Lou Holtz, the legendary Notre Dame football coach started it:

TEAM
me

I remember first seeing this sexy hieroglyph and deciding that it was dead right. The perfect way to express every manager’s deepest desire—cram all those unruly people into a Volkswagen-sized concept, chop off any arms, legs, and other inconvenient body parts that stick out, and step on the gas.

Go team!

I realize now I was half right—the dead part—Team/Me is dead wrong. And Coach, I hope this doesn’t mean I’ll never get your autograph.

Business has fallen in love with teams and teamwork. For good reason. Teams are an ideal way to flatten the hierarchy, shorten lines of command and control (but not eliminate them), increase flexibility and speed, enhance creativity, and allow for productive personal interaction.

Teams are good. But that doesn’t mean individuals are bad. Unfortunately that’s the way Coach Holtz’s hieroglyph is interpreted. A team is a living aggregation of individual talent. Sure, its collective capabilities may add up to more than the sum of the parts. But if we forget to nurture and cultivate each part, the sum can never achieve greatness. I’ve found that many people—I’m willing to say the majority of American workers—are deeply suspicious of business’s infatuation with teams.

Why? Start with the fact that the team will not pay your mortgage each month. The team will not raise your children, care for an elderly parent, or stand by your side in sickness or in health.

In those circumstance the rallying cry is Go Me!

Emotion starts with survival—fear and hope. The emotional bonds that sustain families grow out of the survival instinct. But in a healthy family, the individual never loses his or her identity; it is supported and sustained by the larger entity.

Team/Me diminishes the individual in the interest of a collective outcome. Family/Me, from birth to death grows, the Me bigger and stronger and smarter. As leaders, we sew distrust when we suggest that we are going to make the individual smaller in order to allow the group to get bigger and stronger and smarter. It is very threatening.

My starting point when I build teams is the individual. This is my answer to Lou Holtz:

Me is the core of the team, not a danger pulled along in the wake of the more important entity. Me gives the team its center of gravity.

Making Teamwork a Priority

The best team leader who I ever worked with was former Xerox sales manager Neil Lamey. It was more than twenty years ago and I still consider him to be a mentor and a good friend. When Neil put me on his team, the first thing he did was to explain the benefits that would come my way. And I don’t mean retirement bennies. Neil explained what was in it for me: money, experience, promotion possibilities, and long-term career development. Then he told me what my responsibilities were to the team.

By handling it this way—Me/Team—Neil allowed me to do a quick cost-benefit analysis and realize that it was in my interest do what had to be done to be a member in good standing of the team. From then on whenever there was something about the team that rankled me, I’d just reminded myself of the rewards that would come my way if I swallowed hard and continued to be a good team player.

Today, Neil Lamey still uses the same technique with his teams. He contends that pushing the me button first is the only way to attract high performers to your team: “I think me is always first in everybody’s mind. It may be subconscious or instinctive, but it’s always there. You have to appeal to that first.”¹

As a group, high performing individuals don’t need teams. They’d succeed with them or without them. “They’re not achieving because they want the company to be successful,” Lamey says. “That’s important but not the primary drive. They want to achieve because they want to achieve.” Teams are incidental in his view: “If they have to be part of a team to achieve, they do what they’ve got to do.”

Teams in and of themselves are no guarantee of excellence and high performance for many reasons. According to Neil Lamey, “If you’ve got somebody who’s mediocre, they’ll say, ‘I want to be part of the team,’ because that’s what’s expected…but they’re not going to be the ones to pull the team off its ass and move it forward.”

So where does that leave us? Right back in people-ology country. It’s not the team, it’s the people on the team—starting with the leader. Neil Lamey knows this, as do Coach Purnell and Coach Holtz. In Lamey’s view, “It’s the numbers. If my team doesn’t perform, and I don’t get the numbers—I’m gone.”

In sports, the team doesn’t get fired. The coach gets fired. And that’s as it should be in both sports and business if the team is going to be more than a sham.

The Truth About Teamwork

I have no use for companies that talk a good team game, but don’t play it. In my role as a speaker and business consultant I encounter organizations that are really much more comfortable with a command and control hierarchy than with teams, but they tell themselves and the world that they practice teamwork. It’s a lie that hurts their customers and their employees.

The best reason to use teams is that they are an effective and efficient means of satisfying customer needs. Crypto-teams or dysfunctional teams can never achieve that. Whether it’s backstabbing or poor coordination or a few hard workers carrying mediocre colleagues, everybody ends up frustrated, cynical, and angry. The customer isn’t satisfied and the employees know it.

