Sports teams and other work teams

It’s the middle of October and two of my favorite sports teams (the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots) are both playing this weekend (the Sox are hoping to head to the World Series and the Patriots are in the middle of their season). So I thought I would spend a little time talking about some of the differences between the teams that we see on TV and the teams that make up the majority of our working lives.

You may think there are many differences between your team of co-workers and (for example) the New England Patriots. For example: chances are that none of your team members are making in the neighborhood of $10M annually, none of you regularly host televised press conferences, and none of you are married to super-model.  And you probably think that is just the tip of the iceberg.

From my perspective though, the differences between your team and the Patriots, the Red Sox, or any other professional sports team can be summed up in one word: design.

Team design, how the team is tasked, structured, staffed, supported and rewarded can encompass a slew of different variables and several studies suggest that team design is vastly more important to team performance than interpersonal variables such as cohesion, trust, or leadership. However when we talk about what is going right or wrong with our work teams, we often phrase it in terms of these interpersonal variables. Why?

Interestingly, part of the reason we tend to focus on the variables is probably because those are the variables we hear about when we attend to professional sports teams. Broadcasters and color commentators will talk about “the chemistry” between individuals on the team, about the tensions between coaches and key players, about rivalries between players and between franchises, etc. This makes sense for them, partly because this more interesting to listen to than insightful conversations about team design, but mostly because when watching a sports team in action all of the teams share essentially the same design. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a professional basketball team put 12 players on the court at the same time, or baseball team field 3 pitchers at once? Nearly all of the aspects of team design (with the notable exception of actual skill/talent of individual team members) are clearly articulated as “the rules of the game”.

However in our workplace teams, there are no clearly agreed upon “rules of the game”. Your team is tasked with designing a new product. You may know that your competition is trying to design a similar product; but you don’t know what their time frame is, what the size of their team is, what their budget is, what sort of political support they have from their management, or even if they are collaborating with another organization. Additionally within your own team, roles are not always clearly assigned, team members may or may not have the skills that they need, you may or may not have the resources you need to meet your deadline, and team members may not even have the same definition of success.

Imagine what this scenario would like in a sports arena. “And in tonight’s match, we have Tom Brady, Muhammed Ali, Mary Lou Retton, and the entire pitching staff of the Boston Red Sox against Tiger Woods, LeBron James, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.  The match will begin 3 hours ago and will last until the concession stand sells $40,000 worth of diet soda.” In a situation like this, would you be primarily concerned about the disagreements that Tiger and LeBron have been having about which of them is the best at the pole vault? Of course you wouldn’t. You would be concerned about finding out how “success” is going to be measured, and what you can do to help your team turn it’s apparent disadvantage (only 3 players, Tiger, LeBron and Dale) into some sort of advantage (perhaps through faster decision making, making sure that points can only be scored by dunking a basketball, or trying to earn extra points by posting the fastest average lap time at Daytona).

What does this mean for teams in our day to day lives? It means that time and careful consideration up front to make sure all team members are in agreement about appropriate goals (for both the team and individual team members), clear role assignments, performance measures, and the procedures or norms team members will be expected to follow will lead to high payoffs in terms of team success and team member satisfaction.

Learn the rules of the game, then play ball!

Imagine the future

Everyone knows that leaders and managers need to provide feedback to others. As leaders, we supply feedback to our team members to help them calibrate their efforts, their performance strategies and ensure that they are heading in the right direction. We also rely upon feedback ourselves; to help us improve our own procedures and processes, evaluate new ideas, and evaluate our leadership skills and style.

But as several management theorists and gurus have pointed out, there is a major flaw in relying upon feedback in that it focuses on the past. Often, feedback is received on a bi-annual or even annual basis, when we are barely able to remember the context of the events and behaviors about which we are receiving feedback. Alternatively, feedback is often received fairly quickly when it is in the context of a crisis or disaster (“so let me tell you all of the things that you did wrong…”).  Either way, it is focused on the past, on what has happened, not thinking about moving forward and what might happen.

