Committed Teams

Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance

Mario Moussa, Madeline Boyer, Derek Newberry

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119157427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Cultura del lugar de trabajo

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.

Part One

The first part of this book is about the basics: creating a collaborative culture that ignites passion and supercharges team performance. Chapters 1 through 3 describe the three-steps of the 3×3 Framework—Commit, Check, and Close. You can apply this process to any kind of team. Each chapter includes examples and tools that make it easy for you to apply key takeaways. The final chapter identifies seven of the most common mistakes that undermine teamwork and offers strategies for correcting them.

Chapter 1
Commit: To Know the Rules, You Have to Make Them

Even a lone genius needs help from a team.

British mathematician Alan Turing¹ learned this lesson in his race to crack the sophisticated code used by the German military in World War II. Turing was the consummate rogue intellectual, a brilliant savant who foresaw the modern computer and the advent of artificial intelligence. He envisioned a machine that could use algorithms to solve any mathematical problem. But when the British government tapped him to join an elite team of cryptographers tasked with deciphering the famous German Enigma machine, he balked.

Turing was famous for being socially awkward and eccentric. He was known to hold his pants up with string and ride his bicycle to work with a gas mask during allergy season. He at first believed that working in a group would only slow him down. But he eventually came to appreciate the collective capabilities of his fellow mathematicians in the secretive “Hut 8” of the government's central code-breaking station. The group succeeded in besting the most powerful cipher machine in the world because the right foundations for team success were laid, ensuring the output of the whole would be more than the sum of its parts.

In other words, Turing and his group of cryptographers established the rules that created a culture of high-performing teamwork.

For starters, the team was committed to a clear common goal of cracking the German code in a highly distinctive way. Rather than seeking to uncover an underlying structure, it involved identifying probable words in Axis messages and working backward to decipher discrete meanings. This gave the team a central focus around which all of its activities and discussions could be organized.

The team also defined roles that tapped into the personalities, skills, and interests of each individual. The mathematician Alexander Hugh came onto the team as Turing's deputy. But Turing eventually let Hugh take over the team when it became clear that Turing's talents were wasted by having to manage the administrative aspects of Hut 8. By stepping into the leadership post, Hugh enabled Turing to focus his energy where he could provide the most value to the team.

Turing also benefited from working with Stewart Menzies, the head of Britain's intelligence agency and a crucial liaison for the Hut 8 team to the rest of the military administration. In stark contrast to Turing, Menzies was a classic bon vivant. The grandson of a wealthy whiskey distiller, he was known for his easy-going personality as well as his multiple marriages. Winston Churchill was skeptical of Menzies' abilities when he was appointed head of MI6, but Menzies eventually won Churchill over and became a part of his inner circle. Menzies' knack for building relationships with key people was crucial to gaining support and resources for Hut 8's activities.

The team was full of oddballs who were more accustomed to getting things done on their own. One of the cryptographers was known for taking long walks to think by himself and then throwing his coffee mug in the nearby lake when he was finished. Strange conduct notwithstanding, between 1939 and 1941, the team solved the puzzle created by the most complicated encoding machine the world had ever seen and shortened the length of the war by years. To do it, Turing had to create a culture that enabled his team to thrive. Essential to its success was the special rules that connected a larger purpose to particular behaviors and habits.

For example, one of those behavioral rules had to do with identifying bottlenecks and immediately alerting decision-makers about them, even if the team had to work outside of the established bureaucratic structure. In an exchange dramatized in the popular Hollywood film about Turing, “The Imitation Game,”² every member of the team signed a note sent directly to Churchill about four specific resource needs, one of them being the shortage of trained typists. It was highly unusual to forward this sort of request directly to the British Prime Minister, to say the least. But Churchill swiftly granted all of the team's requests and the work proceeded apace.

Making Commitments: The Power of Structured Conversation

What made Turing and his band of loner intellectuals a successful team? Recall the story of how Jenny from PharmTec got her sales teams on track. Though Jenny and Turing were operating in obviously different environments, what they have in common is a need to be explicit about the rules governing team behavior. It is just too easy to become committed to the wrong ones. Jenny became aware of this problem only after her change initiative sputtered out of the gate, hampered by the old habits that remained unchanged at her company. You can avoid this headache by developing the right rules collaboratively as soon as your team forms.

Of course, the basic question is: What rules should you establish? The first step in the process is all about committing to the rules that matter. Research on teams tells us that these fall into three categories, or what we have called the Three Foundations: Goals, Roles, and Norms (see Figure 1.1). HPTs establish those foundations by having a structured conversation. Our research has shown that conversation is simply the best tool for organizing collaboration and making commitments.

Figure 1.1 The Three Foundations

The outcome of your conversation is what management scholar Leigh Thompson³ calls a team charter. A team charter can be something formal you write on a piece of paper and post, or it can be as simple as a set of verbal agreements. The key is having a conversation about concrete commitments you can refer to later and hold one another accountable for. In the Resources section, we have provided you with a checklist of questions you should be considering to create effective goals, roles and norms. You can begin with talking about any of the foundations, but you should make sure to address all three. The more explicit you are in identifying specifics, milestones, and metrics, the easier it will be to translate commitments into actions and make adjustments later on. But the reality is that it will take some time—and several conversations—to dig down to a level of detail that reveals the behaviors needed for success.

Let's look at how you can structure a chartering process for your own team.

Goals: Grounding Vision in Practice

One of the most important steps you can take in forming a team is to establish the rules about the team's vision and direction: what goals you will pursue as well as what is outside of your scope.

This is hard enough under the best of circumstances. But imagine how hard it is to do goal-setting with someone who would rather not even be part of the team. That was the situation faced by one of our simulation teams at Wharton, Yellow Lightning, in its very first meeting. We were facilitating an ice-breaker, asking each of the participants why they had come to Wharton and what they wanted to get out of their two weeks together. The conversation flowed smoothly as each member spoke to the importance of learning new skills and developing relationships—until it was Ankur's turn to talk.

Ankur, an energetic and intense principal at a top consulting firm, had only known his fellow EDP participants for a day, but he had already developed a reputation for bluntness. When asked about his own personal goals, he stayed true to form, telling his teammates that he had been forced to participate in EDP and that he had little to learn from the simulation. He felt pressured to wrap up a time-sensitive issue that his colleagues back at the office were waiting on, and he made the calculation that it was better for him to placate his real team than worry about supporting the simulated one he would be stuck with for two weeks. His flippant attitude set the tone for the first part of the exercise. Ankur would alternate being arrogantly overbearing and being completely disengaged. He often became engrossed with his iPhone while others deliberated.

WIIFM?

What can we learn from Ankur's example? Start with the widely accepted claim: to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction “Can I Make My Team Work?”
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion: The Future Is Teams
• Acknowledgments
• Resources
• Bibliography
• The Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement