Team Unity

A Leader's Guide to Unlocking Extraordinary Potential

John Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000577440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Based on more than ten years of researching, observing, coaching, and building extraordinary teams, this entertaining and thought-provoking book demonstrates how to unify groups of all sizes to maximize performance.

Unity is the most influential factor in team performance and, although it is frequently discussed, it is often misunderstood. This book explains how disunity is the root cause of all team dysfunctions, and provides clear instructions on how to define, measure, and increase unity in your organization. Through entertaining and impactful stories, John Ross divides Team Unity into four components - focus, direction, trust, and conflict – and examines how they are related and measured. Notably, Ross introduces The Unity Formula: a simple equation useful for leaders at all levels in any organization to measure the team's current unity and identify areas for improvement.

Senior and middle managers in manufacturing, hospitality, and a range of other industries, as well as entry level employees and students of organizational behavior and HRM, will find this book an invaluable resource for understanding how to identify, measure and partake in the right steps to increase team performance.

Part 1 Introducing Unity

Chapter 1 What Makes an Extraordinary Team?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003269038-3

We are all, to some degree, people people. We are motivated by positive connections in our lives and demotivated when that supply of appreciation, affirmation and human connection is cut off.¹

Isolation punishment is so powerful that it is often used as a deterrent in prisons. It’s also used as a tool in interrogation tactics because people are willing to sacrifice loyalty and divulge information in exchange for the promise to protect or reconnect with a loved one or close contact.

Parents use this concept to their advantage. When applying punishment, the isolation may come in the form of a time-out. On the contrary, when a child is rewarded, they are often allowed to see their friends. As a parent, you may say something like, “If you clean your room, then you can go to the pool with your friends” or “If you help me make dinner, then you can take the car to the movie with Alex.”

When adults achieve something at work, the celebration likewise often includes other people. You may have a team pizza party for a job completed or all go out after work to rejoice in successfully meeting a milestone.

While we could celebrate on our own or live in isolation for a time, we crave the elements that come from being part of a group. In some way or another, we need interaction with people.²

Not only do we need people, but we also need to be accepted by them.³

Some might say, “Not me” or “I prefer to be alone.” Many people prefer and may even seek moments of solitude. Being alone definitely can be relaxing. If you think about some of the biggest stresses in your life, other people probably caused at least some of them. It isn’t bad to want to be alone to shut out such stress.

After a while, though, just about everyone seeks acceptance from others. In fact, Boston Consulting Group conducted a study of more than 200,000 people in 2014, and of ten key factors, participants rated “appreciation” for their work the most important to their engagement and happiness within the workplace. Number two was “good relationships with colleagues.” These ranked well above such factors as job security, salary and even relationship with one’s boss.⁴

The connection that people seek could be achieved in person or online groups; either way, it is key to wellness and ultimately performance. In fact, recent research shows that inclusion therapy, the act of helping to develop a person’s belief that they are not alone and that there are others around them that love them and support them, has been extremely potent in the improvement of depression and anxiety.⁵

In short, we can conclude from this research that people are awesome. We seek company for comfort, love, entertainment, support and accomplishment.

Teams Are Personal

I’ve shared how my research came about, but I’d like to back up a bit, so you understand what drives me as your author. The truth is, I love people. I’m fascinated by them. I love hearing their stories, their interests, their beliefs—the who, what, why and how of a person’s life.

I also love when people come together, especially at work. And I’ve always been fascinated by how people work together—even before I began researching team success.

My first job was at a movie theater. It was a minimum wage job at an eight-screen theater in Texas, situated on the border of four high school districts. Every night, weekend and holiday, 60 of us would work at the theater, serving hundreds of customers. We had a tremendous time. Several customers drove from many miles away because of our service. It wasn’t necessarily the management; the secret was we truly loved what we did. We loved being together. I enjoyed making customers laugh and providing the freshest popcorn around. I have so many ridiculous stories from those two and a half years. At the time, I just knew I loved going to work, but I now recognize how unique it was for a large group of teenagers to enjoy working together for so long. We had a very low turnover rate. There were definitely times when the job didn’t get done as well as it should have, but we were passionate about what we did. One could say that we were unified.

