TEAMS HAVE EXISTED for hundreds of years, are the subject of countless books, and have been celebrated throughout many countries and cultures. Most people believe they know how teams work as well as the benefits teams offer. Many have had first-hand team experiences themselves, some of which were rewarding and others a waste of time. Yet, as we explored the use of teams, it became increasingly clear that the potential impact of single teams, as well as the collective impact of many teams, on the performance of large organizations is woefully underexploited—despite the rapidly growing recognition of the need for what teams have to offer. Understanding this paradox and the discipline required to deal with it are central to the basic lessons we learned about team performance.
Initially, we thought that executives and other decision makers could make teams work if only they understood the compelling argument for why teams make a difference to performance. We learned the challenge is more difficult than that. Most people, particularly business executives, already recognize the value in teams. Long-standing habits, demanding time schedules, and unwarranted assumptions, however, seem to prevent them from taking full advantage of team opportunities.
We also thought that people understood most of what differentiated a team from a nonteam, and, therefore, only needed a clearer definition of terms to take full advantage of teams. We discovered instead that most people simply do not apply what they already know about teams in any disciplined way and thereby miss the performance potential within existing teams, much less seek out new potential team opportunities.
There is much more to the wisdom of teams than we ever expected, which we highlight in the following summary of key lessons we have learned about teams and team performance.
1. Significant performance challenges energize teams regardless of where they are in an organization. No team arises without a performance challenge that is meaningful to those involved. Good personal chemistry or the desire to “become a team,” for example, can foster teamwork values, but teamwork is not the same thing as a team. Rather, a common set of demanding performance goals that a group considers important to achieve will lead, most of the time, to both performance and a team. Performance, however, is the primary objective while a team remains the means, not the end.
Performance is the crux of the matter for teams. Its importance applies to many different groupings, including teams who recommend things, teams who make or do things, and teams who run or manage things. Each of these three types of teams do face unique challenges. Teams that make or do things often need to develop new skills for managing themselves as compared to teams elsewhere in organizations. Teams that recommend things often find their biggest challenge comes when they make the handoff to those who must implement their findings. Finally, groups who run or manage things must address hierarchical obstacles and turf issues more than groups who recommend, make, or do things. But notwithstanding such special issues, any team—if it focuses on performance regardless of where it is in an organization or what it does—will deliver results well beyond what individuals acting alone in nonteam working situations could achieve.
2. Organizational leaders can foster team performance best by building a strong performance ethic rather than by establishing a team-promoting environment alone. A performance focus is also critical to what we learned about how leaders create organizational environments that are friendly to teams. In fact, too many executives fall into the trap of appearing to promote teams for the sake of teams. They talk about entire organizations becoming a “team” and thereby equate teams with teamwork. Or they reorganize their companies around self-managing teams, and risk putting the number of officially designated teams as an objective ahead of performance. They sometimes loosely refer to their own small group at the top as a team when most people in the organization recognize they are anything but a team.
Real teams are much more likely to flourish if leaders aim their sights on performance results that balance the needs of customers, employees, and shareholders. Clarity of purpose and goals have tremendous power in our ever more change-driven world. Most people, at all organizational levels, understand that job security depends on customer satisfaction and financial performance, and are willing to be measured and rewarded accordingly. What is perhaps less well appreciated, but equally true, is how the opportunity to meet clearly stated customer and financial needs enriches jobs and leads to personal growth.
Most of us really do want to make a difference. Naturally, organization policies, designs, and processes that promote teams can accelerate team-based performance in companies already blessed with strong performance cultures. But in those organizations with weak performance ethics or cultures, leaders will provide a sounder foundation for teams by addressing and demanding performance than by embracing the latest organization design fad, including teams themselves.
3. Biases toward individualism exist but need not get in the way of team performance. Most of us grow up with a strong sense of individual responsibility. Parents, teachers, coaches, and role models of all kinds shape our values based on individual accomplishment. Rugged individualism is credited with the formation of our country and our political society. These same values carry through in our corporate families, where all advancement and reward systems are based on individual evaluations. Even when teams are part of the picture, it is seldom at the expense of individual achievement. We are taught to play fair, but “Always look out for number one!” And, most of us have taken this to heart far more deeply than sentiments such as “We’re all in this together” or “If one fails, we all fail.”
