Post Meeting Review Notes - Teams

Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming PRESENTERS: Amy Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership & Management, Harvard Business School Adrian Moorhouse, Managing Director, Lane 4 Management Group TEAMWORKING IS GOOD, RIGHT? Organisations are not organisations without teamwork. While not all work is done in teams, most is. Its significance is underlined by the growing necessity for internal and external collaboration.

There are obvious advantages: no one person has all the answers; teams bring together diverse experiences, and facilitate development of creative ideas and alternative solutions.

They enable involvement, and thence commitment to action through participation in decision-forming.

YES, BUT...

Like most things, it depends on being done well. It is important to understand and overcome barriers to team effectiveness, for example 

cognitive/linguistic – power and knowledge balances can be destructive, and jargon obstructive

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social/emotional – rivalries, competition, dislikes

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procedural/logistical – complexities, poor preparation and purposing, lack of support.

TEAMS AND TEAMING Teams are formed with many different purposes and vary in their dynamics – from permanent to temporary, and from complex and multi-faceted project teams to impromptu combinations. The trend is for increasing amounts of work to be done on a project basis rather than in hierarchical teams, through networks rather than through formal structures, and thus less by command-and-control and more by delegated responsibility.

This increases the significance of Teaming – the capability to form and manage teams effectively, whatever the circumstances. Interdependence of team members can be relatively un-programmed and reactive to opportunities or problems. People need to learn how to combine and collaborate flexibly.

Amy described the variegated group of people that dramatically coalesced to save 33 trapped Chilean copper miners in 2010. Although hugely complex and testing this was a vivid example of teamwork ‘on the fly’, co-ordinating and collaborating across boundaries without © Corporate Research Forum 2014

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Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming the luxury of stable team structures or parent organisation, and in this instance lasting less than 70 days.

CHILEAN MINE RESCUE 2010 There were three distinct teams involved – the miners, the engineers and geologists managing the rescue, and the top executives and politicians who had to provide resources and handle relationships with families and the world’s media.

Success was achieved by process discipline, persistence despite failures and setbacks, ideas and innovation, multiple trials and techniques – but above all leadership that envisioned, listened, learned, involved and enabled. This was neither top-down nor bottom-up, but emergent.

TEAMING SKILLS AND LEARNING A learning approach is critical to success in teamwork. This is truer than ever in today’s VUCA operating environment – volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. This table illustrates teaming challenges and what to do to address them.

From Edmondson, A.C. (2012). Teamwork on the fly. Harvard Business Review, 90, no. 4 (April, 2012): 72-80.

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Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming ESSENTIAL TEAMING PRACTICES Team design is as important as ever – carefully considering both the mix of technical skills and the personality types, and how to get the best out of these. Both require good data – and a greater awareness of behavioural differences than many organisations have historically managed.

However, there is also an onus on individuals to be aware of their own strengths, weaknesses and tendencies. This includes binge able to get along even with people they don’t fit well with, at least until for the duration of a project or task achievement. Otherwise their work opportunities may become restricted. Organisations should help by promoting self-awareness, particularly among managers, as part of selection, assessment and development processes.

Here are three practices that build ‘teaming muscle’. 

Manage yourself – for example, communicate what you are good at and otherwise; understand your impact on others; reflect; match your speed with others – faster or slower; consider others’ situation as well as your own; build trust through what you do.

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Manage conversations – inquire, use more open than closed questions; show interest; listen; explain your thinking, ask others to do likewise; seek to make divisive topics discussable.

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Manage relationships – build trusting relationships across organisational fault lines; empathise; analyse and appreciate competing views – golden rules in successful negotiation are understanding and respecting counterparties; ensure you are understood (in their terms).

The ability to take good decisions is at least partly a synthesis of different perspectives, combined with open and honest discussion. This rarely happens spontaneously in groups; it requires 

conscious effort to learn from others

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leadership that creates the right context and provides the right example.

