Lessons from Mars: How One Global Company Cracked the Code on High Performance Collaboration and Teamwork
448
Lessons from Mars: How One Global Company Cracked the Code on High Performance Collaboration and Teamwork
448eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785353598 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Collective Ink |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The "I" in Team, Part 1
The Return-on-Investment (ROI) on team building is lousy. I've seen figures that suggest a positive return on investments in things like corporate training programs and employee engagement. I've read about improved business performance based on increases in employee satisfaction. However, I have yet to come across any convincing work linking typical team-building programs to sustained improvement in team performance and outcomes. I feel certain that when, or if, those calculations are ever done, it will suggest a lot of money is being wasted, because the vast majority of the work done in the name of team building isn't creating any value.
I've been either managing teams or working with those who manage teams for almost 30 years. I've experienced or been part of leading hundreds of team-development or team-building exercises. I've taken part in paintball shoot-outs in the woods; I've led others in forming make- believe aircraft companies that designed and then mass-produced paper airplanes which then competed for greatest distance flown; I've sat in circles, and led those sitting in circles, passing a "talking stick" and telling deep, or at least less shallow truths. Some of this work was hugely enjoyable; some was really touching, some embarrassing and some, like my experience with paintball, surprisingly painful. Some of it left me feeling stoked or moved or just plain smiling. Some of it got me down or left me angry. None of these events, however, had a lasting impact on the performance of the group or groups involved.
But why?
Large organizations, run by very smart people, spend significant amounts of money trying to get good at something that you'd think is natural. I mean, humans evolved to collaborate, didn't we? Cave paintings in Europe show bands of early humans working together to bring down prehistoric creatures.
Observations of modern animal behavior suggest that the critters who evolved along with us also work together at things like hunting and child rearing. Birds do it, bees do it, even chimpanzees in the jungle do it. Apparently.
What's more, not only do we appear evolutionarily predisposed to collaborate, we think and act like it's a really good idea. Teamwork is something we hear about endlessly, starting on the playground, in school sports, and then at work. When we aren't hearing about teamwork, we're reading about teamwork in the latest company newsletter, or on motivational posters in the conference room:
Together Everyone Achieves More
When we're told that we're not team players, it's a severe criticism. Experts and students in the area of group dynamics devote days and months, even years, to reading about, writing about, and studying groups and teamwork. There are countless books and articles on the subject and who knows how many specific team interventions intended to enhance collaboration in the workplace. Yet, based on my 25 years of professional experience, all this inclination, effort and interest have yielded little in the way of sustained improvements in team effectiveness.
Again, why?
Part of the answer to the "Why?" is that teamwork is almost too sacred to question. Teams and teamwork, like organization charts and bitching around the coffee machine, are an essential part of corporate life for most of us. We may sense that the high we get from those team exercises, along with the bruises, wears off eventually and that things go back to the status quo, but no one is willing to look at that as failure. However, it's in my nature to challenge the status quo and I've become intensely interested in answering this particular "Why" question. I'd like to find some answers so that I, and those I work with, can then develop more effective approaches to enhancing collaboration in the workplace. That's what this book is all about.
The Framework I described in the Introduction arose out of my quest to understand why typical team building is so often a waste of time and what might work better. While this Framework is new, my fascination with groups and how they function is deeply ingrained. I'm the sixth of 11 children: five girls, six boys; five older than me and five younger. I grew up smack dab in the middle of a family whose particular dysfunctions (the subject of another book, perhaps) were magnified by our sheer numbers. Learning how to navigate that sometimes perilous environment instilled in me an intuitive sense of what it takes to survive in a group, and a natural interest in finding new and more effective strategies to do so. In 1994 I was fortunate enough to be hired by Development Dimensions International (DDI), based near Pittsburgh but with offices in New York City, near my home in New Jersey. I spent three years with DDI as an external trainer and consultant. It was during this time that I first encountered many of the concepts that I address in this book. For example, the idea of team dynamics, the stages of team development, and the use of personality types with teams were all part of my DDI experience. After three grueling years on the road for DDI, I was hired by IBM as an internal leadership coach and consultant to senior management at corporate headquarters in Armonk, New York. It was during my tenure in Armonk that I learned about David McClelland's work on motives, a framework that features prominently in the team effectiveness approach I developed. It was also during this period that I decided to go back to school for a second Master's degree, this one in Organizational Development. I attended the American University/NTL program, where our class cohort was also our laboratory for studying and working on group dynamics. I stayed at IBM for three years, leaving in 2000 for Mars, Incorporated, where I remain to this day.
