At the bottom of every page in the binder you’ll see one of two dates. There’s an “effective” date, which is often something from the twilight of cooperate time, like 1/1/68. And there’s the “revision” date, something only a little less antediluvian, like 9/30/72.

What I’d like to propose, is a third date – an “expiration” date. After 1/1/2004, the idea goes bye-bye, unless consciously reimbued with life. Every idea, every policy, every procedure, should be reviewed every tow to three years. Modify and extend those that deserve it, and deep-six the remainder – particularly if you notice team members systematically going around a procedure to do their jobs, a sure sign of a procedure that should not be.

Remember that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. More good things happen when you are willing to bend the rules.

Sometimes, of course, the perfect solution for too many rules is a nice roaring fire. This is essentially what happened in two big American car success stories of the last decade, Ford Taurus and GM Saturn. For and GM looked at the baseline, decided it was too screwed-up to build upon, and so built entirely new divisions, making a fresh, honest start in the policies and procedures area. The fresh start gave both of these “Skunkworks” projects terrific vitality, and a head start toward success.

Policies and procedures are supposed to serve the team, not the other way around.

While many of these methods are enjoyable, they may not lead to better team performance over time. How many of you have gone out into the wild to “team” only to come back to the office and still not trust each other or have fuzzy goals or run across unexpected political barriers.  That’s because outdoor team building activities do not translate into team building skills back on the job.

No matter what the method, you will have difficulty achieving successful team outcomes unless you turn on the eight engines of effective teamwork. Over the past 30+ years of practice and research, the following eight engines have surfaced as consistently powering effective team performance:

• Defining goals/objectives/success
• Sorting out roles/responsibilities/accountabilities
• Identifying barriers to success and developing contingency plans
• Improving interpersonal relationships between team members
• Feedback systems
• Team member recruitment and departure
• Team leadership
• Intra- and inter-team communication

There is, however, a significant difference between how ordinary teams and high performing teams run these engines.

Ordinary teams list out all their goals and objectives and prioritize the entire list. I’ve seen some teams with lists of objectives as long as my sleeve. The best teams limit their goals to only a few. Those that need to be accomplished within a short period, say 30 days. These few near-term goals are then prioritized. As time passes, some longer-term goals move into the shorter time frame and are included into a newly re-prioritized list. What exceptional teams do, is identify those goals that seem to consistently drop to the bottom of the priority list. Then they get rid of them; delegate them upwards, outwards (outsourcing) or eliminate them totally since they will never have the time to get to them. This process seems to relieve a lot of guilt associated with not getting those things done that you know you’ll never have time to do. In essence, then, high performing teams only work on short-term continuously high priority goals.

Ordinary teams divide up their roles and responsibilities as best they can. While high performing teams take little for chance. The best teams identify the gaps and overlaps in roles so that people don’t fight over their responsibilities (turf wars) and important (but often dull) tasks (hot potatoes) don’t get left undone.

Exceptional teams go on to identify three types of barriers that have potential to upset the apple cart. People barriers, process barriers, and structure barriers. People barriers show up when someone doesn’t get along with others and is seen as an impediment to progress. Most team jerks fall into this category. If fact, there are very few real jerks; they just may have a toxic relationship with someone else on the team. Process barriers are policies and practices that have outlived their usefulness but remain in place anyhow. Most effective teams either ignore these policy barriers or have them redone. One place to look to improving these outdated policies is to change the date at the bottom of each policy page to an “expiration date” instead of an “effective date” or “revision date.” Structural barriers are created by a mismatch between how the team is structured (hierarchical vs. self-directed) and the skill level of the team members. For example, knowledge workers work best in a hierarchical structure.

High performing teams tend to help each of their members understand their own personalities as well as those of the other team members. This knowledge not only goes a long way in helping the team build bridges across toxic relationships (versatility), but also helps assign roles that take advantage of the natural strengths of one’s personality.

