Besides agreeing on a common purpose, for teams to operate optimally, a raft of key essentials must be addressed.
By Deborah Tarrant
Yay team!
Are you a team player? Did you share something about yourself with a fellow team member today, disclose something that perhaps normally you wouldn't feel comfortable sharing in a work environment? Hopefully you held back on the intimate details of Saturday night, but perhaps you confessed you've been feeling under-confident, overworked or that the project you're working together on could be handled differently?
If not, it's probably time to fess up. If you want to truly bond with your work colleagues and form a coherent and productive team, then you don't just need to share your intellect, expertise and ideas, but some of your emotional self as well.
Invariably, self-disclosure makes us feel uncomfortable, admits Phill Boas, director of design and learning methods at Melbourne Business School. In today's highly competitive working environments the inclination to actually tell people how you are feeling and expose vulnerability doesn't come naturally. However, a measure of self-disclosure is needed to build the vital ingredient, trust, in all teams, Boas says. It's a fundamental in all human relationships but oddly enough overlooked in the fast and sometimes harried 21st century workplaces where teams proliferate.
Teamwork is a buzzword for good reason. Teams, immediate work teams, managerial teams, special project teams, constitute the fabric of today's organisations. Of course, there are small teams and increasingly large complex ones, nudging beyond 20 to some 100 individuals. And techno-powered globalisation is promoting the growth of more geographically dispersed virtual teams.
What separates a team from merely being a group of people, and what really makes a team work, are ongoing topics for academic research and debate, and managerial musing. 'It's rare that the right collection of people happens to find itself together for the right reasons,' notes Boas.
Global trends show workplace teams are not only growing in size and using more technology, but also inevitably have greater diversity and more highly qualified experts.
Sounds like good news. However, recent research into teams at 15 multinational companies by Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School, and Tamara Erickson, president of the Concours Institute, suggests the opposite. Teams that are large, virtual, diverse and crammed with highly educated specialists actually find it hard to get anything done, they report.
According to Gratton and Erickson, members of complex teams are less likely to share knowledge, learn from one another, share resources, shift workloads or put aside their own work to help someone else meet a deadline.
Time for a rethink? Vicky Emery, manager of organisational development and change at investment bank JPMorgan Chase, has observed and encouraged the evolution of a multitude of corporate teams. Her experience in telcos, professional services, banking, insurance, retail and law firms, among others, has pinpointed some key essentials for optimally operating teams.
Beyond the unifying clarity of common purpose, the reason a team has been convened and what it needs to achieve, there's a raft of questions that need to be addressed, she says. Emery observes that in the pressurised business world, teams tend to barrel into solving mode and get busy, overlooking the fact that to succeed they actually need to do some groundwork at the beginning.
She points to a star model, created by St John Miall, to demonstrate the upfront issues teams should agree upon. These are: principles (the rules for operating in the team); position (how does the team want the work to be known?); planning (what resources are required and what's the timeframe?); people (are the right ones on the team?); and participation (who are the stakeholders and how can they be involved or help?).
Boas concurs. 'There are two tasks in every team: whatever it was set up to do, and it's maintenance and development,' he says.
Those old team-building approaches, where co-workers let down defences while dangling over a cliff or plunging through the whitewater rapids, are losing popularity.
Today they are more often considered nice social activities, while team-building is categorised under training and development.
Another proponent of the importance of working on the team, as well as in it, is Chris Nunn, the leadership strategy consultant at Deloitte, where a specialised team culture underpins a new company-wide 'granular' marketing strategy.
Much of the onus for successful teams traditionally has lent on the leaders' capabilities, when team playership is just as crucial. 'It can't all be left to the leader,' says Nunn. 'Today everyone must learn to be team savvy.'
Good team players definitely have strong interpersonal skills, says Nunn, who sees trust, cooperation and the sharing of information as basic. Of course, technical expertise may be highly valued. At Deloitte, for example, there's a move to a multi-disciplinary approach, where tax specialist and lawyers, along with a range of experts with different backgrounds and perspectives, address a business solution. However, Nunn says, ultimately an expert team will outperform a team of experts every time.
