CHAPTER TEN
What Color Is Your Team?
Whenever I am asked to speak on the subject of teamwork, I begin with a game. Our family loves word games, and anagrams is one of our favorites. Anagrams is played by taking a word or phrase and rearranging the letters to form other words. No slang, no proper nouns, no abbreviations, and no words fewer than three letters.
On a flip chart I write the words One Audacious Claim and shout, “Go!” Each person has 60 seconds to write down as many words as they can. Stirring the competitive fires a bit, I offer a prize to the winner and demand the audience not cheat. At the end of 60 seconds, people in the room have formed their words, some as few as five or six and others as many as 15 or 16.
Then I put everyone in groups of four, have them choose a recorder, and repeat the process again with the same three words. At the end of 60 seconds these small groups have come up with 30, 40, and even 50 words from One Audacious Claim. We list the very real lessons on teamwork that we have all just experienced:
• Some people are good at word games; others are not. The team made that weakness irrelevant.
• Everyone brought a unique perspective to the group, even the non-word people. Each contributed a different set of words to the list.
• When group members shared their words, other words came to mind that no one had thought of by working alone.
• It is easier to reward individual achievement with a single prize. How do you reward four winners with a group prize?
• And the most telling, groups working together outperform individuals working alone.
That is the assertion of the One Audacious Claim made about teams by the brilliant Patrick Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare. A friend of mine, the founder of a company that grew to a billion dollars in annual revenue, best expressed the power of teamwork when he once told me, “If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, any time.” (Lencioni, 2002, page 7)
A BUSINESS CASE FOR TEAM
The business case for TEAM can be expressed in a single word, synergy . Synergy means that the sum of the whole is greater than its individual parts. While superstars may grab headlines, teams working together win championships. When Mark McGwire shattered baseball’s single season home run record in 1998, his team missed the playoffs. When Barry Bonds broke the record again in 2001, his team, too, was out of postseason play. Michael Jordan did not start winning basketball championships, or even more than three playoff games, until the Bulls assembled a team around him of Scotty Pippen, Horace Grant, Steve Kerr, and others.
Teamwork affects more than word games and sporting events. Businesses have discovered the power of people working together. Based on decades of consulting in the field of organizational performance, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith state in their best-selling book The Wisdom of Teams:
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 combined job roles and responsibilities. (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, page 15)
Note, however, this qualification, it is “real teams, not just groups that management calls teams . . .” that get these results. So many teams are teams in name only, not dynamic, effective work groups. If I put a BMW medallion on a Pinto, that won’t make it an expensive European sports car. Neither does calling a group a team make it a team. A team is a small group of 3 to 12 people working together in the following four ways.
WHAT IS A TEAM?
T—Trusting Relationships
The first dynamic that makes a team a team is the quality of relationships that exist among its members. Real teams know one another well and trust one another explicitly. This takes place over time as each member, in his own unique way, connects with the other members of the group and finds them to be people they respect and professionals they believe in. This cannot be forced, or the power of teamwork will be nullified right from the start.
What many teams do, instead of investing the time needed to build this unity of spirit, is settle for unity’s evil twin: uniformity. Uniformity looks a lot like unity, the pleasant smiles, nodding heads, and comforting platitudes. But it is fake and will not stand the test of time. Like a dysfunctional family that looks nice and sweet on their Christmas card, but never talks about their problems, team members locked in the grips of uniformity all remain silent when critical issues need to be addressed. One needs to look no further than the Challenger tragedy, when seven astronauts lost their lives, to see the disastrous results of uniformity on vivid display. Many engineers knew about the faulty O-rings that caused the explosive fuel leakage, but no one did anything about it in NASA’s culture in the 1980s of silent uniformity.
Unity, real unity, is forged through the rigors of discussion, dialogue, and even debate. No issue is off the table with teams that trust one another. Team members are open about their mistakes and weaknesses, they ask for help when they need it, and receive input from others without being defensive. People who experience this kind of teamwork find that it is the most invigorating group experience they have known. It calls out the very best in them and produces the very best through them.
