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For all the attention that it has received over the years from scholars, coaches, teachers, and the media, teamwork is as elusive as it has ever been within most organizations.
Like so many other aspects of life, teamwork comes down to mastering a set of behaviors that are at once theoretically uncomplicated, but extremely difficult to put into practice day after day.
most of whom had little experience working outside of the Valley.
She had an amazing gift for building teams.
It was that she did almost nothing at all.
Most of her staff seemed almost paralyzed by their own knowledge of technology,
decisions never seemed to get made;
everyone seemed to be desperately waiting for each meeting to end.
they all seemed like well-intentioned and reasonable people when considered individually.
Jeff ran staff meetings as though he were a student body president reading from a textbook on protocol.
Only when someone made a factually incorrect statement could Martin be counted on to offer a comment, and usually a sarcastic one at that.
Carlos spoke very little, but whenever he did, he had something important and constructive to say.
she was somewhat troubled that his specific role had not yet fully developed.
moments of truth, she knew, are best handled face-to-face.
“First of all, I only have one priority at this point: we need to get our act together as a team, or we're not going to be selling anything.
He waited, hoping Kathryn would jump in and move the conversation forward from there. She didn
“Jeff, I understand your opinion, and I'm fine with your disagreeing with me, especially when you tell me face-to-face.
a fractured team is just like a broken arm or leg; fixing it is always painful, and sometimes you have to rebreak it to make it heal correctly.
And the rebreak hurts a lot more than the initial break, because you have to do it on purpose.
Kathryn could not deny that moments like this were a big part of why she loved being a leader.
And you'll notice immediately that none of this is rocket science. In fact, it will seem remarkably simple on paper. The trick is putting it into practice.
the first dysfunction is a failure on the part of team members to understand and open up to one another.
“Great teams do not hold back with one another,
“They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.
I see a trust problem here in the lack of debate that exists during staff meetings and other interactions among this team.
every effective team I've ever observed had a substantial level of debate.
everyone likes to learn about—and talk about
resisting the temptation to make artificial peace.
“Remember, teamwork begins by building trust. And the only way to do that is to overcome our need for invulnerability.
“I am pretty afraid to fail. And so I tend to over-engineer things and do them myself. I don't like to tell other people what to do, which, ironically, only makes it more likely that I'm going to fail.
Ken always says that his job is to create the best team possible, not to shepherd the careers of individual athletes.
If you let profit be your only guide to results, you won’t be able to know how the team is doing until the season is almost over.
Profit is not actionable enough.
As soon as the reality of business problems is reintroduced to a situation like this one, she thought, people revert back to the behaviors that put them in the difficult situation in the first place.
everyone adopting a set of common goals and measurements, and then actually using them to make collective decisions on a daily basis.
“Okay, imagine a basketball coach in the locker room at half-time. He calls the team’s center into his office to talk with him one-on-one about the first half, and then he does the same with the point guard, the shooting guard, the small forward, and the power forward, without any of them knowing what everyone else was talking about. That’s not a team. It’s a collection of individuals.
Sometimes I feel like a consultant myself. At other companies where I’ve worked I’ve always been more involved in sales and operations, and right now, I feel isolated in my own area.
made sure not to begin her next sentence with the word but.
“Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.
I’d trade that false kind of harmony any day for a team’s willingness to argue effectively about an issue and then walk away with no collateral damage.
“After watching a few of your staff meetings, I can say with a degree of confidence that you don’t argue very well. Your frustration sometimes surfaces in the form of subtle comments, but more often than not, it is bottled up and carried around.
As smart as he was, Martin was not afraid to admit his confusion.
When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.
“So this isn’t a consensus thing.” Jan’s statement was really a question. “Heavens no,” insisted Kathryn, sounding like a school teacher again. “Consensus is horrible.
The point here is that most reasonable people don’t have to get their way in a discussion. They just need to be heard, and to know that their input was considered and responded to.
“Well, some teams get paralyzed by their need for complete agreement, and their inability to move beyond debate.
I just don’t want to have to tell someone that their standards are too low. I’d rather just tolerate it and avoid the . . .” He tried to think of the right way to describe it.
“No buy-in. People aren’t going to hold each other accountable if they haven’t clearly bought in to the same plan. Otherwise, it seems pointless because they’re just going to say, ‘I never agreed to that anyway.
If we cannot learn to engage in productive, ideological conflict during meetings, we are through.
Our ability to engage in passionate, unfiltered debate about what we need to do to succeed will determine our future as much as any products we develop or partnerships we sign.