Exceptional teams tend to make sure the infrastructure supporting their team efforts is continuously maintained. They make sure, for example, that there is an informal continuous feedback loop between all team members/leader. They make sure every team member is operating from the same page in terms of agreed upon decision-making methods. They make sure that they are continuously looking for ways to improve communication within and between teams. They divide their team members up into “core” and “resource” to take advantage of time commitments and needed skills. And they look at varying their leadership models depending on the changing needs of the team.

Moving from an ordinary to a high performing team really depends upon your commitment to run your team using the eight engines of effective teamwork.

On any given day, we can all be jerks – rude people unaware of how we come across. But the true team jerk goes beyond occasional jerkness to full-blown jerkhood. Someone who, let’s say, is interpersonally challenged.  A team jerk is often its most talented member. He or she (yes, there are she jerks too) may have made some very important contributions to the enterprise. Their specialty is ideas – new technologies, new products, new processes, new applications, new combinations of existing things, new marketing ideas. Extraordinarily bright and creative, they are often high-achieving dynamos when motivated, giving off ideas the way regular folk emit carbon dioxide.

Take Bert (please!). He’s a primadonna about his talent. He won’t play by the rules other team members follow. He demands that other people attend to him, while he ignores them. Interpersonal skills have taken a vacation.  Communication with him has eroded to the point where the team simply ignores him – while hoping he includes them the next time a great idea comes to him. When team members do try to include him in things, he bushes them off.

A good archetype for Bert is the software programmer who is a genius with the latest blogging program or writes code in his sleep, but has horrendous interpersonal skills. You hate to lose his talent, but you could sure do without his arrogance, his eccentricities, and his contempt. (Wouldn’t hurt if he bathed a bit more often, either).

What can you do with a guy like Bert?

First, acknowledge that his personality is not his fault. None uf us asks to be born with the precise set of talents and peculiarities we get. The jerk is often blessed with great creativity, but cursed with a crummy personality. There are two strong opposing forces at play in the creative person. One force arises from high internal standards, the other from the need for recognition from others.

Second, appreciate that what you see is probably not all there is. People who seem arrogant often have profound insecurities. These people may simply be unable to adequately communicate what is going on inside them and, thus, often experience more stress than other team members.  Their lack of interpersonal skills is almost intentional in order to hide their true self.

Third, see if the team itself is helping to create the problem. Maybe team members have unconsciously “outed” the jerk because he is cut from such a different bolt of cloth than they are. Or maybe the team rules and policies are too narrow to accommodate a personality with extra, um, verve.

Having made these adaptations, however, you still have the problem of Bert being Bert. You can change the whole world to suit some people, and they will continue to be jerks.  In such cases, you have to make a choice…between competence and sanity.

The best solution may be to put some distance between him and the team. Set him apart from the core team as a valued resource team member. Make him a unit unto himself – a team of one – with a dotted-line relationship to the team or  the team leader, as a reference source, sounding board, or technology guru. Set him up as a one-man skunkworks. Give him an office in a separate building, or on a separate continent, even. Buy him some bunny slippers and make a telecommuter out of him.

But be careful about sending your genius off to the jungle by himself. The idea of separation may sound good to both him and to the team, but it may backfire. It’s very likely that Bert needs human contact to keep him from going completely insane, or from becoming depressed, or buying a gun. The team he derides and ignores may be his lifeline to normality.

You think, if we are to be a team, we must live, eat, breathe, and perform daily ablutions as a team. You tear down the cubicle walls, throw everyone in a pit together, sit back, and wait for those inevitable high-performance team results.

And wait. And wait.

You can wait till the cows come home, but high performance does not. The reason is that – surprise – people do not like being thrown into pits en masse.

Let’s start out by stating that most people do have a real need, deep down, to work together. This is true in the aggregate. But we don’t generally like being shackled to one another at the ankle. That’s not a team, it’s a chain gang.