Self-preservation and individual accountability, however, can work two ways. Left unattended, they can preclude or destroy potential teams. But recognized and addressed for what they are, especially if done with reference to how to meet a performance challenge, individual concerns and differences become a source of collective strength. Teams are not antithetical to individual performance. Real teams always find ways for each individual to contribute and thereby gain distinction. Indeed, when harnessed to a common team purpose and goals, our need to distinguish ourselves as individuals becomes a powerful engine for team performance. Nothing we learned in looking at dozens of teams supports an argument for the wholesale abandonment of the individual in favor of teams. Nor does our book present such an either/or proposition.
4. Discipline—both within the team and across the organization—creates the conditions for team performance. Any group seeking team performance for itself, like any leader seeking to build strong performance standards across his organization, must focus sharply on performance. For organizational leaders, this entails making clear and consistent demands that reflect the needs of customers, shareholders, and employees, and then holding themselves and the organization relentlessly accountable. Out of such demands come the most fruitful conditions for teams. An analogous lesson also applies to teams. Indeed, we think of the team definition (provided in Chapter 3) not as a series of elements characterizing teams but as a discipline, much like a diet, that, if followed rigorously, will produce the conditions for team performance. Groups become teams through disciplined action. They shape a common purpose, agree on performance goals, define a common working approach, develop high levels of complementary skills, and hold themselves mutually accountable for results. And, as with any effective discipline, they never stop doing any of these things.
We believe that teams—real teams, not just groups that management calls “teams”—should be the basic unit of performance for most organizations, regardless of size. In any situation requiring the real-time combination of multiple skills, experiences, and judgments, a team inevitably gets better results than a collection of individuals operating within confined job roles and responsibilities. Teams are more flexible than larger organizational groupings because they can be more quickly assembled, deployed, refocused, and disbanded, usually in ways that enhance rather than disrupt more permanent structures and processes. Teams are more productive than groups that have no clear performance objectives because their members are committed to deliver tangible performance results. Teams and performance are an unbeatable combination.
The record of team performance speaks for itself. Teams invariably contribute significant achievements in business, charity, schools, government, communities, and the military. Motorola, recently acclaimed for surpassing its Japanese competition in producing the world’s lightest, smallest, and highest-quality cellular phones with only a few hundred parts versus over a thousand for the competition, relied heavily on teams to do it. So did Ford, which became America’s most profitable car company in 1990 on the strength of its Taurus model. At 3M, teams are critical to meeting the company’s well-known goal of producing half of each year’s revenues from product innovations created in the prior five years. General Electric has made self-managing worker teams a centerpiece of its new organization approach.
Nonbusiness team efforts are equally numerous. The Coalition’s dramatic Desert Storm victory over Iraq in the Gulf War involved many teams. A team of active duty officers and reservists, for example, lay at the heart of moving, receiving, and sustaining over 300,000 troops and 100,000 vehicles with more than 7,000,000 tons of equipment, fuel, and supplies between the late 1990 buildup through and beyond the end of hostilities in 1991. At Bronx Educational Services, a team of staff and trustees shaped the first nationally recognized adult literacy school. A team of citizens in Harlem founded and operated the first Little League there in over forty years.
We do not argue that such team achievements are a new phenomenon. But we do think there is more urgency to team performance today because of the link between teams, individual behavioral change, and high performance. A “high-performance organization” consistently outperforms its competition over an extended period of time, for example, ten years or more. It also outperforms the expectations of its key constituents: customers, shareholders, and employees. Few people today question that a new era has dawned in which such high levels of performance depend on being “customer driven,” delivering “total quality,” “continuously improving and innovating,” “empowering the work force,” and “partnering with suppliers and customers.” Yet these require specific behavioral changes in the entire organization that are difficult and unpredictable for any single person, let alone an entire company, to accomplish. By contrast, we have observed that the same team dynamics that promote performance also support learning and behavioral change, and do so more effectively than larger organizational units or individuals left to their own devices. Consequently, we believe teams will play an increasingly essential part in first creating and then sustaining high-performance organizations.