Several of us are still in touch. Our children have met. One person in the group became a major celebrity. We all celebrated her success. Two former coworkers married each other. Our team was extremely tight.

How tight, you ask? The movie theater eventually sold and was being torn down. The theater experience meant so much to us that someone had a great idea to hold a reunion there. Many of our team showed up. Our old managers showed up. It was a great time. And it wasn’t because of the building we worked in—but the people we worked with and what we accomplished together.

Seeing how much work had brought us together sparked my interest in teams. Why couldn’t more teams be like that? I wondered.

As we grew up, life started getting in the way. Money didn’t matter much when we worked at the movie theater. We all lived at home with very few bills. As people grow up, they acquire grown-up issues. Money, children, partners, spouses, bosses, school, promotions, respect, status, family, economy, government and more start invading thoughts. Everyone in the workplace stresses over something. In today’s hyperconnected world, home problems follow us to work, and work problems follow us home. A boss can get in touch with us while we are waiting at a red light or a baseball game. Our family can reach us during a meeting or while working on a project. We can check our bank accounts on our phones. Anywhere our smartphones are, the rest of our lives follow. And with many working virtually, the lines become even more blurry. We had a great time at the theater and worked on great projects, but we had all gone our separate ways and life took over.

As I took on other roles, it appeared as if the great days of teamwork at the movie theater were over. It was time to grow up and start “adulting,” a term we millennials use to refer to the process of becoming less fun and more stressed. I needed to accept that this was how life must be from here on out—if I were to be successful.

This is common to how many of my students feel today. They’re timid about graduating because they have to grow up and get “bills,” and I don’t mean dollar bills. I’ve met many adults who still feel the same way that I felt as a young man after high school: Teams are going to be lame from here on out.

Then I returned to the seventh grade. Not like Adam Sandler in Billy Madison. As a teacher.

Many people would not associate working with 12- and 13-year-olds as a defining moment of leadership and teamwork. In fact, many would consider my years as a teacher as training in survival skills. No doubt, teaching junior high can be tough, but I absolutely loved my years with my students.

I started off as a seventh-grade history and English teacher at a small junior high in a very low socioeconomic area of Arizona. I was making $24,000 a year. For the record, at the time of writing this, I am not a very old man reflecting back on days when hamburgers were a nickel. $24,000 was very low even for that time. To give you an idea, my school offered insurance, but informally, I was told just to apply for state benefits because I made so little that I’d easily qualify. As a comparison, many fast-food places today pay $15 an hour starting wage, or over $30,000 a year working full time.

My wife taught dance part time while raising our children. We had a small house, two cars and a large stack of bills. Money was a stressful topic. I worried every night about covering my mortgage and utilities. It was definitely a crazy period in my life that I probably didn’t handle too well at times, but fate had put me in that place to show me a very important lesson.

I learned that despite circumstances, teams can still be awesome. I had a group of seventh graders with all sorts of issues common in low socioeconomic areas with drugs and abuse. I was even told that these students, as sixth graders, had tested the lowest that the school had ever tested, but we still had an amazing time.

The students excelled at anything I gave them. Granted, most of what I gave them in the first few weeks was remedial work from the fourth grade. Many of my students had been uprooted many times. Each time a child moved during the school year, gaps would form in their education. One of my students had moved 24 times in two years. In seventh grade, she struggled with the mere definitions between city, state and country. Most students in my class were below grade level and poor constructors of sentences. I started where they were, and they grew quickly.

As they grew, I found myself setting aside my numerous life issues and focusing on this positive and wonderful thing that was happening in my classroom. The more the class improved, the less outside stress bothered me. I became more hopeful that we’d be able to overcome whatever challenges our little class may experience.