People – average Americans, anyway – need their space to feel calm and safe. Spending the whole day in a playpen with teammates sounds less like a prescription for high performance teamwork than a French drama of existential ennui.

Some of the most successful team environments I have visited don’t feel all that “teamy” at first glance. In one highly successful team oriented engineering company, the offices of team members are small, dimly lit, quite, and include two desks facing away from one another. The engineers using the room are in constant contact, sharing information – but not smelling one another’s breath. The overwhelming impression is of seclusion, not Monkey Island.

In designing a team environment, do not expect people to crave constant contact with one another. Honor their reluctance to lose their individual identity to the team.

It’s a fine line you have to walk. High performing teams require that people must be able to access one another instantaneously. There must be no communication snags anywhere. But people need their privacy, too.

Be aware that environment matters. Find out what works. Chances are it will be about midway between the penthouse and the outhouse.

Collaboration is a misunderstood commodity. There are managers out there who still associate it mentally with the negative collaborations (collaborating with the enemy) during World War II.  So they are against it.  Other folks blanch at the mention of collaboration because it sounds tutti-frutti and unmasculine. “What do you mean, share?”

Sigh.

Among people with plural brain cells, however, collaboration is a powerful component of the high-performing mindset. The whole idea of organizations is rooted in the notion of people working together – collaborating – toward a common goal.

Teams do not absolutely require a collaborative atmosphere. There are successful high performing teams operating in overwhelmingly competitive environments.

But leaders of these teams should consider boosting the amount of collaboration in the air. While teams can function in a primarily competitive atmosphere, they will do better when they are encouraged to share information and experiences – including failures, something forbidden in most competitive regimes.

Now we come to an important point. While teams can get by without collaboration, organizations can enjoy widespread collaborative efforts without forcing teamwork. There are ways to get the collaborative spirit short of adopting the team structure.

What companies should consider, before resorting to teams, is whether they can alter their culture directly, making it a better place to share and think together.

To throw the team switch when all that is needed is an infusion of collaborative spirit is to invoke the dread specter of team tyranny. Team tyranny is the heavy hand of the organization at large, forcing everyone to do everything as part of a team.  The logic is underwhelming:  “Teams are great, so let’s insist everything be done that way”.

Team tyranny (”You must be democratic, you must be open, you must share! All the time. Everyone must be on a team”) sounds ironic and unlikely.  But it happens all the time.  If you see it happening, make it stop.  Not all outcomes are best accomplished via high performance teams.

First ask, whose job is it to do this?

It is everyone’s responsibility to create a high performance teaming atmosphere, by fulfilling their roles within the team.  I use the phrase “organizational karma” to describe this shared responsibility for climate control – karma being the wheel of consequences, with good deeds and bad deeds alike coming back to us continually.

The life of a high performance team is full of negatives and positives. The negatives are differences in perception and behavioral styles (personalities) between team members. The positives are an understanding of the characteristics differentiating good team members from bad. All high performance team members need to incorporate positive teaming behaviors into their daily work life.

Characteristics of an Effective Team Member:

Professes a commitment to goals. It is difficult to work enthusiastically toward some outcome if you don’t know what that outcome is.  So the first thing a high performance team member does is clarify what they’re after.
 
Displays a genuine interest in other team members. People don’t have to like each other to work together.  But high performance team members develop a genuine interest in the well-being of other team members – not as a team survival mechanism, but as a human bond.
 
Confronts conflict. High performance team members intercede when other team members are in conflict, to help resolve the disagreement proactively. Bad team members turn their backs or ignore it hoping that it’ll just go away.
 
Listens empathetically. Empathetic listening means being sensitive to not just the content of the message the other person is sending, but to the emotion behind the message. It also means checking for readiness before you just burst into their office and start talking.  When was the last time you called someone up and before you started talking asked, “do you have a moment to talk?”
 
Practices inclusive decision making. High performance team members run their “first draft” decisions by other team members before they pull the trigger so that there are no surprises with the final decision.
 