My almost-sole focus on team effectiveness, though, only emerged eight years into my tenure with Mars. The part of the company I was working in at the time was reorganizing and my Organization Development (OD) role was made redundant. Unknown to me, a couple of senior managers who felt I had a talent for working with groups had a plan to keep me around. They proposed to our corporate learning and development organization, Mars University, that they create a role dedicated to supporting high performance teamwork. There was no budget for the role so it would have to self-fund. That is, I would have to charge my internal clients for my work and earn back the cost of my salary, wages and benefits. It was an unusual arrangement but Mars and I agreed to give it a go. I couldn't be more grateful. I was worried at first that I wouldn't find enough interested internal clients to support myself, but within six months it was clear that a role dedicated to team effectiveness could support itself and then some.
I soon realized that I had found my life's work. Ironically, not long after, I began to sense that as rewarding as the work was, and as much demand as there was for it, there was a problem. The role was functioning as designed; I was exceeding the expectations of my Mars University colleagues and my clients. I was earning my keep as clients rushed to fill my calendar, but the results I had expected weren't materializing. Teams were working with me — lots of them — but, more often than not, within a few weeks after my sessions with them, team members weren't working with each other any differently. Something was off. It would be a few years before I would conduct the inquiry that led to this book. As passionate as I was about my work at Mars, and as good as my clients told me I was, cracks in the traditional approaches to team effectiveness that I relied upon were showing years before this. I had always just assumed it was me.
Although I didn't know it then, my first clue to the troubled state of team building came in January of 1994, almost 15 years earlier. I was on my very first assignment as a consultant/trainer working for DDI. I found myself at a small factory in North Carolina, the sole output of which was the fabric, sometimes called cambric, that covers the bottoms of mattress box springs and the outsides of disposable diapers. It was a relatively new plant: clean and airy, sterile feeling, but pleasant for a factory. Just the week before, I had been certified to deliver DDI's team-building programs. The curriculum was solid and well-designed with excellent workbooks and videos, all based on Bruce Tuckman's 1965 "Forming- Storming-Norming-Performing" team development model. I was leading a workshop for about 18 employees in a bright classroom full of those one- piece chair-and-desk units that you see in middle and high schools. The seats were arranged, as you would expect, in neat columns facing the front of the room. Welcome back to eighth grade.
I don't recall precisely how long it took, but an hour or two into the half-day-long training program, things went south. This was an angry group of employees whose chief gripes were:
• Their managers treated them unfairly
• Management didn't listen to their concerns.
What's more, they deeply resented their bosses for bringing in this consultant guy from New York with his fancy training program to "fix" them, when the problem as they saw it was the bosses. It was a classic situation. Not knowing what else to do, I chose to depart from the neatly designed leader's guide. I was going to give them what they were asking for — a fair hearing. I worked with them to move beyond complaining to organizing their thoughts into a coherent list of topics they could discuss with management. The employees were grateful, if skeptical. Their managers were just plain pissed. They had paid for a "damned team-training program" and that was what they expected, not some outside agitator whose listening and list making only encouraged the sort of moaning they were trying to extinguish. As I look back on it, my actions were a quaint combination of rookie mistake and wisdom. Back then, it only felt horrible. I was fairly certain that my inexperience and lack of smarts, combined with astoundingly poor management at the plant, were to blame. I never suspected that part of the problems was that the approach was flawed.
Over 20 years have passed since my misadventure in North Carolina. In the intervening years, after working with close to a thousand teams using tools and approaches similar to those I had with me in the cambric factory, I have arrived at this conclusion. Whatever model you're working with – Four Stages, Five Dysfunctions, or 16 personality types – team building isn't as straightforward as it seems. Nor does it do what it promises.
Six years ago, I dedicated myself to working with teams at Mars, Incorporated in ways that would make a difference, long term. During that time, there have been two questions rattling around in the back of my mind that were the impetus for this book:
• Why do we spend so much time, money and effort trying to learn how to work in teams, or get better at it, when you'd think it would be second nature to us as social creatures?
• Why does all this effort have little lasting effect?
After all, we're hardwired to eat, to find mates, to play, all of which we humans do with considerable success. So why is collaboration so hard to get right?
It turns out I had been operating from a false assumption; we aren't coded to collaborate. For reasons I'll explain shortly, we're coded to do something else that sometimes, if properly directed, ends up as collaboration. The assumption that collaboration is innate leads us to do the wrong things to try to get folks to work together effectively. This in turn leads to processes and programs that end up like my visit to the fabric factory, misguided and not nearly as useful as leaders would like to think.
So what is the problem, exactly?
I think Maslow's Needs Hierarchy gets at the problem nicely.
If you're reading this book, I'd guess you're already familiar with this elegant model. If so, bear with me. Our most fundamental needs, those towards the bottom of the hierarchy, deal with physiology and safety and are self-oriented: things like breathing, eating, mating and staying alive. Even though food and sex are usually better when someone else is with us, it's generally true that when things get tough or scary the first thing I'm going to think is, "How am I going to deal with this problem and save my butt and the butts of my progeny?", not "How am I going to work with you to deal with this?"