Change, of course, has always been a management challenge. But, until recently, when executives spoke of managing change, they referred to “normal” change—that is, new circumstances well within the scope of their existing management approaches. Managers deal with this kind of change every day. It is a fundamental part of their job, and includes raising prices, handling disgruntled customers, dealing with stubborn unions, replacing people, and even shifting strategic priorities. Many people, however, would agree that change today has taken on an entirely different meaning. While all managers continue to have to deal with “normal” change, more and more must also confront “major” change that requires a lot of people throughout the company—including those across the broad base of the organization—to become very good at behaviors and skills they are not very good at now. The days of viewing change as primarily concerned with strategic decisions and management reorganizations have vanished.
Notice, for example, how Jack Welch, Lawrence Bossidy, and Edward Hood describe the challenge facing General Electric in their 1990 letter to shareholders.
Change is in the air. GE people today understand the pace of change, the need for speed, the absolute necessity of moving more quickly in everything we do. . . . From that pursuit of speed . . . came our vision for the 1990s: a boundaryless company. Boundaryless is an uncommon word . . . one that describes a whole set of behaviors we believe are necessary to achieve speed. In a boundaryless company, suppliers are not “outsiders.” . . . Every effort of every man and woman in the company is focused on satisfying customers’ needs. Internal functions begin to blur. Customer service? It’s not somebody’s job. It’s everybody’s job. (Emphasis added.)
Throughout much of the 1980s, General Electric made the critical strategic, restructuring, and management changes people typically associate with top management. To achieve their goals of being either number one or number two in each of their chosen markets, Jack Welch and his colleagues divested $10 billion worth of assets and made nearly $20 billion worth of acquisitions. All of these moves were difficult and essential; yet, they represented only a portion of top management’s job. The other part is in managing the kind of broad-based behavioral change described above—what our colleague Micky Huibregtsen calls “energizing” changes.
This is a much more difficult challenge and even the wisest of leaders seldom know fully what to change or how to make all the specifics happen. Jack Welch, for example, is the first to admit he developed GE’s now famous “Work-Out” town meeting approach largely through trial and error. Most leaders today cannot succeed without the participation and insights of people across the broad base of the organization. Together, top management and the people who look to them for leadership must first identify and learn critical new skills, values, and behaviors, and then work to institutionalize those behaviors to sustain high performance. We believe teams are essential to such objectives because they have always induced behavioral change as both an ingredient and by-product of team performance.
Several well-known phenomena explain why teams perform well. First, they bring together complementary skills and experiences that, by definition, exceed those of any individual on the team. This broader mix of skills and know-how enables teams to respond to multifaceted challenges like innovation, quality, and customer service. Second, in jointly developing clear goals and approaches, teams establish communications that support real-time problem solving and initiative. Teams are flexible and responsive to changing events and demands. As a result, teams can adjust their approach to new information and challenges with greater speed, accuracy, and effectiveness than can individuals caught in the web of larger organizational connections.
Third, teams provide a unique social dimension that enhances the economic and administrative aspects of work. Real teams do not develop until the people in them work hard to overcome barriers that stand in the way of collective performance. By surmounting such obstacles together, people on teams build trust and confidence in each other’s capabilities. They also reinforce each other’s intentions to pursue their team purpose above and beyond individual or functional agendas. Overcoming barriers to performance is how groups become teams. Both the meaning of work and the effort brought to bear upon it deepen, until team performance eventually becomes its own reward.
Finally, teams have more fun. This is not a trivial point because the kind of fun they have is integral to their performance. The people on the teams we met consistently and without prompting emphasized the fun aspects of their work together. Of course this fun included parties, hoopla, and celebrations. But any group of people can throw a good party. What distinguishes the fun of teams is how it both sustains and is sustained by team performance. For example, we often see a more highly developed sense of humor on the job within the top-performing teams because it helps them deal with the pressures and intensity of high performance. And we inevitably hear that the deepest, most satisfying source of enjoyment comes from “having been part of something larger than myself.”