“I don’t like that man very much. I must get to know him better” Abraham Lincoln

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Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming INCLUSIVE LEADERSHIP – THE KEY ENABLER Knowing how to be an effective team member is important, but the quality of team leadership is critical. Amy emphasised inclusivity in order to achieve effective participation, through 

being accessible and visible

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proactively inviting input

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acknowledging fallibility – “I don’t have all the answers”.

Amy also stressed the importance of leaders creating psychological safety for team members, to permit both good ideas and concerns to surface by 

lowering the psychological costs of speaking up

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raising the psychological costs of silence.

Note that excessive allocation of accountability undermines confidence, while overconfidence can arise when people feel ‘too safe’. It’s a matter of finding the right balance. ………………………………………………………………………………………..

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY AND ACCOUNTABILITY

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There are many circumstances when targets, strong assumptions, group-think and ‘pleasing the boss’ variously serve to suppress open debate and challenge, and result in bad decisions.

She illustrated this with the example of what went wrong when the Columbia Space Shuttle and its crew were destroyed.

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Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming

COLUMBIA - THE COST OF SILENCE Transcripts of Columbia mission management meetings reveal how the subsequently correct view of a middle-ranking engineer about potential disaster was not heard. The culture required that his manager spoke for him, and that manager was cowed by the team leader’s orientation to avoid any disruption to the shuttle programme’s momentum. That attitude in turn was created by pressure on schedules and costs from top NASA management. The dialogue shows how closed questions discouraged making any ‘fuss’. The engineer was allowed no voice, and there was no safe whistle-blowing alternative. The result was seven deaths and a major interruption to the programme.

LEADING TO GOOD TEAM DECISIONS There are many rights and wrongs in reaching effective team decisions – and the behaviour of the team leader is at the heart of these. Amy stressed that leaders should 

be directive about team processes – establishing ground rules – but avoid overly directing the detail of discussion

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actively manage the discussion to draw out people with diverse experiences, information and perspectives

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be aware that individual viewpoints tend to be suppressed by commonly shared opinion, information and norms, yet can be highly valuable in improving or resolving challenges

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and be alert to divergent interests or goals that undermine sharing.

Impatience with consensus-building is understandable – and frequent – among task-oriented managers, who in frustration just take decisions themselves. However, the price is typically paid in team participation, and in poorer and less supported decisions.

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Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming “Gentlemen, I take it we are in complete agreement on the decision...Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give us time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”

Alfred P Sloan, My years with General Motors (1946) SUCCESS AND FAILURE Dimensions of ‘success’ include both outcomes and process, and need to take account of different stakeholders’ interests. Failures fall broadly into three categories 

Preventable – where knowledge exists to avoid failure.

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Complex – where multiple factors combine, and failure is less predictable.

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Intelligent failures – experimentation that is intended or unintended, and where ‘failure’ is accepted as an intrinsic contributor to learning and progress.

Learning and innovation suffers in teams, organisations and contexts where the prevailing belief is that effective performers don’t fail, and where blame must be assigned. Leaders must strike the right balance in communicating about standards, and what happens when things go wrong.

INSIGHTS FROM ADRIAN MOORHOUSE Drawing from both research and direct experience of Olympic teams, Adrian highlighted 

how performance levels increase where teams shift from being talented individuals to a squad with a shared ethos, emphasising mutual support and learning

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the importance of achieving identification within new teams or organisation structures – for example after a merger or acquisition

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the value of ‘servant-leaders’ – devotion to getting the best out of people rather than just bossing them around; you can be tough, but must achieve trust that you are serving others not yourself

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similarly, avoiding the historic tendency towards parent-child, hierarchical models – high-performing organisations demonstrate the ability to develop adult-adult relationships.

IN CONCLUSION...

Amy highlighted that leadership in facilitating effective teamwork means avoiding common but destructive human behaviours, such as helping to turn difference into advantage rather than a cause for conflict, and achieving shared effort and congruence while eschewing © Corporate Research Forum 2014

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Team Building & Beyond - The Notion of Teaming groupthink. Leaders have to do this in a global, multi-cultural environment. Self-awareness – and the ability to foster this among others – is a vital leadership attribute in managing relationships within and between teams. Good team behaviours rarely occur spontaneously – they require skilled leadership.

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