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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Build high-performing teams with an evidence-based framework that delivers results
Committed is a practical handbook for building great teams. Based on research from Wharton’s Executive Development Program (EDP), this concise guide identifies the common challenges that arise when people work together as a group and provides key guidance on breaking through the barriers to peak performance. Committed draws its insights from the EDP’s living lab: an intensive two-week simulation during which executive-level participants run complex global businesses. The authors have observed over 100 teams collaborating and competing for over 100 combined years in this intense environment. It has yielded fundamental insights about teamwork: what usually goes wrong, what frequently goes right, and the methods and techniques that will help you access your team’s full potential. These insights have been distilled into a simple, repeatable process that you can start applying today.
Getting teams engaged and aligned is hard. Committed will give you the tools you need to deal with all of the familiar teamwork challenges that get in the way: organizational politics, delegation, coordination, and aligning skills and motivation. Using vivid stories and examples from the worlds of business, sports, and non-profits, it will teach you how to:
- Understand the dynamics of successful teams
- Achieve peak performance using a research-backed methodology
- Gain expert insight into why most teams underperform
- Learn the critical points common to all great teams
Committed gives you the perspective you need to combine the right people with the right way of collaborating to achieve extraordinary results.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction “Can I Make My Team Work?”
Teamwork Everywhere, All the Time
A Teamwork Laboratory: Creating the 3×3 Framework
High-Performing Teams Play by the Rules—But Which Ones?
Teamwork Rules = Culture
Make the Rules
“How Have You Helped a Pharm Rep Today?”
How This Book Is Organized
Notes
Part One
Chapter 1: Commit: To Know the Rules, You Have to Make Them
Making Commitments: The Power of Structured Conversation
Don't Stop!
Notes
Chapter 2: Check: What You Don't Know Is Probably Hurting You
Team Culture and the Mystery of the Kaiko
The Saying-Doing Gap
Check Alignment: Revealing the Gap between Saying and Doing
Learning to Become Your Own Observer
Notes
Chapter 3: Close: To Bridge the Saying-Doing Gap, Act Like a STAR
Swimming in the Deep Water
Situational Awareness: Ambitious Goals Are Not Enough
Act Like a Star
The Enormous Flywheel
Bringing It All Together: The Surgery Team Turnaround
Notes
Chapter 4: Pay Attention: The Seven Common Mistakes You Are Probably Making
The Seven Common Mistakes You Are Probably Making
The Little Things, and the Big Picture
Notes
Part Two
Chapter 5: Can You Hear Me Now? Making Virtual Teams Work
Build Trust Early
Build a Reciprocity Circle
A Phone Call in Time Saves Nine
Where in the World Is My Teammate?
When Virtual Teams Go Wrong
Notes
Chapter 6: No Time for Teamwork? Lessons from Startups
Triaging Culture
Prioritize Talent Management over Tasks
Build a Network of Champions
Create 3x3 Checkpoints
Culture on the Fly
Notes
Chapter 7: Who Has a Good Idea? Insights on Innovation
Innovation Takes Work
Innovation Principles and Kickstarters
Define Values
Multiply Perspectives
Tinker
Respect Tradition
Notes
Chapter 8: Lead or Follow? Guidelines for Leadership Groups
An Automotive Love Affair
How Easy It Is to Forget: The $250 Million Mistake
Back to Basics: Keeping Your Top Team on Track
Multiplier Top Teams
Notes
Chapter 9: Why Are We Here? Engaging Committees
Inspiring Passion
The Committed Committee
Notes
Conclusion: The Future Is Teams
The New Regime
Teamwork Trends
Your Toolbox for the Hyper-Collaborative World
Passion and Performance through Process
Notes
Acknowledgments
Resources
3×3 Framework Tools
Seven Common Mistakes Checklist
Team Cultural Archetypes Assessment
Bibliography
Anthropological, Sociological, and Other Academic Works
Business Books, Biographies, and Industry Studies
Teamwork and Dynamics
Personal Psychology and Personal Effectiveness
History and Popular Culture
The Authors
Contributing Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
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Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1: Commit: To Know the Rules, You Have to Make Them
Figure 1.1 The Three Foundations
Figure 1.2 Team Cultural Archetypes
Chapter 2: Check: What You Don't Know Is Probably Hurting You
Figure 2.1 The Three Levels of Situational Awareness
Figure 2.2 Team Temperature Survey
Chapter 5: Can You Hear Me Now? Making Virtual Teams Work
Figure 5.1 Reciprocity Circle
Chapter 8: Lead or Follow? Guidelines for Leadership Groups
Figure 8.1 Top Team Development Survey adapted from Raes
COMMITTEDTEAMS
Three Steps to Inspiring Passionand Performance
MARIO MOUSSA,MADELINE BOYER, AND DEREK NEWBERRY
With Contributions fromJoanne BaronVishal BhatiaAmy BrownLauren HirshonMichael JoinerAnnette MatteiRenée Gillespie Torchia
This book is printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Copyright © 2016 by Mario Moussa, Madeline Boyer, and Derek Newberry.