What if instead of focusing our coaching and development efforts on what people have done in the past, we instead shifted towards a future focus, what professor, author and consultant Marshall Goldsmith refers to as “feedforward”. In other words, rather than focusing on someone’s behavior in past situations, thinking forward to their likely future contexts and situations and thinking about what behaviors will be helpful to them in those situations.

Think of this, we can’t change the past, but we can change the future. Feedback asks us to learn from past mistakes in a simple, corrective manner. What Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris would refer to as “single loop learning”. This is fairly simple; as a matter of fact it is the kind of learning we expect of our dogs! And while feedback helps us avoid repeating past mistakes (certainly a valuable exercise), it doesn’t help us understand and recognize what will be effective behavior in new and future situations.

Goldsmith’s idea of “feedforward” however focuses us on the future, not on the past; it also focuses on positive, proactive behaviors rather than criticism of mistakes, which is often an energizing experience in and of itself. “Feedforward” also helps us think more strategically about new and different behaviors, about broadening our behavioral “toolkit” if you will. In contrast feedback tends to push us into distinct behavioral patterns (“do A not B”).

Finally, the idea of “feedforward” is more inherently developmental. Let’s face it, it is fairly easy to figure out what not to do after you have been “burned” in a situation. It is much more difficult to envision what will succeed in a brand new situation. As a leader, you should be preparing your people for the situations that they are going to find themselves in over the next several months and years, not simply correcting the mistakes that they have already made. “Feedforward” assumes that this person is going forward in their career, on to new challenges and responsibilities for which you need to help prepare them.

So while I’m not suggesting that a good leader never gives feedback or focuses on corrective behavior, I do suggest that you spend at least some of your time developing your people for their future rather than their past. Imagine the possibilities!

Interpersonal "strategies"

It seems to me that one of the problems that most of us face (and I include myself here) is that we often fail to think strategically about our day to day situations. For example, a guest speaker to an MBA program recently mentioned an interaction with an IT client where the question was posed "what do you want IT infrastructure to be able to do in 10 years?", and the reply was "no one here has ever asked that question before".

We often get so caught up in the minutiae of this moment, this interaction, this person, that we fail to step back and ask "What, really, do I want out of this situation? What are my goals? What tactics can I take to best reach my goals?". Instead, we simply use tactics in the moment - those of us that are comfortable with conflict become argumentative, those of us that are good at reconciliation try to build consensus and collaboration, etc. However, ultimately the goal is to have all of these tactics as "tools" in our managerial "toolbox", to be taken out and used as appropriate.

My question for you (o dedicated blog reader) is this: What "tactics" do you tend to use most often, and how do they add to or detract from your interpersonal effectiveness? What ideas can you think of to help yourself (or any of us) start thinking "strategically" about our interactions? How can you avoid the trap of using the same interpersonal "tactics" over an over, and start thinking more "strategically" about your relationships with colleagues, co-workers, managers, etc.?

A few things to know about virtual teams

So a lot of my students these days (particularly the part-time students) want to know all about "virtual teams"; that is, teams that work together on a project without having any shared physical space. Well, the first thing to know about virtual teams is that there is a lot of differences between them! One the one hand you may have a "virtual team" that is all members of the same organization, all speaking the same language and using the same terminology, all coming from mostly the same basic assumptions about goals, processes, products, etc. On the other hand, you can have a virtual team where one member is in NYC, a second member is in LA, a third member is in Paris, a fourth in Beijing, a fifth in Cairo, etc. And to top it off, at least 2 of those "team members" are either independent consultants or are employed by another organization, so they don't operate within the same structures, systems and norms as some of the others!

So there are virtual teams, and then there are virtual teams.