Which isn't to suggest that we're never there for each other. What about altruism? There's a lot to be said for altruism and the potentially powerful drive to sacrifice oneself for the benefit of others. We hear with regularity about people putting themselves at risk to save others, in war in particular. From my interviews with veterans and members of the military about their combat training, being there for your comrades, having one another's backs, is literally drilled into recruits for months. This kind of intensive conditioning, though, isn't seen in large, non-military institutions like for- profit corporations.
Then, there is this question: Are altruism and collaboration the same? Is helping others coming from the same mental/emotional place as working with others? I don't think so. Altruism by definition expects no tangible reward or quid pro quo. Collaboration, on the other hand, is all about shared outcomes and mutual expectations. What is more, in studies of charitable giving, altruism has been shown to be driven in large part by what it provides to the giver, the self. "Warm-glow giving," as it has been called, describes that feeling that the giver gets from his or her act of generosity. Other self-oriented feelings like guilt, social pressure and even social status have also been found to drive altruistic behavior. In other words, it's not about us, not about collaboration. It's about me. I write this not to demean altruism. I only want to make the point that our desire to support others, which is a wonderful and sometimes life-saving human trait, isn't necessarily purely other-focused and isn't sufficient to support — or even the same as — collaboration. If we go back to those prehistoric hunters depicted on cave walls, I feel pretty sure that they collaborated on taking down ancient ungulates not from the goodness of their Paleolithic hearts, but so that they could feed themselves and their families, so that they could survive and propagate their genetic code.
We need to distinguish between collaboration and two other human tendencies: helpfulness and cooperation. I see helpfulness as a sort of lower-order altruism. It may involve dropping a buck in the cup of a homeless woman on the street or helping the guy next door to pull out a tree stump or helping a colleague to figure out how to create a pivot table in her spreadsheet. Helpfulness involves acts of kindness that, at their best, like altruism, seek no reward. When helpfulness does start to involve quid pro quo exchanges, it moves into the space of cooperation. I'll help you so long as helping you helps me. We go along to get along, more or less. Some think of this as collaboration. I don't; at least I don't think of it as effective collaboration. As you will read later in this book, the kind of collaboration I'm interested in involves more commitment and intentionality than either helpfulness or cooperation. Helpful and cooperative people are good to have. For business teams and businesses to succeed, however, genuine, intentional collaboration is what is required. But you wouldn't know that, based on how our businesses are set up.
In the modern, Western world, most of our enterprises are designed to take advantage of our more common, or at least more easily accessed, self-first orientation. For example, the most common organizational structures, hierarchies themselves, play strongly to the bottom of Maslow's pyramid, to our instincts to take care of and work for ourselves first. In a traditional large organization, you will find hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of generally decent, me- centered people laboring away in an environment optimized to take advantage of this perfectly natural human tendency. Things like performance management, pay, recognition and rewards are all typically geared to individuals and they play on this individual survival mechanism. And therein lies the biggest problem with teams and collaboration at work. We preach collaboration, talk and train teamwork, but all the while most organizations are optimized to manage, foster and reward individual effort.
It's not news, right? This glaring contradiction in organizations is another part of what frustrates our efforts to get teamwork and collaboration to stick, and has led to the proliferation of articles, books and consultants focused on these subjects. I owe my career to the many brilliant people who have pioneered the field of group and team dynamics. What they offer can indeed help groups to operate more effectively for a time. Most of what I have tried and used, though, hasn't made the lasting changes for the teams that I or they hoped for. That brings me back to the gap in ROI with which we started this discussion. We do it, and it costs a lot of money, time and effort. We may even enjoy it, but we don't hold on to what we learn after the program is over. It was only a few years back that I began to pay attention to this feeling that something was off, that something was missing from the terrific body of work that I had been schooled in and benefited from. Because even though all those brilliant people studied it, and great minds worked towards it, we seem to keep having to re-learn and re-teach teamwork. Over and over and over.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Lessons from Mars"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Carlos Valdes-Dapena.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
Part I,
Chapter 1: The "I" in Team, Part 1,
Chapter 2: Mars and High Performance Teamwork,
Chapter 3: Research and the First Insights,
Chapter 4: What Doesn't Work,
Chapter 5: The "I" in Team, Part 2,
Part II,
Chapter 6: Intentional Collaboration and the Three Imperatives,
Chapter 7: The Practices of High Performance Collaboration,
Chapter 8: Clarity and Inspire Purpose,
Chapter 9: Clarity and Crystallize Intent,
Chapter 10: Intentionality and Cultivate Collaboration,
Chapter 11: Discipline and Activate Ways-of-Working,
Chapter 12: Team Learning,
Chapter 13: Discipline and Sustain & Renew,
Chapter 14: The Special Practice-Clarify Context,
Part III,
Chapter 15: Putting the Framework to Work,
Using the Appendices,
Appendix A: Team Purpose,
Appendix B: Crystallize Intent,
Appendix C: Cultivate Collaboration,
Appendix D: Activate Ways-of-Working,
Appendix E: Sustain & Renew,
Appendix F: Clarify Context,
Notes,