All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom.
For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993, or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-on-demand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Moussa, Mario, author. | Boyer, Madeline, 1987- author. | Newberry, Derek, 1983- author.
Title: Committed teams : three steps to inspiring passion and performance / Mario Moussa, Madeline Boyer, Derek Newberry.
Description: Hoboken : Wiley, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015042388 (print) | LCCN 2015047335 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119157403 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119157410 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119157427 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Teams in the workplace–Management. | Employee motivation. | Leadership. | BISAC: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Workplace Culture.
Classification: LCC HD66 .M68 2016 (print) | LCC HD66 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/022–dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015042388
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © iStock.com/furtaev
Illustrations by: Barbara Boyer
For Robin Komita
—Mario Moussa
For Robert and Ana Boyer
—Madeline Boyer
For Carolyn Newberry
—Derek Newberry
Preface
Our teamwork philosophy is easy to describe. You get organized, schedule regular times to check on your progress, and make adjustments when necessary. Three steps.
Simple.
The hard part is actually following the steps during your typical workday: time-crunched and stressful, deadline-driven, often chaotic, and full of quirky characters who have surprising motives. Not so simple—but that is a common reality. We wrote this book for teams who have to deliver results under these difficult conditions. Though it originated in the research we conducted at the Wharton School of Business, we organized our findings in the form of a how-to guide.
In Part One, we describe the three-step process for creating and maintaining a committed team. The process begins with establishing the three foundations of successful teamwork: goals, roles, and norms. Combine the three foundations with the three steps, and you have what we call the 3×3 Framework—or the 3×3, for short. We recommend you read Part One from beginning to end, so that you understand the whole 3×3 and how to apply it. Each chapter includes a tool that you can start using right away.
Part Two is about five common types of teaming: virtual teams, startups, innovation projects, leadership groups, and committees. If you are especially interested in learning how to manage a particular type of teamwork, you can go right to the chapter about it in this part after reading about the basic 3×3. Of course, you are welcome to read straight through Part Two, and we hope you will after finishing Part One. Each chapter in the second half of the book offers lessons you will find valuable no matter what your team needs to accomplish.
The three of us collaborated with a group of contributing authors who are experts in social science and organizational consulting. You can read about their backgrounds in the Authors section.
We tell lots of teamwork stories that we have heard over the years. We are interested in hearing your story, too. Please get in touch with us at www.committedteams.com
—Mario Moussa, Madeline Boyer, and Derek Newberry
Introduction
“Can I Make My Team Work?”
Intense!
Twisting your features into a mask of pain, you dig your heels into the soft grass. A rope tears into your palms. Sweat runs down your face as blood seeps from spidery cracks in your skin and onlookers gawk and yell.
A clear, tiny voice speaks to you amid the cacophony of confused thoughts swirling in your head: “So-o-o-o … what am I learning from this experience?”
Well, you should be learning about teamwork. You are in the middle of a typical organizational development exercise. This one happens to entail pulling a large rock 30 feet. Your supervisor decided to start by having you try going it alone. Yet, despite all of your 5 a.m. Crossfit workouts at the gym, you failed to move the boulder even an inch. To achieve a different result, you clearly need to work with others.
Teamwork gets things done, right?
As others join you, one by one, the collective rope-pulling effort seems to demonstrate the point. Little by little, the boulder starts moving until it nudges over the 30-foot mark. Cheers erupt. But you notice something odd. With each additional person who contributes to the effort, the boulder moves a little bit faster, but not as fast as you would have imagined. By the time the tenth person steps up, you feel the group is barely pulling harder than when it was only six, even though everyone seems to be working hard.
Afterward, you ask others if they noticed the same thing. Everyone says: “I was pulling my weight, but it sure seems that others weren't.”
1 + 1 = … 1.5?