So a few things to know about virtual teams...
First, despite what you may think, virtual teams in various shapes and sizes have been around for quite a while. The East India company operated in many ways as a set of virtual teams, with ship captains and traders having to coordinate their actions, and predict the actions of their partners, over distances of thousands of miles, in order to maximize profit. The armies of the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and other ancient empires managed to coordinate actions over hundreds of miles, varied terrain, and a multitude of logistical problems (weather, travel conditions, repairs, supplies, etc.) to bring different battalions together at a central point at the same time. So "virtual" coordination of effort, intelligence and information isn't new. The difference now is that it happens, quite honestly, a lot easier and faster than it used to!
The critical thing to know about virtual teams is that they really aren't *that* different from any other team around. They just have a harder time engaging in full sharing of information.  Personally, my belief is that the modern idea of the virtual team (where a relatively small amount of people share information and engage in problem solving using computer mediated technologies) was dreamed up by a few hard-core, introverted engineers who thought "If only we all interacted through a *computer*! Then we wouldn't need to to deal with all these people problems!" The dream of a group of people coming together cybernetically into a purely rational network of cognitive function and efficient information transfer however dashes against the sharp, jagged rocks of human perception, emotional reaction and behavior. We just aren't wired for it (literally and figuratively)!
So if you want to have a well-functioning virtual team, you need to treat it like you are *supposed* to treat a "normal" (face to face) team, only more so. You need to be incredibly clear up front about the goals, roles and procedures that will govern the team; you need to make sure that everyone understands them and has accepted them (at least for the duration of the team project); you need to touch base routinely with team members both collectively (a meeting) and individually to find out what is going on, what problems they might be having, what opportunities might exist for synergy within the team, etc.
So being a part of a virtual team is a lot of work. Especially as a leader or manager, but even for non-leader team members. Communication errors happen more often, it is easier to get off track with each others' work, and there is generally little sense of team cohesion or social connection. So why do it?
Well, the great thing about virtual teams in the modern world is that it allows for specialists to work together regardless of physical constraints. An engineering company I do a lot of work with has as one of their corporate mottoes "Design Anywhere: Build Anywhere". They have about 50 different locations throughout the US, each one purchased over time because there was a distinct bit of local expertise or knowledge. So by implementing virtual teams (one member in NY, one in NH, one in TX, one in WA, etc.) they get to leverage the knowledge and assets that they have without spending a lot of time and money on airline flights. So that is the big advantage of the virtual teams: access to the best expertise that you can get, wherever it may be. Is it worth it? For some certainly. But all to easy to mess up.
So remember, if you are setting up a virtual team, outline the basics clearly, early and often; make sure all team members are routinely updated about all aspects of the project and how the pieces are going to fit together; and make sure to touch base regularly with individual team members to provide a sense of connection, continuity and support.
Good luck!

A Team Leader's Job: If (they) only had a brain....

So when I was younger, "The Wizard of Oz" would come on TV once a year without fail. And every year I watched it without fail (except the bit with the flying monkeys, they always scared me...). And every year I was always fascinated towards the end when I realized that as soon as the Scarecrow stopped being dependent upon Dorothy for guidance, he showed that he really did have a brain and was perfectly competent at understanding tricky situations, realizing what needed to be done, and even strategic planning (I figure that creating a plan to sneak into the Witch's castle counts as strategic planning, I have colleagues who would disagree with me but that is another discussion...).
So all this time both Dorothy and the Scarecrow were operating under the impression that he knew nothing, and it turns out that they were both wrong. Huh.
In my non-blogging life I am a teacher. I teach undergraduate and MBA courses in Leadership, Teamwork and the like. I periodically find that I have unintentionally begun to assume that my students have no brain, but I only realize it when a student writes a particularly good paper that makes me re-evaluate the way I look at the student, the assignment, all the other papers, etc.
Chris Argyris, of Harvard Business School, has written extensively about senior managers and leaders within organizations, and how their position begins to shape they way they think about themselves and others. Simply put, if I am promoted to a management position it must be because I am smarter than those who were my peers. Argyris talks about how this paradoxically makes it harder for those senior managers to learn, because they become psychologically invested in the tools, techniques and knowledge that helped them attain their current level of success. However, this same unconscious belief also makes it harder for us to find ways to put the team's collective brain power to use. After all, if I am the smartest (because I am the "manager") then any one else is at best the 2nd smartest person on the team. And why would I want anything but the smartest brain working on an important problem?
So this set of assumptions leads a manager or team leader to assume that he or she has to be the one figuring out all the answers. However this is a bad assumption for at least four reasons:
1) you may not actually *be* the smartest person on the team;
2) you may not be the best suited to solve this particular program (it may rely upon specialized knowledge, skills or networks that you don't have);
3) your primary job as manager or team leader is to get and keep the team running at peak performance;
4) if you are working on all the hard problems it is a huge demotivator to your team members.

