The Discipline of Teams

A summary of the full-length HBR article by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, highlighting key ideas.

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

Managing across is especially challenging when you’re leading a group of colleagues. You’re not their boss, but on this project, you’re their leader. How can you get them to focus on your team’s work when they also need to tend their own small fires—or meet their bosses’ demands?

When you instill in your group the discipline of teams, your struggles will diminish. You’ll be helping your team create a shared vision and then realize that vision with individual and mutual accountability.

THE IDEA IN PRACTICE

A team’s essential discipline includes these characteristics:

1. A meaningful common purpose the team helps shape. Most teams are responding to an initial corporate mandate. But to be successful, your team must “own” this purpose by developing its own spin on it. For example, if one of your company’s strategic priorities is to increase customer retention, how might your web team translate that into its common purpose? By committing itself to becoming the online destination of choice for B2C customers in your industry.
2. Specific performance goals that flow from the common purpose. Developing compelling and measurable goals will inspire and challenge your team, and inject a sense of urgency. Shared goals also have a leveling effect. They require everyone to focus on their collective effort rather than on any differences in their titles or status.

   For example, your web team might set the following goals on its way to becoming the online destination of choice for its B2C customers: 1) Increase first-time visitors to the site by 50% over last year; 2) grow repeat site visitors by 25% over last year; 3) boost e-commerce sales by 15% over last year.

3. A strong commitment to how the work gets done. Your team must agree on who will do what jobs, how you will establish and honor schedules, and how you will make and modify decisions. On a genuine team, everyone does equivalent amounts of real work; all members—even you as leader—contribute in concrete ways to the team’s collective work.

   Developing these rules of conduct at the outset will help your team achieve its purpose and goals. The most critical rules pertain to attendance (for example, “if you can’t make a meeting, send notes or a representative who can speak for you”); focus (“no checking e-mail during meetings”); discussion (“no sacred cows”); confidentiality (“the only things to leave this room are what we agree on”); analytic approach (“base decisions on data, not assumptions”); end-product orientation (“everyone gets assignments and does them”); constructive confrontation (“no finger pointing”); and, often the most important, contributions (“everyone does real work”).

4. Mutual accountability. You can’t force trust and commitment. The process of creating and agreeing upon purpose and goals helps your team members forge their accountability to one another—not just to you, the leader.

   For example, as your web team makes progress toward its three goals, everyone becomes increasingly eager to contribute to the team’s success. Individuals volunteer their own and others’ areas of expertise: The person with the best eye for visual detail prepares the PowerPoint presentation for the next unit meeting; the one who has the strongest relationship with your IT director spearheads delicate conversations about prioritizing the team’s technology needs.

Jon R. Katzenbach is a founder and senior partner of Katzenbach Partners, a strategic and organizational consulting firm, and a former director of McKinsey & Company. His most recent book is Why Pride Matters More Than Money: The Power of the World’s Greatest Motivational Force (Crown Business, 2003). Douglas K. Smith is an organizational consultant and a former partner at McKinsey & Company. His most recent book is On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We in an Age of Me (Financial Times Prentice Hall, 2004).

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