If the boulder exercise sounds like something you have experienced on your own team, then you have encountered a well-known phenomenon first identified by Max Ringelmann in the early twentieth century: social loafing.1 It names the tendency to apply less and less effort to a task as more people become involved with it.
In the original studies of what became known as the Ringelmann Effect, the French engineer analyzed the amount of energy expended by his students in a rope-pulling contest. As each side expanded its team, each person became less committed to the task, subconsciously slacking off more and more. No synergies here: 1 + 1 equals something less than 2, as illustrated in Figure I.1. This is just one in a long list of bad habits that most teams tend to cultivate over time, even though they might not be aware of it.
Figure I.1 Effects of Social Loafing on People Pulling on a Rope
Teamwork Everywhere, All the Time
Flawed or not, teams show no signs of going away. Increasingly, in fact, being good at teamwork is synonymous with simply being good at work. And for a valid reason: the complexity of today's world—shaped by rapidly accelerating technological, economic, and cultural trends—demands that organizations of all kinds seek out the synergistic potential of teams. But too often what teams deliver is a lot of talk and little accountability. How many team kickoff meetings have left you, just a few minutes afterward, not quite sure of what the heck was accomplished? And wait—when is the next meeting, anyway?
Hence the basic question that led us to write this book: How do you create a team that is committed to high performance when few teams end up being truly greater than the sum of their parts? Our answer is a simple framework: the 3×3. It is built on three foundations and supports an interactive three-step process. By helping you get better at leading teams, the 3×3 will help you get better at virtually all aspects of your work.
A Teamwork Laboratory: Creating the 3×3 Framework
Our own team came together through the Executive Development Program (EDP) at the Wharton School of Business. We were a group of assorted organizational specialists—social scientists, MBAs, and management consultants—with decades of combined experience researching and solving problems related to group dynamics. Mario Moussa, co-director of Wharton's Strategic Persuasion Workshop and an EDP faculty member, gave us one goal: produce a field-tested process for creating and leading High-Performing Teams (HPTs).
Wharton's EDP, an immersive two-week experience, attracts leaders and rising stars who come from all around the world to develop a broad range of business skills. Participants learn under the guidance of top faculty and Academic Director Peter Fader, the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing. One of the core components of the program is a highly realistic business simulation that creates a living teamwork laboratory. Because EDP participants are the best of the best, the program is an ideal environment in which to stress-test our theories about what makes teams tick and how they get better.
To give you a sense of how this “laboratory” works and why it helps crystallize the key features of high- and low-performing teams, let us bring you into the world of the simulation, entering the way hundreds of participants do every year. At the beginning, you sit huddled in a conference room with six other executives from nearly every continent on the planet. They are your teammates. But you have never met any of them before and, given the number of languages spoken in the room, you may have trouble communicating with them about even the most basic topics.
To make matters worse, you know next to nothing about your company's industry, and neither does anyone else, because it is organized around medical devices that don't exist in the real world. Nevertheless, all of you have to quickly ramp up and, as a team, make a series of business decisions. Biggest issue: Sales are down in your company's most important region. Why? Is it product quality? Poor marketing? Your team needs to do research into the possible causes before it can determine what to do and where to invest. Your peers will scrutinize your team's decisions and results in a public forum.
Do you want to join this company? Probably not, because it sounds like a nightmare. But we would strongly encourage you to spend a few days of your life working in it. You would learn a lot there. We certainly have.
In this setting, we took on the challenge of creating a process that any team can use to boost engagement and continually improve performance, no matter how diverse the group, or how unwieldy its challenges. We knew that if the approach we created worked in the chaotic world of the EDP simulation, it could work anywhere. So far, we have observed, analyzed, and supported the development of more than 100 of these EDP teams. With each running of the program, we have assessed and made adjustments to our team-building framework. Combining our insights from the simulation with our own individual experiences as researchers and consultants, we created the 3×3 Framework for producing team results that are greater than the sum of individual members' efforts.
The first 3 stands for the Three Foundations of HPTs: clear goals, roles, and norms. If you have read or heard anything about good teamwork, you are probably familiar with some version of these foundations. We bet you have also felt frustrated in trying to establish them. Even with the best of intentions, teammates quickly stray from commitments. At times, getting everyone on the same page can feel like endlessly translating your thoughts into a language you barely understand and communicating with a group of people from strange and unfamiliar cultures—such as finance, IT, sales, and manufacturing. Research shows that, in the workplace, these internal subcultures matter at least as much as national ones and cause just as many communication headaches. You collaborate across these functional cultures many times a day, and often through emails and conference calls. The key to getting the most out of your team is to understand this boundary-crossing and why it often seems like the work of getting aligned is always just out of your grasp.