One of the best articles on empowering others I have ever read was a 1976 article in Organizational Dynamics called "MacGregor" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W6S-4B7GPCN-2V&_user=1967573&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1139576761&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000053403&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1967573&md5=9cde3c8bb84920f12472867ce3e70ae7)
MacGregor is a fictional plant manager who spends the vast majority of his time playing golf. He forces his assistant managers to work with each other to solve all of the problems that they run into. He gives himself the tasks of strategic planning for his plant, and choosing who will be his next assistant managers. Its a wonderful tale about building motivation and engagement in one's direct reports or team members not simply by letting them do meaningful tasks, but by *forcing* them to realize that they are not dependent upon you as a leader.

So if you want your team members to start acting like the smart, skilled people that they are - don't simply request it, require it by changing your own behavior!
Good luck!

A Team Leader's Job

In my line of work I see and talk to a lot of people who are in the position of leading a group without having access to the rewards and punishments that formal managers can rely upon when needed. Whether these people are team leaders (who are formally given responsibility, but not given any real authority), team members or informal/emergent leaders who are leading their peers, or the leaders of relatively informal groups (e.g. leaders of non-profit groups, networking organizations, communities of practice, etc.) they all wrestle with defining their role as "leader". And they all deal with it in different ways.
However, the two biggest mistakes I see are when these informal group leaders try to either A) adopt a formal "command & control" style of leadership, or B) try to lead by always taking on the biggest, most difficult, and most complex tasks themselves.
Obviously, the first route (command & control) will begin to develop resentment among the members of your team. You're not officially their boss, why are you giving orders? And obviously, the second route (trying to do everything) will lead to burnout on the part of the leader and may well lead to important tasks not being completed properly or in a timely manner (overload on the part of the leader).
However, there is something that both of these mistakes have in common that is often overlooked. Both of these leadership strategies send the message that the other group members are not capable, and committed to the task.  If I am giving orders, it sends the message that you aren't capable of making decisions and knowing what is important; If I do everything myself, it sends the message that either you aren't capable of performing the complex task, or you are not committed enough to perform it properly. Either way, the other group members are being treated (usually unintentionally) as if they don't really have a brain.
So, how to lead then?
Remember that as a team leader (or a team manager), your top job is actually *not* to do everything related to the task. Certainly it is helpful if you have a general understanding of what needs to happen for the task to be completed properly, but you do *not* need to be the expert in the room on every part of it. Your job instead is to unleash the *collective* intelligence, skill, experience and ability that resides on the team. If only one brain was needed for the team's task, then you would simply be telling computers or robots what to do. However, you need creative, talented, thinking people on your team. Therefore your job as team leader is to stimulate them to perform at their best. And when you are making all the decisions and performing all the most complex tasks yourself, without their input, then you are sending the message that not only are their brains not needed, but that their thoughts are not wanted.
More on this soon....

"Time" for leadership

A great discussion on how a leader's messages about time impact the way employees (and teams) go about their work, setting priorities, and engage with their tasks.

