Transform Time With Teams

Teamwork can be a tremendous accelerator for reaching your Rocket Goals in record time, but only if you are part of a healthy and functional team. Otherwise, dysfunctional teams can actually wind up holding back high achievers from reaching their goals.

Bestselling author and management consultant Tom Peters once described the surprising/not surprising state of affairs found in many corporate leadership “teams”. Citing an article entitled, “Teams and Teamwork: A Study of Executive-Level Teams”, Peters shares a fairly bleak state of teamwork at the top of many Fortune 500 companies, with quotes pulled from more than two-dozen executive teams.

Communications
“We rarely discuss things in the true sense of the word. Usually, each of us takes a fixed position early on and sticks with it. There’s lots of speech-making, grandstanding, and put-downs. Everyone’s so intent on saving face that nobody’s willing to budge.”

Internal Coordination
“Who coordinates? We go our own separate ways, and that’s that.” “Most of us are very cautious about coordinating our efforts. I think we’re afraid we’ll get sucked into somebody else’s problems.”

Meetings
“The president of our company uses meetings for two purposes: to deliver sermons or to lay down the law. The rest of us just sit and listen and nod in agreement.”

Strategy & Planning
“We’re so used to having to take action, frequently under pressure, that we seldom take time to reflect deeply on fundamentals,” one exec told the researchers. “Contemplation makes us edgy.”

Listening Skills
“On many of our teams, what passed for listening was little more than a respite during which those managers who weren’t talking marshalled arguments against the one who was. … There was … frequent inattention, frequent interruptions, and almost reflexive arguing and counter-arguing. … [A] number of managers who were articulate to the point of eloquence seldom seemed to hear simple messages spoken by others. Highly developed speaking skills frequently went hand-in-hand with underdeveloped listening skills.”

Reaching Consensus
“We attended a meeting in which the COO kicked things off by saying: ‘I think we must—I repeat must—build the new branch as soon as possible, but I want to hear your views first. Within minutes, six vice presidents agreed that yes, we must.”

Delegation
“The whole idea of calling a meeting every time a decision has to be made … goes against my grain. I don’t think the president of a company, any company, should be held hostage by his vice presidents. I’m darned if I’m going to abdicate in favor of the people who work for me. That may be what the bleeding-heart theorists recommend, but it’s no way to run a business.”

Decision Making
“The boss makes the decisions, period. We endorse them. It’s a very neat division of labor.” “Generally, if we have a tough decision to make, we put it off in the hope it’ll make itself. If we’re forced to decide, we usually opt for the safest alternative.”

Execution
“Ironically … the same executives who proclaimed the need for wholehearted commitment at their own level would often say things like, ‘Let’s write it up in a memo and send it around,’ or ‘Let’s each of us hold a meeting to tell his people what’s been decided,’ …[M]any of our executives seemed to believe that any decision promulgated by top management would automatically receive the follow-up it required”


Does any of this sound familiar? If so - make a note on the two or three particular teamwork issues that jump out to you the most. Those are the ones to work on first!

Teamwork is as powerful as it is rare because successful teamwork is built on the many overlapping and inter-related skill sets and behaviors discussed above. If just one or two of these skills are lacking - you and your team will suffer.

If you find yourself on an under-performing team there are really just three choices: you can be part of the problem, part of the solution - or start looking to be traded to a better team.

But just remember - the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence, and the teamwork issues that you struggle with at one organization might be just as bad - if not worse at your next company.

The team you are already working with might be looking for an answer,
and that answer might just be you.