To address the issue of alignment, we created a three-step process for resolving differences and deepening commitment. We call the three steps Commit, Check, and Close. The steps may seem simple—because they are. Which is the whole point: complicated flow charts and high-level mantras are not going to help you ignite passion and improve your team's performance in the real world of work. The three-step process will help keep your teammates on track and stay committed to their goals, roles, and norms. In this sense, HPTs play by the rules: the commitments they make to the Three Foundations.
High-Performing Teams Play by the Rules—But Which Ones?
Stop us if you've heard this joke before.
Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way. The older one nods and says, “Morning, boys. How's the water?” The two young fish keep going and eventually one of them looks over at the other and asks, “What the heck is water?”
This particular version of the joke is adapted from a college graduation speech given by the late novelist David Foster Wallace.2 But the challenge he illustrates is a universal one. The hardest things to notice are often right in front of our faces—things like our own and others' thoughts and feelings, and also the implicit rules that govern how we interact with others. Virtually all teams underperform because of this disconnect between psychological awareness and the reality of a group's social environment.
We call this phenomenon the illusion of insight—insight into the motivations that produce our actions. What we think we know about others and ourselves is, more often than not, surprisingly misguided. But we jump to conclusions anyway.
Decades of psychological research reveal that we believe we know our own minds far better than we actually do, and it also turns out that we have as much difficulty knowing others' thoughts as we do understanding our own. Psychologist Nicholas Epley describes a famous experiment in which couples were asked to answer a series of questions about each other's preferences, and then guess how accurate they were.3 The participants were right about 30 percent of the time, but they guessed they had been right about 80 percent of the time. In other words, they were shockingly overconfident about how well they knew each other—and these were couples in long-term relationships. Imagine how much tougher it can be to understand co-workers.
The bottom line: we often think we understand ourselves and our team even as we miscommunicate and misinterpret intentions, overestimate our ability to perform a task, and fail to recognize our own assumptions about the way work should be done. Every team needs clear rules. The trick is to make the rules explicit so that everybody understands what they are and remains committed to them.
Teamwork Rules = Culture
We human beings are wired to create rules that enable us to live and work together. These rules help solve problems big and small, such as: “How do we build a fire to keep from freezing?” or “Where should we go out for dinner tonight?” or “How are we going to get this project done on time and on budget?” In short, such rules govern collective behavior. Many social scientists claim that the ability to create and follow collective problem-solving rules is a defining human characteristic. Because all of us have this ability, we co-exist harmoniously—most of the time anyway—in tribes, villages, cities, and countries. Furthermore, in work-related settings, we are able to collaborate in teams and organizations.
A long line of anthropologists defines these problem-solving rules as “culture,” which groups express through language, symbols, and behaviors. Put two or more people together and a culture starts to take shape automatically. As the venerable social theorist Clifford Geertz observed, culture is what defines humans as social beings. Without it, attempts to collaborate would degenerate into “a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions.”4
Long story short: human beings need culture to get along, and your team needs its own culture to get work done.
Therefore, the first step in creating a high-performing team is establishing its culture. In the most practical sense, culture is the set of rules—or commitments—that govern how you work together with your teammates to solve problems. A shared culture helps teams adapt and thrive in challenging environments in both the natural and the business worlds. But culture causes problems, too. We often misinterpret our own group's rules for collaborating and are blind to ingrained behaviors that actually undermine performance.
Thus, a puzzle: Why is culture both the most important aspect of team success and the biggest barrier to it? Answer: familiarity equals invisibility.
Try a small thought experiment: Imagine you and a friend have stepped onto a crowded elevator in a tall building as your workday is starting. As people rush on, one person stands directly in front of the buttons. After a few “Ahem”s and “Excuse me”s, this person moves away from the buttons, squeezing right between you and your friend and staring at the back of the elevator. The crowd eventually empties out, yet the stranger is still standing shoulder to shoulder with you, even though there is plenty of space to move away.
How would you describe this person's behavior? As “bizarre,” of course. Imagine how we felt when we conducted this experiment—acting as the stranger—in an undergraduate anthropology class.