E—Established Purpose, Values, and Goals
The second dynamic of a fully functioning team is the formation of purpose, values, and goals. A fully functioning team knows where it is going, why it exists, and how it is going to get there. Every pilot who takes an airplane into the sky, commercial or private, files a flight plan. The flight plan clearly states where that plane is going, how long they intend to be in the air, and where and when they are going to land. You can’t take off without one. Yet many of the groups of people we call teams do not do this. It’s like they say to the tower, “Well, we’re going to go up in the air, fly around a bit, and see what happens.”
Dynamic teams do not do this. They define their central purpose: that is what they are doing as a group. Along with that purpose they identify the core values of the group, or the why of their what. Then with those two in place they set clear goals to measure their progress. I call this the Team Target, and it looks like this:
If you were on a team that managed Habitat for Humanity in my state, your purpose might be to provide affordable housing for children and their families in Oregon. That purpose statement would be strengthened by adding a core value to it like this: To bring dignity and self-respect to the children and families of Oregon by providing affordable housing. Your team target would be complete, however, with a clear goal in it: To bring dignity and self-respect to children and their families by providing 200 affordable housing units in the state of Oregon by the end of the year. This is a perfect team target: a central purpose with a core value and a clear goal.
Do things happen that can take you off course from your plan? Certainly. No one can perfectly predict the weather or the future. Pilots recognize this and are always making midcourse corrections as they fly. Dynamic teams do the same by using their flight plan to get them in the air, executing against it along the way, and making changes when needed to get them to their intended destination.
A—Active Participation by All the Members of the Group
The third dynamic of effective teams addresses how group members function when they are together. Two A’s actually come into play here, All the members of the group Actively participating in discussion, decision making, and doing what the group has set out to accomplish. Please note that this is not Equal participation. That too would spell the word, but wrongly, TEEM. Not everyone in a small group will be equally experienced, equally educated, or equally talented for a particular project. As a result, the ball, if you will, does not need to be passed around to everyone every time. But for a team to be a team, everyone must have a part of the action for which he is best suited; one dribbling, one passing, one shooting, and one rebounding, for example.
In every anagram game played when I speak on teamwork, there is a verbal superstar who can list more words than anyone else. Never, though, has that superstar formed more words than a group of four in the second round. But when the superstar joins a group, that team inevitability has the most words in the room. This is an example of Active Participation versus Equal Participation. In the jobs that teams are asked to do, there will always be those who excel at them, but everyone can have a part of the action adding to the whole in such a way that it is greater than any individual could do on her own.
Here are some questions to ask about your team along these lines. When you are discussing issues, does everyone have a chance to say what’s on his mind? When a decision is made, is everyone polled for her perspective before the decision is made? When jobs are assigned, does everyone have a significant part of the project? These are just a few of the ways active participation by all the members of the group is assured.
M—Mutual Accountability
Who’s the leader of your team? Don’t answer too quickly because that’s a trick question. Yes, most every team has a formal leader. But teams will get only so far when they depend too much on this formal leader. Teams that truly perform at the highest level of effectiveness have broken free of their dependence on a formal leader and function in a zone of mutual accountability, each team member taking responsibility for the performance of the team as seriously as if he alone were the formal leader. In fact, if you were a fly on the wall at the meeting of a team that has grown to this point, you would not be able to tell who really was the formal leader of the group.
Competitive bicycle racing has a word for this dynamic: paceline. A paceline occurs when cyclists ride in straight-line formation with a rider in the lead and the rest drafting off him. That lead position takes the most effort, but after a few miles the point rider slips into the back of the line and another cyclist leads the group. In this way the paceline shares leadership, conserves the energy of all, and delivers better performance. Teams with mutual accountability experience the same as the answer to the question, “Who’s the leader of your team?” becomes irrelevant.
The evidence of a business paceline is when the leadership of team meetings is shared with others, perhaps even rotated throughout the group. It takes root when discussions evolve naturally without the leader saying, “Okay, next item” and when everyone takes responsibility for moving a meeting along and keeping it on track. It grows when every member of the group, not just the formal leader, takes the initiative for encouraging the other members, remembering special days like birthdays and anniversaries, and celebrating achievements. And it reaches its peak when a formal leader does not need to drive execution of the jobs assigned to team members, but each person does what he has been asked to do because he doesn’t want to let the group down, not just the formal leader.