The students felt the same way. Many of my 12- and 13-year-olds had experienced more hardships in life than I had ever experienced, even though I also came from blue-collar parents. They struggled with many learning disadvantages and home stresses, but when we were together, things were different. They left all of that behind. They were themselves in our room, and were experiencing great success in the classroom, some for the first time ever. Because their school life was improved, the students were able to handle their home lives a little easier.

Some of the parents, many of whom were working multiple jobs, began volunteering with classroom activities—the first time ever for some. Our amazing team not only impacted our lives but those around us as well.

There were many other signs of success in this class. Word spread of our class’s success. Enrollment in our tiny school was busting at the seams. Parents were withdrawing children from other schools just to attend my seventh-grade class. By the end of the year, the students in my class were in the 90th percentile in the nation for reading in year one and 85th percentile in the nation for year two. Our grade raised more money than any other grade in a Mesa/Phoenix-wide charity competition, an impressive feat being the lowest income school in the competition; our class donated more cans for the canned food drive than any other class in the school. We killed it at everything we did. We event printed T-shirts with our successes, which I still have today.

Fast forward several years. I had been a part of several other teams but none that I would call extraordinary. There were definitely some great ones but none that reached the same level as we had in my classroom. As I reflected on why this classroom had been so special, it seemed that fates had to align just right for an extraordinary team (ET) to happen, almost as if ETs were random.

This belief was reinforced by several books, which suggested you could no sooner predict an ET than you could predict where a tornado would land or where the next lighting strike would happen. These super high-performing teams were random and thus thrown out of team research. As outliers, they seemed impossible to study—and perhaps more important, irrelevant, since there would be nothing anyone could do to influence their creation.

Then, as a project lead in a major manufacturing company, I heard of another team that was accomplishing some extraordinary things.

My job position provided me the opportunity to travel throughout the entire plant. I heard several executives talking about how this new director got lucky—that everything had been set up for him, that he had the most resources and the best people—so of course he was successful. I knew that wasn’t true because I had known the area he took over before he arrived. It was a forgotten area, an area where no one wanted to be, because it was so unsuccessful that many felt it a career-damaging move. But this person had turned it around.

I also knew he hadn’t been provided many, if any, extra resources, because I remembered when he was hired. He was new to aerospace. His hiring was in question from the start. What could he possibly show us aerospace professionals at one of the world’s largest companies? After his success in his new position, they challenged his luck again with a different position, new challenges and additional responsibilities on top of his new position. He achieved tremendous results again. It almost seemed easy for him.

Clearly, this guy knew something about how to create an ET. He had a track record, with several examples of leading ETs. He wasn’t following a script, but he knew intuitively how to inspire a team to perform at very high levels. While he hadn’t yet defined his steps, he knew how to recreate success within a team. That’s why his resume impressed the vice presidents when he was hired, and that’s why he continued to have success. I was convinced it was not luck. It was not extra resources. It was not having the most skilled people on his team. He was successful in two consecutive attempts, in spite of any roadblocks.

Extraordinary Teams Are Not Random—or Static

It was then that it hit me. Contrary to many books, ETs are not random! ETs cannot be random. If they were random, then what about the true stories of teachers who did tremendous things with groups of people, as documented in several movies—such as Erin Gruwell in Freedom Writers, Francois Begaudeau in The Class, Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver and Joe Clark in Lean on Me? These teachers weren’t just one-hit wonders. They delivered tremendous results year after year. They must have had an idea of how building an ET was accomplished.

What about coaches? Why are millions of dollars spent on college football coaches, unless the athletic department is confident they know how to build a team? Coach Phil Jackson of the Bulls moved to the Lakers in 1999 and won three more championships, then two more a few years later. Many have said that he had the talent with Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neil, so of course he won, but Kurt Rambis and Del Harris also had amazing talent on t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1 Introducing Unity
• PART 2 Defining Unity
• PART 3 Measuring Unity
• PART 4 The Unity Formula
• PART 5 Increasing Unity
• Conclusion
• Index