People are People – Teams do not equal performance

People are people
So, why should it be
You and I should get along so awfully?
- Depeche Mode, song “People are People”

All organizations are seeking to do more with less. The rising unemployment rates around the world are testament to the fact that dynamic movement of people between organizations has gone, at least for the time being. It remains that even as businesses have shed employees they seek ways to return to growth. That search is leading them to reach beyond the cost-saving paradigm and into the realm of innovation. The very notion of spending time, energy and money on efforts that involve any amount of risk is almost too much for many organizations to bear. To address this risk aversion senior leaders often seek to safeguard the resources of their organizations while creating hoped-for new products and services.

Organizations often implement teams to improve performance. This is increasingly common as organizations wrestle with their approach to innovation and cross- organization participation and engagement. Such restructuring does not automatically address poor performance. There is a clear relationship between team members’ negative moods and team processes (social cohesion, workload sharing, team conflict) regardless of the intention behind the team’s design. Negative mood has a detrimental effect on team performance via the disruption to team processes. The question remains: what can you do to create a team with the best chance of success?

There are four key elements to establishing the best possible foundation for success:
1. Purpose that is constantly reinforced
2. Performance expectations linked to mutual commitments
3. Production focused on results (both quick wins and long-term goals), and,
4. Positive recognition for accomplishments established at the outset.

It’s interesting to me how often lessons about what works can arise out of what so clearly is not working. While working with a business unit in a global client I experienced the absence of all four “P’s” and the dissatisfaction at the team level was palpable. Established by a senior team to accomplish a critical strategic project, the team had been pulled together from company representatives around the world and co-located in a city near the corporate headquarters. As for a sharing a common purpose, the business leader who initiated the project provided input to the kick-off meeting and then disappeared from view. Without that kind of an anchor the other essential elements for team success never fully materialized.

There was no framework for sharing expectations among team members and therefore no basis for mutual commitments to the team’s success. No only that, but it seemed that some members felt a duty to work on their “day jobs” at the expense of the core team project while others struggled to pick up their slack and complete essential project tasks. Milestones were passed without review for completion. Deadlines, well let’s just say that they were flexible. Bitterness inside the team began to grow, internal conflict became rife as the team began to eat itself from the inside, and a gallows humor became pervasive.

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
- Douglas Adams, novelist

With this kind of laxity in team process adherence productivity slumped dramatically. The team members had devolved into a team in name only. As for results, there were no quick wins, just slow successes eked out by a committed few. Overall, when the project finally was closed, the members dissolved without fanfare. The job was over. The project less-than-stellar. Certainly no one paused long enough to reflect on what might have been.

It seems to me, that if we get the leaders we deserve, we also get the teams we deserve. The situation described above was never irrecoverable. At any point a choice could have been made to reset and rebuild a commitment to the initial purpose for action. But it never should have arrived at this point. If companies are choosing to create teams focused on innovation, then they also need to take care to plan, care and feed (psychologically) those teams in order to give them the best chance of success. Without that clear initiating intent why bother to make a half-hearted effort? You waste time, resources and money – the very things you are trying to avoid risking.