Check it out, if you have the time!

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/10/how_smart_leaders_talk_about_t.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-TOPICEMAIL-_-OCT_2009-_-LEADERSHIP1

Want engaged employees? Give them an engaging task!

Recently an acquaintance was asking me what he could do to make sure that his team members were more "engaged". He felt that they lacked enthusiasm or motivation for their task. As the team leader, he wondered if  there was something he should be doing to his management style to make them happier or more satisfied.

My response was that he should first look at the task they are doing.

When I was in junior high school, one of my favorite books was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams. One of the characters is a robot named Marvin, who is absolutely brilliant but generally quite depressed. Marvin is repeatedly asked to do menial tasks (because that is what robots are for after all), and as he trudges off to complete the menial task he mutters "Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me if I can (insert menial task here)".

Well, we often do this same thing to our employees without realizing it.

Many years ago, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham came up with what they called the Job Characteristics Model. They posited that employee motivation would be based upon the task(s) that employees are being asked to perform. Their model statest that motivation increases when employees are given a "meaningful" task (meaning that it requires a variety of skills, the task is significant in some way, and it has a specific identity), which is then combined with autonomy to perform the task in way the employee decides, and followed up with regular, specific feedback about task performance.

This model can be found in almost any organizational behavior textbook. But we often fail to take it into account when we design teams/tasks or when we look for ways to increase "engagement".

Designing teams and tasks properly takes work. More work than most of us ever want to do. Our business environments push us to start accomplishing things yesterday, we don't have time to do things properly just start doing them.  However we often forget that teams are a technology that we have borrowed from sports and the military, and those two industries know that to have a high performing team you need to spend time with it, redesigning the team, working with the individuals, running it through simulations. Practicing managers don't have that amount of time to invest into a team before they get results. However, as a team leader, you need to find at least some of that time to think about how the team and the team members should approach the task at hand, in order to keep everyone's engagement levels up.

So stop thinking so much about your "management style" and focus on the task!

Trust me!

So recently someone was asking me about how to develop trust within a team.
Trust in teams and organizations: its pretty much a perennial concern. Everyone wants trust. Let's face it; everyone wants to be trusted, everyone wants to work with people that they trust, we know that trust has some positives associated with it (e.g. reduced conflict, increased information sharing, etc.) and has relatively few downsides.
But in our 24/7 instant-on-demand culture, we want trust to develop faster. We want to develop trust before the team starts, we develop team-building sessions to help create trust, we find ways to encourage (or even force!) non-task social interaction in order to develop trust. Especially in virtual teams, where team members do not have the opportunity to meet face-to-face, we are concerned with the impact on trust.
What we often forget is that trust is primarily an outcome of social/task processes, not an input. When you first meet someone you have neutral trust with them - or rather, you have whatever trust you happen to have in the social context. If there is a strong social system with distinct rules and laws, then you have trust in those rules & laws rather than trust in the individual. If you meet someone in a relatively lawless environment, then you are going to be suspicious of them until they have given you reason to trust them. So trust is an output first, and then becomes an input into social processes over time.
So, the best way to build trust within a team is let people start interacting and performing. Over time (and really, not that much time if they have the opportunity to work on shared tasks), they will get a very realistic sense of how much they can trust each others' motives, values, intentions, competencies, etc.
But still, some people will want to speed up the development of trust within their team. Sorry, you can't. You cannot force two people to trust each other. You can however build up a social system in which they can place trust, regardless of the trust they may have for each other (positive, negative or neutral). So what you do is focus on building very clear, shared goals for the team - working to make sure that everyone's motives and intentions are in alignment with each other. You create very clear roles for everyone on the team, and explain to all team members what John Doe brings to his role and what Jane Smith brings to her role. This helps to build trust in people's competence. Finally, you encourage communication between group members about their task, as it is hard to feel interpersonal trust for someone who is isolated from you. Now you have a system that encourages trust in the short term, plus the interaction to build interpersonal trust over time. So sit back and start enjoying the task, the trust will come.
Go on, give it a try!