Now consider why this stranger's behavior seems so bizarre. Everyone knows you are supposed to face the front rather than the back of the elevator. You were probably told how to behave in this situation by a parent when you were little, or you simply watched others and learned through trial and error what you were supposed to do. And then, at a certain point, you stopped having to think about it. You just knew how and where to stand in an elevator without anyone telling you. The formal, explicit rules governing your behavior became informal and unspoken—even unconscious. This is how culture works.
As a group's rules accumulate over time, a culture forms in ways that can be largely invisible to team members, and individuals often begin operating by new rules that conflict with the team's explicit rules in ways they are not aware of.
Comprehensive and often contradictory, all of these rules just become “the way we do things around here.” People may not even be aware of or remember why certain ways of doing things developed in the first place. Culture often works wonders and makes social life more efficient, as in the case of elevator-riding. But there is another side to the story, too. Imagine being on a startup team with a laid-back culture where everyone shows up to meetings 10 minutes late. This behavior might help boost morale and create group rapport at first, though it could become a major liability as the startup grows and the volume of work increases.
Becoming aware of your culture and managing it effectively is more than just a fun team building activity. It is the key to your success.
Make the Rules
Creating and leading a team affords a rare opportunity to consciously and deliberately cultivate a few key cultural rules for getting work done. Research on group dynamics shows that teams perform best when they agree on rules related to goals, roles, and norms—or what we call the Three Foundations. Commit, the first step in the process of creating an HPT, produces basic agreements about these foundations. (see Figure I.2).
Figure I.2 The Three Foundations
1. Goals: Rules guiding the team's direction
Do you have a shared vision and specific goals that not only establish clear performance targets, but also tap into the values that are meaningful to individual members?
2. Roles: Rules defining each member's contribution
Do you have clearly defined roles that include both the formal and informal aspects of teamwork, such as facilitation, coaching, and mediation?
3. Norms: Rules determining how members interact
Do you have mechanisms for making decisions, sharing information, and resolving conflicts so that clear expectations are set for team behaviors?
While rule-making is an essential first step, it is one that must be continually revisited. Team members inevitably create new rules that can undermine the original foundations of the team. This is why Steps Two and Three of the HPT process—Check and Close—involve checking on alignment with the original commitments and closing the gap between stated commitments and actual behaviors.
The Case of the Diamondbacks
As an example of how this process works, consider a team we observed in EDP: the Diamondbacks. The Diamondbacks were eight guys with big personalities who immediately clicked when they met and decided to form a team. Former soldiers and athletes, the Diamondbacks adopted the “Git-R-Done” motto. Made famous by the blue-collar comedian, Larry the Cable Guy, the catchphrase (and maybe philosophy of life) is all about just putting your head down and doing the job. In other words, for the Diamondbacks, speed and action—livened up with a heavy dose of locker room humor—were priorities over long-range planning.
They were an energetic group that meshed right away, and they established their culture up front. Git-R-Done guided the rules that would align this group of doers and propel them to dominance in the simulation—or so they thought. But by the middle of the first week, the Diamondbacks were struggling and their commitment to the team was flagging. Their turbo-charged culture had pushed them to make deal after deal. In fact, they did so well, they oversold. In the process, they incinerated relationships with other teams by failing to deliver on the sales they had promised. Their big personalities that helped to grease the wheels of making deals were suddenly viewed as political and untrustworthy.
Despite their Git-R-Done approach, the Diamondbacks unfortunately ended up getting little if anything done for the first half of the workshop. Their team observer helped them become aware of ways the rules they had created were out of sync with the environment of the sim. The team culture was dragging down performance. Drawing on the power of their brotherhood, however, the Diamonbacks pulled together during more than one come-to-Jesus moment. At the end of the two-week EDP, they were on an upward trajectory and in high spirits. In a word, they were committed. They are still one of the most legendary of EDP teams, a great example of the benefits and dangers of a strong culture and its rules.
The Diamondbacks saw firsthand that even when you make the rules and build consensus, team members can just as quickly fall out of alignment once they get into the flow of their day-to-day work. For this reason, we agree with group dynamics experts like the late Harvard professor J. Richard Hackman,5 who has demonstrated that teams need to establish the right foundational factors like goals and roles to be successful. But we also have found that building these foundations—the first step in the HPT process—is not enough to ensure that a team consistently amounts to more than the sum of its parts. As we saw with the Diamondbacks, and as you have probably seen on your own teams, a disconnect between team commitments and team behaviors inevitably begins to appear.
Become Your Own Observer
Alignment is a stubborn problem, and its roots lie in the failure to regularly check in about commitments. The second step in the process—checking in—can be hard because of what we called the illusion of insight, which blinds your team to underlying conflicts. An outside observer can help you see these conflicts. On your own team, however, you may have to cultivate the ability to be your own observer. But this step takes more than pointing out shortcomings.
When you first address the fact that members are not fulfilling their commitments, chances are you will be met with denial, blank faces, or a few bland responses. For one thing, your team members may not be aware they are falling short of their collaborative potential and thus see no need to address the problem. Even if they do, they still may be unwilling to address it, because they fear retribution, feel embarrassed, or simply want to avoid looking stupid.
Researchers Amy Edmondson and Jim Detert have shown that people are hard-wired to evade perceived threats to their psychological or material well-being.6 Inspiring others to devote their best effort to a task is hard enough, but just encouraging them to share their true thoughts and feelings about it might be even harder. As much as you would like your colleagues to leave their egos at the door and focus solely on doing the right thing for the team and the organization, the ego is a constant companion who never takes time off or waits patiently outside the conference room.
In order to be successful in the second step of the process, you have to create a psychologically safe space for your team to have tough conversations and push each other to become a high performing team.
Even when teams start by establishing commitments, like the Diamondbacks did, they often experience a growing gap between what their team says and what it does. We call it the saying-doing gap, and it is the reason why most teams never push the metaphorical boulder as hard as they could. Changing behaviors to close the saying-doing gap is the third step in the process (Figure I.3).
Figure I.3 The 3 Teamwork Steps
To recap the 3×3 framework: (1) You first need to get your team to Commit to goals, roles, and norms. (2) You need to regularly Check alignment with these commitments. 3) Finally, you need to Close the gap between saying and doing.
“How Have You Helped a Pharm Rep Today?”
Time and again, we have observed many examples of leaders who have successfully implemented the 3×3 Framework to close the saying-doing gap and supercharge performance. Take Jenny, the vice president of strategy for a major pharmaceutical company, who was tasked with being the architect of a transformational change initiative that we studied. At the time we interviewed Jenny, she had been an integral part of transforming the company's culture by reorienting its entire business model to focus on customer satisfaction rather than sales volume.
Responding to the passage of the Affordable Care Act as well as increasingly stringent restrictions on pharmaceutical sales, the leaders of the company—let's call it PharmTec—concluded they had to adapt to a changing healthcare landscape. Jenny was charged with leading the team that would develop a multi-step initiative to center business decisions and performance on the needs and concerns of healthcare professionals. Above all, PharmTec leaders wanted to change the culture of the company, one shared by many others in the industry, which rewarded sales reps for promoting prescriptions above all else.
Jenny's team created a five-year road map and an 11-point plan. They developed new goals, roles, and norms for the company's sales team. The plan was airtight, and employees seemed to respond to the new values espoused by the president in company-wide meetings. But Jenny noticed that something was off when she walked the PharmTec hallways to see whether employees were actually aligned with the initiative. She noticed that while the sales team managers parroted the values of the new practitioner-focused mindset, some still had plaques on their desks saying, “How have you helped a pharm rep today?” They were still regaling new hires with stories about reps who had the best sales figures and seemed to favor them in promotions and reviews. In other words, there was a gap between what they said when they recited the new values and what they did in continuing to incentivize sales volume.
Once she spotted this gap, Jenny's team went about closing it. Managers attended workshops that instilled the rules involved with evaluating rep behaviors under the new system. This training focused on the most basic elements of the new behaviors, such as how to properly observe sales teams in the field. PharmTec leaders invited physicians who were enthusiastic about the new business model to speak at company meetings. Insiders and outsiders began telling stories highlighting the behaviors of reps who had gone out of their way to help a practitioner. These stories tapped into a powerful motivator of change—pride. They also served as reminders that the reps who did the best job of serving their customers would be rewarded and that the reps who merely generated volume were following the old rules.
Jenny's team led a successful rollout of the new initiative. Internal surveys showed a jump in employee morale, and physicians who had seen PharmTec as just another big pharma company began valuing the different approach their reps took. To achieve this change, Jenny followed the three steps we have outlined. First, her team members established commitments around new goals, roles, and processes. Then they identified the conflicting rules that caused misalignments between those commitments and actual sales team behaviors. Finally, they cultivated new habits and ideals to close the saying-doing gap.