Behavioral change also occurs more readily in the team context. Because of their collective commitment, teams are not as threatened by change as are individuals left to fend for themselves. And, because of their flexibility and willingness to enlarge their solution space, teams offer people more room for growth and change than do groups with more narrowly defined task assignments associated with hierarchical job assignments. Finally, because of their focus on performance, teams motivate, challenge, reward, and support individuals who are trying to change the way they do things.
As a result, in the kinds of broad-based change that organizations increasingly confront today, teams can help concentrate the direction and quality of top-down leadership, foster new behaviors, and facilitate cross-functional activities. When teams work, they represent the best proven way to convert embryonic visions and values into consistent action patterns because they rely on people working together. They also are the most practical way to develop a shared sense of direction among people throughout an organization. Teams can make hierarchy responsive without weakening it, energize processes across organizational boundaries, and bring multiple capabilities to bear on difficult issues.
In fact, most models of the “organization of the future” that we have heard about—“networked,” “clustered,” “nonhierarchical,” “horizontal,” and so forth—are premised on teams surpassing individuals as the primary performance unit in the company. According to these predictions, when management seeks faster, better ways to best match resources to customer opportunity or competitive challenge, the critical building block will be at the team, not individual, level. This does not mean that either individual performance or accountability become unimportant. Rather, the challenge for management increasingly becomes that of balancing the roles of individuals and teams versus displacing or favoring one over the other. In addition, the individual’s role and performance will become more a matter for teams, instead of hierarchies of managers, to exploit; that is, in many cases teams, not managers, will figure out what the individuals on those teams should be doing and how they are performing.
Such predictions about teams, however, induce a lot of skepticism. We believe the argument for greater focus on teams is compelling, and most people we have interviewed agree. Yet when it comes to using the team approach for themselves or those they manage, most of these same people are reluctant to rely on teams. Notwithstanding the evidence of team performance all around us, the importance of teams in managing behavioral change and high performance, and the rewards of team experiences in everyday lives, many people undervalue, forget, or openly question the team option when confronting their own performance challenges. We cannot fully explain this resistance; there probably are as many reasons and emotions as there are people. Moreover, we do not suggest that such resistance is either “bad” or “good.” We do, however, think that it is powerful because it is grounded in deeply held values of individualism that neither can nor should be entirely dismissed.
Three primary sources for people’s reluctance about teams stand out: a lack of conviction that a team or teams can work better than other alternatives; personal styles, capabilities, and preferences that make teams risky or uncomfortable; and weak organizational performance ethics that discourage the conditions in which teams flourish.
1. Lack of conviction. Some people do not believe that teams, except in unusual or unpredictable circumstances, really do perform better than individuals. Some think that teams cause more trouble than they are worth because the members waste time in unproductive meetings and discussions, and actually generate more complaints than constructive results. Others think that teams are probably useful from a human relations point of view, but are a hindrance when it comes to work, productivity, and decisive action. Still others believe that concepts of teamwork and empowerment applied broadly to an organization supersede the need to worry or be disciplined about the performance of specific small groups of people.
On the one hand, most people share a lot of constructive common sense about teams but fail to rigorously apply it. People know, for example, that teams rarely work without common goals; yet far too many teams casually accept goals that are neither demanding, precise, realistic, nor actually held in common. On the other hand, the very popularity of the word “team” courts imprecision. People rarely use “team” with much concern for its specific meaning to them in the context they face. As a consequence, most people remain unclear over what makes a real team. A team is not just any group working together. Committees, councils, and task forces are not necessarily teams. Groups do not become teams simply because someone labels them as teams. The complete work force of any large and complex organization is never a team. Entire organizations can believe in and practice teamwork, but teamwork and teams differ.
Most executives outspokenly advocate teamwork. And they should. Teamwork represents a set of values that encourages behaviors such as listening and constructively responding to points of view expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, providing support to those who need it, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others. When practiced, such values help all of us communicate and work more effectively with one another and, therefore, are good and valuable behaviors. Obviously, teamwork values help teams perform. They also promote our performance as individuals and the performance of the entire organization. In other words, teamwork values—by themselves—are not exclusive to teams, nor are they enough to ensure team performance.