One frequent mistake is to assume that teams eliminate the need for supervision. The perfect excuse to eliminate layers of middle management. But in actual fact, teams require more leadership, not less. In a team setting, the primary responsibility of the leader is to create and maintain a culture of cooperation and collegiality, as well as to set expectations and hold the teams and their individuals members accountable for results. The suspicion that many people have toward teams, which I noted earlier, comes in large part from personal experience with teams that were poorly led.

Whenever I’ve undertaken a business turnaround assignment, one of my first statements to the entire group emphasizes that starting immediately, “Everyone pays the rent.” The implication is that there will be minimal levels of expectation that all must meet. Without fail, I look around the room and a handful of people will be nodding their heads vigorously. They’re usually the ones who feel they’ve been carrying a lousy team or that their well-led team is yoked to other poorly led teams that drag down the whole operation.

What could be more demotivating? I sweat so that you can loaf? My family gets cheated to benefit yours? My career is hurt because the company does not have the nerve to demand excellence from everyone?

Equally destructive is a culture that allows a portion of its teams to consistently turn in lackluster performance when, with a little effort and leadership, the individuals on those teams could be trained and developed to work up to their full potential. It’s an outrageous waste of talent. Particularly since teams are a tremendously effective mechanism for individual development. A good team is a hothouse of synergy, mentoring, and cross-pollination. I’ve seen misfits and oddballs blossom in team settings, proving that they could bring unique skills to the table to directly benefit people who they might have little in common with. Competent teams dissolve the barriers that deny opportunities to women and minorities. Incompetent teams reinforce those barriers.

Nine times out of ten—no, ten out of ten—a lousy team has a lousy leader who doesn’t know how to make each team member feel secure, respected, and nurtured within the team environment. That’s where the trouble starts, and no amount of cheap, insincere blather about the joys of teamwork will fix it.

There are many classic signs of a half-hearted dedication to teams, among them:

• Major disparities between the performance of various teams within the organization that are allowed to persist;
• Insufficient rewards and recognition for overall team performance;
• Sporadic team activities and tasks;
• Off again–on again emphasis on teamwork;
• A recruitment process that does not evaluate a candidate’s teamwork skills and history;
• Top management does not team.

Team Colors or Camouflage?

Teams can easily become hiding places if they are used as a way to blend high, low, and middling performance into some form of acceptable average. If that’s happening it’s really cheating your best people, and it will drive them away. They are thoroughbreds who should be allowed to run and win races, not function as wheel- and workhorses to make up for those who won’t pull their share of the load. All the members within a team must be fairly tasked. The same goes for the all the teams within an organization. That doesn’t mean, though, that the loads have to be equal down to the last ounce. But everybody pulls their appropriate share, given the assignment, and the business situation. Resentment and deep frustration are guaranteed if one team member clocks up a disproportionate share of the team’s business, while other members are allowed to coast. Perhaps the high performer earns extra money for his or her effort—which is only just—but that makes a mockery of the teamwork concept and destroys morale.

When I was sent to the Xerox’s Cleveland district there were excellent people still hanging on but it took a major feat of persuasion to keep them from bailing out. If I had been caught in a B.A.U. mode—business as usual—those people would have been gone in a flash.

High attrition rates always worry me because I suspect the ones who leave are just the people you need to keep. Neil Lamey says flatly, “The mediocre ones never leave. They never get fired. They never get promoted.” My strategy is to always build teams around the highest performers and let them set such a blistering pace that the mediocre performers can’t hide and chose to go someplace else where they’re more comfortable.

One of the pleasures of a new leadership assignment for me is to rescue the top performers from teamwork hell and let them loose—but they’re loose to move as a team, an effective team this time. And it is especially satisfying to liberate a young person who was stuck on a bad team. To me, knowingly assigning a newcomer, who is on his or her first job to be “broken in” by a weak team and team leader is a crime. The chances are you’ve ruined someone’s career before it even got off the ground.

Teams from the Top Down

Now that I have chewed up several pages badmouthing teams, it’s time for a pop quiz. Answer yes or no: Frank Pacetta is a total Neanderthal when it comes to teams and favors going back to the good old days of command and control?