Aligning your people

A bit of a follow-up to last week's post on personal (or personnel) development.

Teams (as well as larger organizations) often have a tendency to suffer from inertia. In other words, we keep doing something in the same way because that's the way we have "always" done it. A key manner in which this can hurt a team is in terms of job assignments.

Your team changes. New people come onto the team, sometimes people leave, sometimes people alter the amount of time they can spend on your team, and sometimes people go out and learn new skills & knowledge. However, we rarely sit back and systematically look at the (human) resources that we have and how they map onto the jobs/demands that the team must fill. Your financial advisor will tell you to systematically look at and adjust your financial portfolio every 1-3 years. However, they will also tell you that this doesn't hold if certain things change - most notably your own financial goals or the goals of an individual fund.

Similar logic holds for systematically analyzing the resources your team has at its disposal. You don't need to do this every 6 months, or every year. However, there are certain situations that should trigger a systematic evaluation of the team's tasks and the roles of team members.

These will include events such as:

• A change in the team's tasks and responsibilities. Don't just assign someone to the new task, make sure that your overall "portfolio" of people and the roles that they perform make sense. This includes not only what is someone's availability and technical skills/expertise, but also what relationships and people skills can a team member take advantage of?
  
• A change in the team's membership. Obviously, if you have different members on your team, you have a different set of skills & abilities at the team's disposal. We often see this in terms of new skills added to the team (by a new team member), or skills lost to the team (when a veteran team member leaves). However, we rarely think about moving people around within the team to better position the team as a whole after the arrival of a new team member. An example: John has been our team's liaison to Operations over the past 9 months. He does a pretty good job, and he is not dissatisfied with this aspect of his job. Now Lisa joins the team. She has a background in Operations, worked there for 15 years. Most managers don't think about giving her John's liaison responsibility, they just give her any "open" jobs, or a job that someone is performing poorly. However, this is a lost opportunity.
  
• A change in the way key tasks are performed (e.g. new software, a new business partner, etc.). "I've been doing this task all along; so yeah, I suppose I'll learn the new software...". As a team leader or manager, your response should be "no, wait". Its one thing if this team member wants to learn this new skill for other reasons. But if someone else in the team has that skill, this may be a good time to reposition a few team members and the roles they perform.

And don't forget, there is also a long-term advantage to shuffling people around to get the "optimal mix" of people to roles on your team. Six months down the road, when one of these people is pulled from your team for another project, you now have someone else on the team who is already familiar with that role and can fill in for a while if needed.

So mix it up!

Leading people via personal development

A fair number of people I know have been asking lately about performance feedback. What *is* the best way to give performance feedback?
Some people prefer to focus on an individual's weaknesses, some prefer to focus on strengths, some prefer to try to achieve "balance" between strengths and weaknesses, etc.
A lot depends upon your goal when you give someone performance feedback?

An analogy: when a child reaches towards a hot stove, do we take the time to praise them for their curiosity or their ability to climb up on the chair by themselves? No, because our *goal* is to make sure that they don't make that "mistake" (touching the hot stove) again. Conversely, when that same child draws a picture and proclaims it to be several fish swimming in the sea, do we criticize them for not drawing an accurate depiction of fish? Again, no, because our "goal" this time is to get them to begin developing their abilities to draw & color, use a writing implement, express themselves, etc.

So the way we handle feedback should be in with our goals for that particular feedback session. If someone has just made a mistake, and you want them to not make that mistake again - then by all means use critical feedback. The human brain is hard-wired to accept and remember critical feedback. From an evolutionary perspective, if I just ate a berry that made me sick - I really, really want to remember what it looked like so that I don't eat that same berry again. We remember critical feedback very well, it makes an impact on us. Properly timed criticism can be very helpful in ensuring that we do not repeat mistakes.