Research into knowledge teams, originally emanating from the CSIRO, shows it is the soft skills that differentiate high- and low-performing teams. 'It's about the synergistic opportunity of working together, as opposed to being a whole bunch of very clever people working on the same project,' reveals Nunn. Unfortunately, he says, there is no magical alchemy that will generate team players who have great interpersonal skills. Although with practice new behaviours can be learned, he adds.
Very bright people and those who are more senior may also need coaching to be on the team, he says, 'as they don't always see the value of other's skills and therefore are not necessarily the best team players'.
Any number of factors make teams run off the rails, even long-established and previously high performing ones have off-times. Common causes are personality differences, competitive reward systems, quality standards and members who just don't pull their weight. Boas observes: 'We live in a society that firmly believes in competition, and yet most good work is done collaboratively. It is destructive to make people within the same organisation compete.'
Regardless of the cause, in Emery's experience, a common outcry is that the matter should have been addressed earlier. Don't let it fester. Times of high pressure prompt mixed results. Depending on the level of sophistication in its communications, a team may fall apart or get closer together on deadline, and this is when the value of preparation becomes most apparent.
'When the pressure is on, in banks, accounting and law firms, it should be remembered that people come to work to do a good job. Yes, they get tired and make mistakes, Emery says. 'But in a team they should be able to deal with that by keeping in touch, letting individuals know what's falling behind and keeping on talking.' Quoting TV chef Gordon Ramsay she adds: 'A quiet kitchen is not good.'
At the same time, observes Nunn, pressure may have a cohesive effect, motivating a team to work together harder.
So does size count for effective teams? When more than 10-12 people are brought together it starts to get complicated, they say. Just giving people air time in a large group is challenging.
Apart from the time to express their views, which Emery notes is particularly relevant for vocal Australians, there are 144 interpersonal relationships emanating from a group of 12. Take it to 20, and there are 400 relational factors.
Gratton and Erickson found that collaboration is better if 20-40 per cent of a team has previous connections, but actually gets worse if too many people know each other well, as they tend to form sub-groups.
In large teams, people can hide in the woodwork, reports Emery, and they can also get bogged down. The planning process should factor in a predetermined way of making decisions, probably by consensus once a minimum number of members are in attendance. Another possibility is splitting into smaller teams to consider separate elements of a project. In that case, Boas says, it's worth asking whether the larger entity still constitutes a team.
So if interpersonal relationships present potential sticking points for teams that meet face-to-face, what happens in the virtual world?
Boas is sceptical about the longevity of virtual teams, his view supported by academic literature. He believes that for the magic ingredient of human disclosure to occur, a virtual team needs some face-to-face contact, at least once in its formative stage.
At JPMorgan Chase, teams operate successfully across the globe using a range of technologies, from virtual meetings to email and (Lotus) Sametime software that enables electronic chatting in the same manner as MSN.
The killer for a virtual global team can be time zones, notes Emery. When planned well, for instance, with members operating in Mumbai, Sydney and Hong Kong, time differences can improve productivity, enabling the team to operate 24 hours a day. 'Of course, progress is very motivating,' she says. On the other hand, a team running Mumbai, Boston, Sydney could fizzle on a 16-hour lag. She also believes shorter pieces of work are better in virtual mode. 'It's helpful to know what people can and can't do,' says Emery, whose ability to work late at night, for example, facilitates 'convening' with team members based in the UK.
The availability of social software, for example, enabling tools such as wikis, is increasingly allowing remote team players to share knowledge, and also to track their collaboration.
A final word of warning, though: Teams operating virtually only seem less tangible, they still demand attention and leadership, Emery insists. If the technology (everyone needs the same access) or the time zones don't cause delays, it's possible that local politics will. Virtual teamwork can end up in oblivion if one geographical location sees more benefit in a project than others.
For further information on team building retreats and workshops online visit the Team Building website.