I hope your answer is no. I am crazy about teams; that’s why I hate to see them abused and misused. When I was beginning to come out of my underachiever phase, I looked around at what I was really interested in and had the most passion for. It wasn’t selling copiers or for sales in general. I had planned to be a lawyer, a dream killed by my own irresponsibility in the space of my first four months at the University of Dayton. I’ve never met anyone who set out to be in sales. Most salespeople had other plans that got sidetracked. I majored in sales at Harvard are words that are not likely ever heard outside of this book.

To find professional passion, therefore, I combined my two greatest personal passions—love for family and love for sports. I did what most everyone does—I looked inside myself and asked what I was going to do with my life that made sense and had meaning. It didn’t take me long to realize that the places where I felt pride, exhilaration, and had fun and sense of purpose were at home, and when I played sports in high school and college. I wanted to feel that way every day. It seemed totally logical—and it still does—to take the best of the family traditions and the best from sports, put them together, and take the combination to work.

With a background like this, I consider myself a connoisseur of teams. The first thing I look for is the overall culture. Is it a genuine team culture, or isn’t it? One way to tell is to determine whether the teams are cohesive both on and off “the field.” If a team operates well in a structured setting, like meetings and presentations, that’s one thing. The real test is whether the team continues to exchange ideas, support, and mentoring outside of this formal context. I’m not saying that becoming buddies is mandatory, but the best teams are those whose members seek out one another’s company and expertise. Ideally, they become families within the family.

Teaming, for want of a better term, must start at the top of an organization and come straight down to the bottom. Anything less is fakery. Yet, as far as I can tell, few company recruiters bother to ask about a candidate’s teamwork skills and experience. Why? It’s really not a significant part of the culture. The talk isn’t lived. Teamwork must be recruited, rerecruited, trained, and rewarded. As executives move up the ladder they should be held accountable for the performance of the teams that they led or were a part of. If “not a team player” is a damning indictment these days, “not a team leader,” should be doubly damning.

In twenty-four years I was repeatedly trained at Xerox on teamwork. It was drummed in. The company has one of the best teamwork structures and process manuals that I have ever seen. It’s fabulous. Even so, the corporate culture was not so entirely in tune with the demands of a team-based enterprise it could avoid falling into a “one-third, one-third, one-third” trap.

When I was with the company, roughly one-third of their districts fell below average yearly performance goals, one-third achieved the established goal, one-third exceeded the target. And it was usually the same districts in each category year after year. Like many companies that pride themselves on teamwork, Xerox’s culture does not rigorously execute it. By definition, all teams and team members must pull their own weight. There has to be a disciplined process to ensure that that happens. Allowing one-third of your teams to consistently fail, one-third to do middling work, and only one-third to excel is pretty ho-hum.

Avoiding a Destructive Game of Hide and Seek

Earlier, I said that teams can become hiding places for people to burrow into, but they also serve as screens that top managers can use to protect themselves from accountability. If I empowered my teams and they fail—well, that’s the price of empowerment is it? I’m an enlightened manager and can go on my merry way. Richard Sennett, the author of the Corrosion of Character, observes:

Effective teams cannot exist without responsible and accountable leadership. That’s where teamwork starts. You can have committees, bull sessions, and anarchy without leadership, but not teams. The term presupposes coordinated action. Likewise, accountability and the team process must stretch the full length of the organization. Only a culture-based teaming, driven from the top—practiced at the top—is strong enough to flow to the bottom and, on the return loop, back to the top, delivering all of its incredible benefits to the organization. When it does, teamwork can then measure up to the ultimate test: Does it positively impact the customer and make it easier for him or her to do business with us?

Hard Heads Versus High Walls

Teams can make a bad organization more tolerable. I know any number of team leaders who simply “paint the windows black” and keep their teams functioning superbly despite what goes on elsewhere in the organization. But it’s a tough life and probably a relatively short one. Eventually, the culture clashes will intrude more and more on the team and interfere with its effectiveness. Eventually, a leader who has pounded his or her head against the wall will come to a point when it’s not worth it any longer. As far as I’m concerned, I have only one head to beat against the wall. At least, I want a wall I can break.

Leaders can lead effectively only as long as their credibility is intact; if the culture won’t let them keep their promises, it won’t be long before the trust department is bankrupt. When the corporate culture is not aligned with team culture, fighting it out with the head office becomes a constant headache. When you’re forced to use energy and time to manage up when you should be managing down, it is a sure sign that the team’s days are numbered.