THE LIFE CYCLE OF A TEAM
Teams pass through four stages of development as they go from a collection of individuals to a fully cohesive, functioning group. Understanding these stages and applying the right leadership strategies is absolutely critical to team success. Group development expert R. B. Lacoursiere first referred to these stages in the book The Life Cycle of Groups: Group Development Stage Theory. The general outline of his study has been summarized with the words Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Ken Blanchard, author of the wildly popular One Minute Manager, identifies these stages as Orientation, Dissatisfaction, Integration, and Production. For our discussion, we refer to them in a more primal sense with these four colors: red, blue, yellow, and green.
The RED Team
CHARACTERISTICS This newly formed team is excited and ready to go. That’s why they resemble the color red. They are eager to take on the job ahead, even though they may not really know what that job entails. Relationships are new and people are polite and optimistic. Hidden under this optimism may also be an undercurrent of caution, another reason for the color red. New team members may not know what are acceptable behaviors and may not understand how they will fit in with the other members of the group. Other questions like, “How much time will this take? Will I be able to do what is being asked of me? Will the project actually get done?” may lie just below the surface. Morale is moderate to high, but productivity is low because the team hasn’t actually accomplished anything yet.
LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES Red Teams need the formal leader to set the stage in a strong and decisive fashion. This direction, though, has a specific objective: orientation. The purpose of the group should be explained and some of its initial goals set. Time should be allowed for team members to begin to get to know one another and important questions asked and answered. Many of those questions, however, will be raised in one-off conversations because some team members are not yet comfortable bringing them up in front of the group. I have learned that Red Teams can benefit from an early win, a simple goal that can be easily accomplished. It gives the group momentum and a good start to their work.
The BLUE Team
CHARACTERISTICS As teams continue to work together there is an inevitable drop in morale. A gap between expectations and reality emerges and the people that seemed so warm and friendly in your first few meetings are beginning to get on your nerves. The warm glow of an early win has worn off and the ongoing work of the group is beginning to get tiresome. More aggressive team members try to assert control over the team, even challenging the formal leader, and a conflict or two has arisen that makes everyone feel distinctly uncomfortable. The team is blue. Morale is low. Productivity is also low. Some teams even destroy themselves at this stage or sit in a perpetual state of dysfunction.
LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES This is where the real work of team leadership takes place. Conflict must not be shut down, as difficult as that is. Team members must be able to freely speak their mind and first attempts at that are not always pretty. Neither fight nor flight reactions serve us well, but staying engaged with the discussion provides both safety—high concern for the relationship—and soundness—high concern for the issues at hand. Being both safe and sound provides a context for the dissatisfaction of the Blue Team to reach resolution. The formal leader MUST model these behaviors or the rest of the team will not embrace them.
This is where I begin dialogue around the team’s values and the way it wants its meetings conducted, drawing out the opinions of the quieter members of the group. I also start using what I call a spotter, a team member deputized to assist in leading team meetings, keeping the group on track and helping resolve any disputes that may arise. The spotter may be the same person at every meeting or it could rotate through the group. This may also be the time when others decide this is not the team for them. That’s okay. Personality assessments, like DiSC or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, can also be helpful in deepening mutual understanding. This is not the time, however, for leaders to wilt. It takes strong, courageous men and women to take a team through this tunnel to the light at the end.
The YELLOW Team
CHARACTERISTICS Teams that learn how to fight fair and respect the differences of their fellow members become a Yellow Team. Like the sun beginning to shine after a rainstorm, morale begins to climb, and with it, productivity. Meetings start becoming enjoyable, even something to look forward to. People start thinking in terms of we instead of I and the group begins to thrive. But this is a Yellow Team and not a Green Team, so caution, too, is in the air. Stinging from the conflict of the previous stage, team members may not speak their mind on important issues, preferring to keep the peace. Groupthink, another word for the evil twin of uniformity, may develop in the name of unity, and bad decisions could undermine the performance of the group. Warring personalities may not have achieved a lasting peace, just a cease-fire.
LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES Leaders of a Yellow Team should congratulate themselves for surviving the blues and breathe a sigh of relief. But important work remains. Team leadership at this stage can start being shared even with the formal leader being absent from some meetings so that the team can find its own voice. The team must be “mined for conflict” as Patrick Lencioni puts it. Mining for conflict is where the team leader digs down below the surface of an issue to uncover a person’s real thoughts and feelings. Polling is another important facilitation technique where each member is asked for a 1-to-10 rating on an issue. They are also asked to explain their rating and what could be done to make it one or two points higher. It is important in this stage that the formal leader isn’t the only one using these techniques. A team will never grow out of this stage unless team members initiate these activities for themselves. A formal leader must give permission for this to be done, even asking members to do so in one-off conversations.
The GREEN Team
CHARACTERISTICS This is the payoff. Green Teams get it done. Morale is high and so is productivity. There is a sense of pride and excitement in being part of something great. Openness and honesty rule the day as decisions are routinely made based on the rigor of discussion, dialogue, and debate. The paceline is in full force as members draft off the strength of others and offer the same strength in return. Goals have been set—big, challenging goals—and met, with bigger, more challenging goals taking their place as team members, who didn’t get along at first, become close personal friends.
LEADERSHIP STRATEGIES Formal team leadership at this point should be fully shared with members of the group. In some cases at this stage, leaders can step out of the group and let someone else lead it while they move on to other things, visiting the team occasionally. Be on guard for boredom, however, and meet it head on, challenging the team to take on new goals. But nothing in business remains static and your successful team may have key members recruited by other teams and new members join the group. With these changes, a team may unavoidably regress one or two stages, requiring the leader to adopt different strategies for the new development level.
BUSINESS COACHING EXERCISE: WHAT COLOR IS YOUR TEAM?
We have developed a simple survey to identify the specific development stage of your team and select the strategies that are needed to help it succeed. What follows is a questionnaire that an individual team leader or the entire group can complete. The first score sheet tabulates the score of an individual participant; the second the scores for the group. Start by completing the survey, then tabulating your scores on the score sheet that is right for your situation. Then answer the five questions that follow this exercise to put the lesson learned into practice.
TEAM Survey
© 2007 Leadership Link, Inc. Used by permission.
Individual TEAM Survey Scoring Sheet
© 2007 Leadership Link, Inc. Used by permission.
Group TEAM Survey Scoring Sheet
© 2007 Leadership Link, Inc. Used by permission.
Place each of the four AVERAGE numbers from the preceding table underneath the appropriate letter for TEAM in the following table and total the numbers to the right. Find the description of your team that matches the range of totals listed on the left.
© 2007 Leadership Link, Inc. Used by permission.
1. Based on your individual or group TEAM score, what color is your team? ________________________________________
2. Reread the description of the specific team stage that matches the color of your team. Which characteristics specifically describe your group? ________________________
3. What strategies do you need to implement to move your team to the next stage of development? ______________________
4. According to the numerical scores on your survey(s), list the four elements of your team’s TEAM from the highest to the lowest.
| # 1- | _____________________________ | Score: | __________ |
| # 2- | ____________________________ | Score: | __________ |
| # 3- | ____________________________ | Score: | __________ |
| # 4- | ____________________________ | Score: | __________ |
What does this ranking say about your team? _____________
5. Who can you enlist to help you with the actions you need to take to grow your team? What will you ask them to do?_____
BUSINESS IMPACT STORY: HOW BRILLIANT TEAM LEADERSHIP SAVED A NATION WRACKED BY CIVIL WAR
Abraham Lincoln was 52 years old when he sought the presidency of the United States. He hadn’t held public office for 12 years, and that was only a two-year stint in the House of Representatives. He had failed, not once but twice, in his bid to be elected a U.S. senator from the state of Illinois. In the weeks leading up to the 1860 Republican National Convention, Lincoln was not the party’s first choice, or their second or third choice either. That was the distinction of William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates. Each one a skilled, experienced, political veteran, Seward, Chase, and Bates were all passed over as Lincoln, a party outsider, was nominated on the second ballot.
A virtual unknown to the nation, Lincoln was a compromise candidate calculated to keep the country from civil war. He was not well received at first. “The conduct of the Republican Party in this nomination is [a] remarkable indication of small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over,” wrote the New York Herald, “statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth-rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar.”