However, if you want your employees to grow and develop, you need to adjust your feedback strategy. Critical feedback makes everyone do the same thing (avoid the mistake). But it also has side effects: it limits experimentation, makes us less likely to communicate with others, and in many people has a negative impact on motivation and satisfaction. Positive feedback on the other hand ("here are your strengths") causes very different reactions: it makes us *more* likely to experiment with new ways of accomplishing tasks, more likely to incorporate new ideas and information into our thinking, more likely to connect and communicate with other people, and it tends to have a positive impact on satisfaction and motivation.

Positive feedback also allows us to better identify, understand and develop our own unique and individual strengths. Organizations are made up of many people for a reason, you don't *want* carbon copies of one person. The fact that organizations have a diversity of people means that they have a diversity of strengths, and a successful organization plays to this.

Another analogy: If you were managing a sports team, would you want your roster made up entirely of multiple versions of David Ortiz or Teddy Bruschi or Tom Brady? Okay, so I'm a New England sports fan, but still... You wouldn't want a soccer team made of carbon copies of David Beckham or even of Pele; you wouldn't want a basketball team made of multiple copies of LeBron James, or Shaquille O'Neal, or even Michael Jordan. Business organizations (like many sports teams) operate in a complex environment where they benefit from specialization.

So maybe you have direct report (let's call him "Bob") in your marketing department that isn't very creative at all, but is a great analyst. You have to do things: (1) you have to help Bob realize that he isn't all that creative, because to let him have a false sense of competence in a specific area isn't fair to him or to your organization; (2) you have to help Bob realize how his analytical abilities help the department as a whole, and how he can be even more help if he goes out and further develops his analytical abilities. Now, Bob is motivated to work on his strengths (because they have been recognized, and will help the organization), and is cognizant of his weak area (and so will allow others to be the strong ones in that area). Plus, because most of your feedback is focused on the positive, Bob is more likely to be proactive and creative in his use and development of his analytical abilities, will be more likely to step forward and communicate his skill to others, and will be more likely to reach out and partner with others who have complementary (rather than redundant) strengths.
The end result? A stronger team.

Much as I like David Ortiz, I don't want him trying to Red Sox entering into the post-season....

One of the better books (although not necessarily the easiest to read) on leading teams was written a few years back by Professor Richard Hackman of Harvard University.
The book "Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances" (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) emphasizes that it is not so much what a leader does once the team is in place that is important. Rather, it is how the team is constructed in the first place that counts the most.

Think about it for a minute.

There must be hundreds of books out there that talk about "how to lead" in terms of how to treat people, what to have as day-to-day priorities, how to create effective communication, trust, honesty, ethical conduct, etc. But barely any books out there on how to structurally set up a team to help it succeed.

Professor Hackman's points are fairly simple & straightforward, yet often neglected in real time.
In order to have a successful team, you need to design the team properly up front, not focus on leading it once it is established. Proper team design focuses on issues such as:

• Does the task actually require a team? Does the team have a goal that will compell and motivate people of itself, or is it simply drudge work?
• Does the team have the right people? Do the team members have the skills, knowledge, and authority to accomplish the task? Are the members on the team from the beginning, or is membership constantly changing - forcing the team to re-justify all of its decisions every week?
• Does the team have a supportive structure? Are people rewarded for team work? Do they have access to information, and are they encouraged to learn from and teach their team members? Do they have access to technical resources & coaching when needed?

If you design a team properly, it is much less dependent upon the leader than a poorly designed team. Consequently, the team leader is able to spend more time focused on other team issues such as suggesting performance strategies and working the relationship between the team and its external environment (gaining resources, minimizing political interference, etc.). The team members, in turn, benefit from this increased independence by having a greater sense of their own accomplishment, and being able to really push the use of their own abilities (individually and collectively).