Jenny's team felt its way through this process, basically using trial-and-error techniques. In this book, we teach you to do it systematically so that adjusting team culture becomes second nature. Getting your team to create new behaviors is hard, but with practice you can get better at it.
How This Book Is Organized
In the following chapters, we give you the tools and techniques to establish commitments on your team, check on the alignment of behaviors with the commitments, and close the saying-doing gap. The process will help your team stay deeply engaged and perform to the maximum of its potential.
Before we describe how this book is organized, however, let us pause to reflect on a skeptical thought that might be bothering you at this moment. You might be wondering whether the best strategy for getting something done, and done right, is to just do it yourself, especially since experts have gathered loads of data that raise questions about the effectiveness of teams. True, individuals are often more effective than teams in performing certain tasks that require high degrees of creativity or technical knowledge. But it would be a terrible mistake to give up on teams, because they actually accomplish amazing things every day in organizations around the world. And your team can, too. So, to return to the question we started the chapter with: “Can I make my team work?,” we answer with confidence: “You can!” Based on our research and experience, we have concluded that the path to becoming a true HPT is our field-tested process for relentlessly closing the saying-doing gap.
Part One of this book describes the 3×3 framework (see Figure I.4).
Figure I.4 The 3×3 Framework
Chapter 1
provides a detailed explanation of the first step in the process: establishing commitments. We describe a highly structured way of having discussions with your team members in this phase, which we call
chartering
. HPTs create a charter that guides their work.
Chapter 2
shows how you can create the conditions for checking the alignment between saying and doing—the second step of the process. The goal is to identify your team's hidden problems and stay on top of the natural drift that all teams experience. Outside observers often have unique insights into others' cultures, and HPTs know how to become their own observers and identify the behaviors that help close the saying-doing gap.
Chapter 3
describes a detailed behavioral process designed to close the saying-doing gap: STAR. It stands for be Specific, Take small steps, Alter your environment, and be a Realistic optimist.
Chapter 4
reviews the seven deadly sins of teamwork: the most common bad habits that teams develop, often without being aware of them. We walk team leaders through ways to break down each of these barriers to performance.
Part Two of this book analyzes five common team types: their defining characteristics, their biggest problems, and key behaviors that produce success. Why are we focusing on these five? Based on our experience as consultants and business school faculty, we bet you spend a good chunk of your time collaborating in ways that resemble one or more of them.
Chapter 5
provides best practices for leading virtual teams. Virtual teams always need to work especially hard to create cohesion and maintain engagement, but there are ways to make it easier.
Chapter 6
shows how startups and entrepreneurial teams can successfully manage the team-formation process even when they have to move at breakneck speed.
Chapter 7
aims to correct common misperceptions about project teams that need to be creative and innovative in addition to being productive.
Chapter 8
analyzes the dynamics of top teams. These teams are often made up of all high-performing leaders who need to learn when to follow and how to leverage the power of social networks to augment their formal authority.
Chapter 9
seeks to refresh some typical ways of thinking about committees. Rather than laboring to direct a group of people who are collaborating because they
have to
, you can create a team that
wants to be
high performing.
Our
Conclusion
explains why today's workplace demands that all teams be high performing and that everybody know how to be a high-performing teammate.
Notes
1
The original research publicizing the concept of social loafing is M. Ringelmann (1913), “Recherches sur les moteurs animés: Travail de l'homme” [Research on animate sources of power: The work of man],
Annales de l'Institut National Agronomique
, 2nd series, vol. 12, 1–40. Available online (in French) at
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54409695.image.f14.langEN
.
2
The graduation speech delivered by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College is available at
http://bulletin.kenyon.edu/x4276.html
.
3
For more details on this study and a comprehensive look at the question of how effective we are in reading the minds of others, see Nicholas Epley,
Mindwise: Why We Misunderstand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want
(New York: Vintage Books, 2014).
4
From Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” Chapter 2 in
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
(New York: Basic Books, 1973), 9.
5
For a comprehensive overview of Hackman's writing on working in teams and group dynamics, see J. Richard Hackman,
Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances
(Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2002). Our HPT observer team relied heavily on Hackman's research in developing our own framework of evaluation for Wharton EDP.
6
James Detert and Amy C. Edmondson, “Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak,”
Harvard Business Review
, 85, no. 5 (2007): 23–25.
https://hbr.org/2007/05/why-employees-are-afraid-to-speak
.