Teams are discrete units of performance, not a positive set of values. And they are a unit of performance that differs from the individual or the entire organization. A team is a small group of people (typically fewer than twenty) with complementary skills committed to a common purpose and set of specific performance goals. Its members are committed to working with each other to achieve the team’s purpose and hold each other fully and jointly accountable for the team’s results. Teamwork encourages and helps teams succeed; but teamwork alone never makes a team. Consequently, when senior executives call for the entire organization to be a “team,” they really are promoting teamwork values. However well intended, such ambiguities can cause unproductive confusion. Moreover, those who describe teams as vehicles primarily to make people feel good or get along better not only confuse teamwork with teams, but also miss the most fundamental characteristic that distinguishes real teams from nonteams—a relentless focus on performance.
Teams thrive on performance challenges; they flounder without them. Teams cannot exist for long without a performance-driven purpose to both nourish and justify the team’s continuing existence. Groups established for the sake of becoming a team, job enhancement, communication, organizational effectiveness, or even excellence rarely become real teams, as demonstrated by the bad feelings left in many companies after experimenting with quality circles. While quality represents an admirable aspiration, quality circles often fail to connect specific, achievable performance objectives with the collaborative effort of those in the circle.
Ignoring performance, we suspect, also explains much of the evidence about apparent team failures. Peter Drucker, for example, has cited the difficulties GM, P&G, and Xerox, among others, have had in overshooting the mark with “team-building” efforts. Without question, teams and team efforts sometimes fail. But more often than not, such failures lie in not adhering to the discipline of what makes teams successful. In other words, unclear thinking and practice explain more about such disappointments than whether teams are appropriate units of performance to get something done. Regardless of their cause, however, such unrewarding personal experiences in groups labeled as teams weaken people’s conviction about teams even further. Many of us who have observed, participated in, or watched the best intentions at team-building exercises get quickly forgotten or scorned have grown cynical, cautious, or even hostile to teams.
2. Personal discomfort and risk. Many people fear or do not like to work in teams. Some are true loners who contribute best when left to work quietly on their own. Some research scientists, university professors, and specialized consultants fit this pattern. Most people’s discomfort with teams, however, is because they find the team approach too time-consuming, too uncertain, or too risky.
“My job is tough enough,” goes one recurring comment, “without having to worry about meeting and getting along with a bunch of people I don’t even know that well, or I do know and I’m not sure I like all that much. I just don’t have that kind of time to invest.” In this view, teams represent a risky extra burden that can slow down individual accomplishment and advancement. Some people are uncomfortable about speaking up, participating, or being otherwise conspicuous in group settings. Some are afraid of making commitments that they might not be able to keep. And many people just do not like the idea of having to depend on others, having to listen or agree to contrary points of view, or having to suffer the consequences of other people’s mistakes. These concerns particularly afflict managers who find it difficult to be part of a team when they are not the leader.
Few people deny the benefit of teamwork values or the potentially useful performance impact of teams. But, at their core, most people have values that favor individual responsibility and performance over any form of group, whether it be a team or otherwise. Our parents, teachers, ministers, and other elders emphasize individual responsibility as paramount from our earliest days onward. We grow up under a regimen that measures (academic grades), rewards (allowances), and punishes (trips to the principal’s office) individual—not collective—performance. Whenever we want to “get something done,” our first thought is that of holding an individual responsible.
It is hardly surprising, then, to discover strong anxieties among individuals faced with joining a team. It is not that teams and teamwork are absent from our culture. From The Three Musketeers through The Dirty Dozen and Star Trek, we have read about, listened to, and watched stories of famous teams accomplishing the improbable. Most sports we follow are team sports. And our parents and other teachers have also instructed us in, and expected us to practice, teamwork values. But for most of us, these admirable notions, however potentially rewarding, forever remain secondary to our responsibilities as individuals. Individual responsibility and self-preservation remain the rule; shared responsibility based on trusting others is the exception. A reluctance to take a risk and submit one’s fate to the performance of a team, therefore, is almost inbred.