The best weapon, in that case, is performance. A well-run team may not be ultimately bulletproof, but it can take many hits and keep running. In the meantime, the team leader has to have three kinds of courage: 1), the courage to be honest with his team and explain why he or she is unable to clear barriers out of the way; 2), the courage to protect the team and its members from the fallout caused by unwise decisions from above; and 3), the courage to continue working relentlessly to get top management to change its ways.

It isn’t easy. Some leaders—and Neil Lamey is one of them—simply make it clear before they are hired that part of the deal is that the boss is going to have to put up with getting an earful whenever he or she makes a decision that hurts the team. They may not like what they hear, but they’re going to hear it. And isn’t that what I’ve been saying from the start? Communication has to be based on full disclosure—up, down, and sideways. If full frontal feedback is expected on the loading dock and the warehouse, it has to be the policy right up to the boardroom.

I really believe that “the truth will set you free” and that if I keep telling the truth the message will get through and the right things will happen. It’s cheating your team, and all the other teams in the organization if you stop “speaking the truth to power.” Those two biblical injunctions give me courage to use my head as a battering ram.

If your head starts hurting too much, use vision to knock down the barriers. A company that thinks it believes in teamwork usually incorporates references to teams and teamwork into its vision and mission statement. Every time something happens that violates that vision make sure you point it out. It’s hard to argue that you’re not being a good team player by raising objections, when the objection is supported by the company’s own cherished vision. “I’m just doing what’s in the vision statement” is tough to gun down.

Talk Teams

The culture clashes that I warned about are often caused by a well-intentioned desire to become team-based that is undermined by an inability to execute the process of building and sustaining teams. One of the keys is to constantly talk about teams and teamwork.

Yes, talk. If you talk about it all the time, there’s more of a chance you might do it. As a rule, hardly a piece of paper was issued in my name without the word “teams” and “teamwork” included in the text. I never ran a meeting without talking about teams and teamwork, and few conversations ever occurred without the subject being mentioned.

Here’s a copy of an overhead transparency that I have used for years to remind my team leaders what their mission is all about:

As you can see, team building is a full-time job and it is never done. Teams are works in progress. When you think you’re finished team building—the team is finished. Kaput!

Neil Lamey reminded me of this when I asked him to contribute his thoughts on teamwork and leadership for this chapter. He said teams get stale. “Ours in Columbus never lasted for much longer than a year.” New blood was always being added and people promoted up to other positions. That was one of the draws to be on one of Neil’s team’s—he puts you on a fast career track. We knew that and were dying to work for him. I don’t think his teams ever really got stale, but some do; even successful ones get too comfortable and fall into ruts. Businesses change, customers and teams need to change as well.

And keep this in mind: Selfishly holding a good team together by holding good people back from promotions and career opportunities elsewhere is an act of betrayal that will end up hurting you in the end.

In or Out

Two additional points about teamwork need to be addressed before I wrap up. The statement on the overhead transparency, “Recognize and reward the team as well as the individual,” deserves a place in your red notebook. Talking is essential, but so is rewarding team behavior and performance. It seems like such an elementary concept, but it is ignored time and again. If there is nothing in it for “us,” what’s it to me? It’s true for laboratory rats and for human beings—we get the behavior we reward. By asking for teamwork and then neglecting to recognize and regard those who comply, we signal that teamwork really isn’t all that important.

Finally, “each player has a responsibility to the team.” There are no exceptions to this rule. Dennis Rodman can’t play for my team. I don’t care how many games he can help me win. Lone wolves and teams can’t coexist. The wolf will devour team spirit and cohesion. It’s up to the leader to domesticate the beast enough to allow him or her to make a contribution and still be an effective performer. One of the best ways to do this is to appeal to their highly developed aggressiveness by devising incentives that can only be captured through team play. Thank them publicly for their contribution, and make sure they know how important they were to the team’s success. It may take time. I have worked months turning solo acts into team players, but it’s worth it.

My, What a Big Nose You Have

High people-ology requires teams. It’s not optional. But I think many of our brightest, best, and most aggressive business executives see teams as a threat to their success: It seems to smack of power sharing and loss of control. Also, teamwork requires leadership skills that have taken a back seat to management techniques fostered by the command and control era. And, of course, there really isn’t time for teamwork.

Make time. We can’t afford to reserve top management positions for the wolves and teams for Little Red Riding Hood. Unless we start practicing people-ology built around real teams, Red’s going to stop coming to visit Grandma, start her own cottage industry, and kick our butts.