But Abraham Lincoln surprised the pundits of his day and won the White House with a narrow victory over all three of his opponents. An even greater surprise followed when Lincoln formed his cabinet. Lincoln named his rivals Seward to be his secretary of state, Chase to be his secretary of the treasury, and Bates to be his attorney general, offering the remaining top posts to former Democrats. This inner circle of our sixteenth President bitterly bickered with one another, nursed petty differences, and constantly competed for the spotlight. One member, Salmon Chase, even conducted a secret campaign for the presidency against Lincoln as he ran for his second term of office. But these men were amazingly talented, the best and brightest of their time, and together with Lincoln led our country through some of its most difficult days: the secession of the South and a bloody civil war.
Then, of course, came the tragic assassination. It was originally planned as a triple homicide of the secretary of state, the vice president, and the president at exactly 10:15 on the evening of April 14, 1865. The only assassin who succeeded, however, was John Wilkes Booth. The outpouring of grief for the president was great, but none greater than from those who were once the powerful competitors of this legendary figure. The grizzled Edward Stanton, Lincoln’s indomitable secretary of war, was unable to control his tears for weeks.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin concludes in Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, “None felt the absence of Lincoln more keenly than the members of his cabinet, the remarkable group of rivals whom Lincoln had brought into his official family. They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested their chief on important questions, but, as Seward remarked, ‘a Cabinet which should agree at once on every question would be no better or safer than one counselor.’ By calling these men to his side, Lincoln had afforded them an opportunity to exercise their talents to the fullest and to share in the labor and the glory of the struggle that would reunite and transform their country and secure their own places in posterity.” (Goodwin, 2005, page 747) This is team leadership at its very best!
TOP 10 WAYS TO USE THIS TOOL
1. When coaching team leaders, first have them fill out the TEAM Survey and tabulate the Individual TEAM Scoring Sheet. What color is this person’s team from his perspective? What strategies are needed to help it grow to the next stage of development?
2. Consider having each team member anonymously submit to you their TEAM Surveys and tabulate the Group TEAM Scoring Sheet. Present the results to your coaching client and compare these results with his own perspective of the team’s development. Create an action plan based on the strategies that match the team’s development and set a date six months in the future to resurvey the team and measure their progress.
3. Help your client pick a person who can act as a spotter for the group. A team spotter helps keep meetings on track and assists in facilitating team interaction. At the end of a meeting the spotter takes the floor and polls everyone in the group regarding the quality of the meeting. This does not have to be a permanent position, and can rotate around the group. Debrief the use of a spotter early and work out all the kinks.
4. Consider using DiSC or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator as a way of helping a team leader with self-awareness and team members with a deeper understanding of the other members of the group. This can be facilitated in both individual and group coaching sessions and will achieve the T in TEAM, trusting relationships.
5. Request to observe your client live in a team meeting and use your observations to deepen your coaching interactions. You will not participate in the meeting in any way; you will be there just to watch and listen. There is no substitute for first-hand experience of the leadership of your client.
6. Help your client develop team-meeting agendas a month in advance and be fully prepared for those meetings. Most business meetings are thrown together at the last minute and accomplish very little. Preplanning allows leaders to get the most out of their meetings and gives others enough time to be involved in the process of leading them.
7. Role-play mining for conflict and polling with your client and help her practice these important team facilitation techniques in a safe environment. Debrief her first attempts with the team and work on improving these skills.
8. For a deeper understanding of team meetings, read with your client Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. Help implement the four kinds of team meetings presented there: the daily check-in, the weekly tactical, the monthly strategic, and the quarterly off-site review.
9. In promoting your team coaching services to a prospective client, use this formula developed by the 3M Corporation. One hour of a business meeting costs a company the average salary of the people in the room divided by 1000 and multiplied by the number of participants. For instance, a meeting with 10 participants and an average salary of $80,000 costs a company $800 per hour. The point is not to have your prospective client stop having meetings, but to use you to get more out of every meeting. Your help for this company will certainly cost less than $800 per hour!
10. To help a team communicate better, consider using the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument from CPP, Inc. This is a very simple and affordable tool with sound statistical validation that identifies five distinct ways of handling conflict that all team members use. It has both an individual and group component and is available at www.cpp.com.
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