3. Weak organizational performance ethics. The reluctance to commit one’s own fate to a team pervades most organizations with weak performance ethics. Such companies lack compelling purposes that appeal rationally and emotionally to their people. Their leaders fail to make clear and meaningful performance demands to which they hold the organization and, most important, themselves accountable. To the organization at large, such behavior manifests more concern about internal politics or external public relations than a commitment to a clear set of goals that balances the expectations of customers, shareholders, and employees. At the worst, such environments undermine the mutual trust and openness upon which teams depend. There is a built-in expectation that any decision of consequence must be made at the top or, at a minimum, be approved by enough other layers that the implementor of that decision is well-covered. Politics displace performance as the daily focus. And, inevitably, those politics play on individual insecurities that, in turn, further erode the conviction and courage to invest in a team approach. Bad team experiences become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Modifying the strong natural emphasis on individual accountability will, of course, be necessary as teams become more important. Yet replacing individually focused management structures and approaches with team-oriented designs will matter little, or even do damage, unless the organization has a robust performance ethic. If it does, then shifting the organization’s emphasis away from individual toward team can enrich both the number and performance of teams—particularly if management also is disciplined about how it deals with team situations. But all the team-promoting policies in the world will fall short if the teams are not convinced that performance truly matters. Some teams, of course, will always emerge—beyond all reasonable expectation. But they will remain the exception. Because of the all-important link between teams and performance, companies with weak performance ethics will always breed resistance to teams themselves.
Teams are not the solution to everyone’s current and future organizational needs. They will not solve every problem, enhance every group’s results, nor help top management address every performance challenge. Moreover, when misapplied, they can be both wasteful and disruptive. Nonetheless, teams usually do outperform other groups and individuals. They represent one of the best ways to support the broad-based changes necessary for the high-performing organization. And executives who really believe that behaviorally based characteristics like quality, innovation, cost effectiveness, and customer service will help build sustainable competitive advantage will give top priority to the development of team performance.
To succeed, however, they and others must also pay a lot of attention to why most people approach teams cautiously. In large part, this resistance springs from undeniable experiences and convictions about individual responsibility and the risks involved in trusting other people. Teams, for example, do demand a merging of individual accountability with mutual accountability. Teams also do require lots of time together; indeed, it is folly to assume that teams can perform without investing time to shape and agree upon a common purpose, set of goals, and working approach. Moreover, few groups become real teams without taking risks to overcome constraints imposed by individual, functional, and hierarchical boundaries. And team members do depend on one another in pursuit of common performance.
No wonder, then, that many of us only reluctantly entrust critical issues to team resolution. We all fool ourselves if we think well-meaning aspirations to “work better as a team” will be enough to dispel the resistance to teams. Building the performance of teams throughout an organization that needs to perform better, we argue, is mandatory. But doing so also poses a far more serious challenge than any of us would like to admit.
The good news is that there is a discipline to teams that, if rigorously followed, can transform reluctance into team performance. Moreover, while some of the elements of this discipline are counterintuitive and must be learned—for example, that “becoming a team” is not the primary goal—most of it builds on commonsense ideas like the importance of goal setting and mutual accountability. Furthermore, this discipline applies equally well to teams that run things, teams that recommend things, and teams that make or do things. What works at the front lines also works in the executive suite.
The bad news is that, like all disciplines, the price of success is strict adherence and practice. Very few people lose weight, quit smoking, or learn the piano or golf without constant practice and discipline. Very few small groups of people become teams without discipline as well. Extracting team performance is challenging. Long-standing habits of individualism, rampant confusion about teams and teamwork, and seemingly adverse team experiences all undercut the possibilities teams offer at the very moment that team performance has become so critical. Groups do not become teams just because we tell them to; launching hundreds of teams will not necessarily produce real teams in the right places; and building teams at the top remains among the most difficult of tests. Yet the fact remains that potential teams throughout most organizations usually can perform much better than they do. We believe this untapped potential literally begs for renewed attention, especially from the top. We also believe the key to such performance is in recognizing the wisdom of teams, having the courage to try, and then applying the discipline to learn from the experience.