Again, its not always the easiest read (as opposed to many of the personality-based, popular leadership books). However, if you can begin to act upon these principles, your teams will get off the ground much sooner, have far fewer authority conflicts, and ultimately will be more productive.

Check it out!

Transparent leadership for the future

This link takes you to another blog, but a really interesting post about the growing need for leaders to act in a transparent manner.
The authors main point is that with the proliferation of social networking and nearly everyone having an online presence, the old days of ruling from behind a curtain are pretty much over (so much for the Wizard of Oz!).

Very interesting: check it out.

http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/leadership-transparency/

The importance of goals

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit an award celebration for a Boston area non-profit called "Social Capital Inc." (really cool organization if you're interested in non-profits helping develop capacity in urban areas - check them out at www.socialcapitalinc.org ).
As some of the award recipients were speaking, it struck me how inspiring their stories (and consequently their activities) were. I drove back to NH thinking to myself "how can I come up with an inspiring story like that to tell about myself, or teach my students to create such inspiring stories for themselves?"
The reality is, most of us who work in the business world rarely get to deal with truly "inspiring" goals. We are handed goals such as "increase profits by x%", "cut costs by $x", or "complete this project within the next 3 weeks". These don't exactly inspire most of us to climb up to the rooftop and yell "look what I do!"
So how can we translate our relatively mundane organizational goals into something that will get people excited?
The old MBO (Management By Objective) philosophy still applies - even though it has been forgotten by many as a "fad". If you can tie someone's work directly into a larger (strategic level) goal, it often gives the goal more weight and more inspirational appeal.
One of the best examples I know of is a DOD contractor who has their headquarters relatively close to us here in NH. Their company motto is "we protect those who protect us"; and indeed that is precisely what they do. Their products make for greater safety among U.S. pilots, sailors and infantry. They get the wonderful benefit of periodically having servicemen and women come back from overseas, pay the organization a visit, and talk about how a particular piece of equipment saved their life. Now *that's* a goal!
How can the rest of us get this sort of excitement out of our jobs and our goals? When you start a project, make sure you have a good idea of what its potential impact could be. How does it tie in to strategic imperatives at the organizational, divisional or even departmental level? How will it impact the lives of others (both inside and outside the organization)? The more things you can tie into your goal, and the more expansive you can be in describing it, the better able it will be to inspire motivation among your team members.

A model for "perfect teamwork"?

A recent commentary report in the United Kingdom's Telegraph proposes that a rowing crew (in particular the "light blues" of Cambridge University) is a model of "perfect teamwork". (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/rowing/5044937/Cambridge-University-Boat-crew---The-perfect-team-model.html)
Having spent over 8 years as a member of collegiate and post-collegiate crews, and also having spent many, many years studying teams, I am largely in agreement.
However, the rowing crew lacks one thing that *most* teams are in sore need of - individual accountability. In a rowing crew, all members of the crew (with the lone exception of the coxswain) perform the exact same role, and there is no measurement of individual performance when the boat is on the water. (yes, I know, there is a huge amount of individual performance measures before the crew is assembled - I am well aware of erg scores, seat races, etc. - but once the crew is set and on the water, there is no individual measure).
Rowing crews make up for this lack of individual accountability through countless hours in training and competition - both as a collective unit and as individuals. This extensive period of practice allows the members of the crew to develop trust that each member will perform to his or her highest levels, despite the fact that there are no individual measures of performance.
Business organizations do not have the luxury of spending hundreds of hours in "practice". Their imperative is to get the team up, running, and in performance mode as soon as possible. They don't have the time to build up huge levels of trust between team members.
However, business organizations put teams together to take advantage of individual differences. Therefore, these teams not only can have individual roles (and thus individual accountability) but *should* have those individual roles and accountability.

However, we need to remember that teams are a technology that we have imported (imperfectly) from the sports world. Therefore, we need to make sure that we *adapt* this technology to our own needs, rather than simply adopting it unthinkingly.