Values individual differences. High performance team members look at differences as positives.  They respect the opinions of others and view others’ perspectives as pluses, not minuses.

Contributes ideas freely. High performance team members don’t hold back their ideas. When they have an opinion about something, they express it – even if it’s just to support someone else’s opinion.

Provides feedback on team performance. High performance team members develop an informal method for providing continuous feedback on how the team is working, what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and what to do about it.

Celebrates accomplishments. High performance teams find excuses to celebrate – not just for the heck of it, but to acknowledge successful outcomes. Even the little one’s along the way toward the accomplishment of a bigger goal.

Think of TransCompetition as a grafting of fruit from the two trees of competition and collaboration. Each tree has fruit that’s good, and fruit that’s not so good. The job of your high performing team is to combine the best of both trees, the best attributes of each approach, for the task currently facing your team. Here are some of the fruits of both trees.

The will to greatness vs. the will to commonality. High performance teams require both ambition and humility. Ambition drives us to try great things. Humility lets us survive to try again when we screw up. As great as ambition is, the will to commonality may be greater. It seeks to find win/win solutions, common ground even when positions seem cast in stone.

Focus vs. empathy. This can also be called inwardness versus outwardness – valuable but opposite skills. Inwardness is capable of focusing on the task at hand to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Outwardness is forever scanning the horizon for more to understand.

Persistence vs. insistence. These are as different as conquistador and natives, the killer instinct and the instinct to survive. Persistence is heroic, the willingness to die for a cause. Insistence is about survival – in order to keep the cause alive.  What is your teams purpose?

Results vs. process. A results orientation is an attentiveness to the “what” of the team: did we meet our goal? A process orientation is attentiveness to the “how” of the team. Did we deal with each other or our customers appropriately?  It is imperitive for high performing teams to be both outcome driven and process oriented.

Play vs. work. Play is a team’s genius – its ability to generate, innovate, revolutionize from thin air. Work is why we show up when we don’t feel so playful. TransCompetition means abandoning the pain principle for the pleasure principle: work for the fun of it.

Personalization vs. depersonalization. Personalization is the talent for communicating in such a way that the person you are talking to feels the message has been custom-tailored to his or her understanding. It is a precious skill on high performing teams. But depersonalization is also very powerful. It is detachment, the ability to see a thing without regard to its effect on you. When detachment comes in, out goes paranoia, disrespect, and the blindness that so often accompanies self-interest.

Loose vs. tight. Which structure is stronger, one that is elastic but encourages innovation and experimentation, or one that achieves coherence through the imposition of order? Loose relationships permit wider latitude for expression – but tighter relationships, unions, and alliances have the power to effectively underwrite security. Let duration be your guide. If you are in imminent danger of destruction, tighten the bonds between yourself and others. If your survival issues are longer-term, let loose the line and encourage free minds to find solutions.

Think TransCompetitively!

Anyone who has been on a senior team knows how rare true camaraderie is. The senior team table more closely resembles a play from the Renaissance, with dukes and earls and grand viziers jockeying for advantage, than the kind of team we have been talking about. At the top levels, politics reigns supreme, and “team members” are there less to cooperate on joint action than to pursue constituent agendas.

This is partly because of the personality type that tends to rise to the top of organizations – Drivers with a bullet. Hard-charging executives prefer disposing to proposing, and they are typically rewarded for superior top-down, command-and-control performance. Except perhaps for the Vatican, large organizations do not turn to pastoral types for leadership.

But lets imagine a generation of powerful, collaborative-minded managers rose suddenly to the top – people who share information, swap skill sets, and set their egos aside to achieve common objectives. In fact, this will happen someday, and not far in the future. Generation X-ers and Y-ers are much more prone to team action than their Baby Boomer predecessors.

However, today’s corporations will not welcome these generations, and will throw up powerful resistance to them. Today’s organizations are modeled after patriarchal organizations established centuries ago, when leadership was envisioned in a singular, Driver-driven, masculine, competitive, Machiavellian way. Intrigue and manipulation are built into the charters of these organizations. To expect companies like IBM or Daimler-Chrysler or Harvard University to lead the way in describing a new kind of leadership by team, is to ask these organizations to go against their own natures.

Senior teams are “teams” in name only. They don’t act like real teams because they are really parallel teams of one, each with their own constituents. Real teams share roles and responsibilities whereas senior teams typically have parallel accountabilities. They are never able to prioritize goals since each member feels that his or her niche’s goals are the most deserving.

Oh, it’s sad and hypocritical. While top management encourages teamwork among the rank and file, they have no clue about it themselves. They can’t. They are constitutionally prohibited from engaging in it. So, when top management cannot practice what it preaches, why should the rest of us take the preaching seriously? Because it’s their job to point the way, to encourage teaming behavior. But, never, ever, look to top management to display teamwork. They can’t team. Collaborate, hopefully, but not team.

Well, perhaps never is too strong a word. We will with the passage of time see the development of true senior teams. But it will happen in smaller, younger organizations. And it will be lifetimes before the model takes hold in their Fortune 500 counterparts.

Even at this stage it’s still not too late to give up on the team approach.  You don’t need teams when:

1. Decisions are best made by one person

2. Decisions are predetermined

3. The outcome is not critical to company, division, or department success (like what color toilet paper to buy)

4. Time is of the essence (a decision by tomorrow)

5. The project is either “back-burner” or a low priority

Teams are best used when they are formed to address short-term, high-priority, perhaps cross-functional, single-focused, action-oriented outcomes.  You need teams when:

1. The wider the input the better the output

2. The issue is cross-functional or multidirectional in nature

3. The outcome/decision has potential high impact for department, division, or company

Don’t feel pressured to form a team because it’s the thing to do now. If it doesn’t feel right, the heck with it. Form teams only when they make sense, and the team output will be greater than the sum of the individual members’ inputs.

I call these assemblages mobs. There are ways to differentiate real teams from fake teams or mobs:

Teams
Members recognize their interdependence and understand that both personal and team goals are best accomplished with mutual support. Time is not wasted struggling over “turf” or attempting personal gain at the expense of others.

Members feel a sense of ownership for their jobs and unit because they are committed to goals they helped establish.

Members contribute to the organization’s success by applying their unique talent and knowledge to team objectives.

Members work in a climate of trust and are encouraged to openly express ideas, opinions, disagreements, and feelings. Questions are welcomed.

Members practice open and honest communication. They make an effort to understand each other’s points of view.

Members are encouraged to develop skills and apply what they learn on the job. They receive the support of the team.

Members recognize conflict as a normal aspect of human interaction, but they view such situations as an opportunity for new ideas and creativity. They work to confront and resolve conflict quickly and constructively.

Members participate in decisions affecting the team, but understand that their leader must make a final ruling whenever the team cannot decide, or an emergency exits. A positive result, not conformity is the goal.

Mobs
Members think they are grouped together for administrative purposes only. Individuals work independently, sometimes at cross-purposes with others.

Members tend to focus on themselves because they are not sufficiently involved in planning the unit’s objectives. They approach their jobs simply as hired hands.

Members are told what to do rather than being asked what the best approach would be.  Suggestions are not encouraged.

Members distrust the motives of colleagues because they do not understand the role of other members.  Expressions of opinion or disagreements are considered divisive and non supportive.

Members are so cautious about what they say that real understanding is not possible. Game playing may occur and communication traps are set to catch the unwary.

Members may receive good training but are limited in applying it to the job by the supervisor or other group members.

Members find themselves in conflict situations without knowing how to resolve them. They do not differentiate confrontation and conflict. Their supervisor or “team leader” may put off intervention until serious damage occurs.

Members may or may not participate in decisions affecting the team. Conformity often appears more important than positive results.