How “Teamwork-as-Usual” Hurts Your Organization and What to Do about It
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
—Helen Keller
We’ve all experienced it. It’s one of the biggest reasons why an organization’s internal and external strategies misalign and misfire. It’s why some of your highest performing people find their work to be disconnected from their talents.
It’s teamwork-as-usual.
It typically kicks off at an all-hands company meeting. A facilitator often leads the group, putting everyone through a series of physical activities meant to simulate what it’s like to work well together. Trust falls and the like.
Attendees receive t-shirts, hats, and mugs. The boss enthusiastically calls for everyone to go forth and work as one. Expectations are high. People leave thinking, “Maybe this time we can get things done together.” And everyone tries—really tries.
At first, teamwork seems to improve, with flashes of the cross-functional potential that is the promise of every team. But then old, unproductive patterns reemerge. Office politics come into play. Conflicts arise and aren’t managed. People delay making decisions. Soon, employees stop talking, taking risks, and sharing information. Expectations fall, and internal–external misalignments appear.
Managers may try to fix things by making every decision a team collaboration, but find that holding meetings eats up so much time that progress grinds to a halt. Or they recognize that their priorities and resources are misaligned, and don’t know how to correct the problem.
Eventually, high performers get fed up. The team appears to be a tar pit. For all their talents, employees lack the skills to work together in a group setting. And the team manager doesn’t have the skills to lead them. It’s teamwork-as-usual, but with a dumbed-down output.
Dumbing down is insidious, like a corporate virus. It gets a foothold on the day when you decide it’s not worth pushing your team to do the right thing. Maybe there’s so much on your plate that you promote compromise just so that the group—and you—can move on. Or you keep quiet when someone is rebuked for putting forward an idea that, although sensible, didn’t fit the prevailing corporate politics. Or you see misaligned priorities, but don’t try to correct them.
Here are good, even brilliant, people trying their best to work effectively. But they cave in to mediocrity. Why do these messes occur?
A team can only function at the level of its lowest performing member. It’s like a chain. If one link is weak, it doesn’t matter how strong the others are. They’ll all be useless if one snaps.
I’ve recently taken up the sport of rowing, which offers some useful analogies. I used to imagine rowing as an intensive arm and back exercise, but quickly learned it’s about the legs. If your arms are strong, but your legs are weak, you might start off quickly and vigorously, but you’ll eventually slow down to the pace your legs can handle.
The same thing applies to teams. If you have one weak team member, you might be able to carry him for a short while. If you have more than one, forget it—even the highest performing tire of the extra effort that is required. One by one their contributions diminish. Soon, the boat flounders or sinks in the water.
I frequently find new clients with organizations that are financially successful and filled with hardworking people, but with vast potential being left out on the conference room table.
I see people working at cross-purposes, their “schedule versus cost” priorities misaligned. And often these conflicts are only resolved by the loudest voice in the room, not the smartest.
I watch project kickoff meetings that are exciting and full of hope. But then “reality” sets in. Enthusiasm tempers. And excitement about the work fades into an attitude of “just getting by.” The workers have, subconsciously, dumbed down their operations. And they’re not alone. It happens all the time, almost everywhere.
I often ask leaders in these organizations about their past experiences on teams—to describe their best and worst team experiences. It’s critical for the leaders to think about this and answer it themselves. Their responses are the same nine times out of 10.
Here’s what they say about the worst teams—the ones that dumb down (Figure 3.1).
Are you nodding your head in agreement? These worst behaviors are forces that oppose high performance. Some are obvious, but others are less so. And any one of these can prevent people from doing their best work.
Figure 3.1 Behaviors of worst teams
This scenario occurs, time after time, in company after company. We continue paying attention to the idea of teamwork and all its trappings (“Don’t forget to order the t-shirts!”). But we don’t attend to what it takes for a team actually to work.
It is, after all, called teamwork. Not individuals-gathered-in-a-room work. It is based on how we interact with one another in a group. We think this happens automatically and so we don’t address it; and dumbing down occurs.
After decades of working with hundreds of teams, I know that most people want to do good work. They want to do something that they are proud of, that’s respected, and that makes a difference. They don’t come into your organization intending to dumb down.
So what goes wrong?
There are three primary causes of dumbing down.
1. Blind spots
Often, we don’t see that dumbing down is happening. But then one day, you have an experience where you do get to work at full potential, and you realize what you’ve been missing.
It’s like the old story of the frog in a pot of water. Content at first, the frog doesn’t sense the water’s heating up until it’s too late.
My time at Compaq is a perfect example.
The company started with a small group of employees who were fervent about the idea of a new product and—something equally important—the company was also a great place to work. But as I explained in Chapter 1, the vibrancy of our environment began to decline. Our hires began to flood through the door—hardworking, yet not fully invested in the business.
The influx of new people diluted the passion and drive we once enjoyed. Office politics crept back into the environment. Strategic alignments went askew. And even worse, we were blind to what was happening.
But others saw it. An outside vendor told me later, “Before, people were always in the building working. There was a steady hum, a glow. After the change, I’d see people streaming out the door at 5:00. The entire feeling of the place, at all times, was different.”
Compaq went on to have a few more successful years, but was ultimately subsumed by Hewlett-Packard.
2. Over-applied individualism
Teamwork is a concept to which most people haven’t paid attention. We aren’t born knowing how to master it. It’s something we have to learn.
Usually, though, we assume that the skill set for working as an individual will serve us similarly as a team member. Though the skills needed for each situation are similar, they’re not carbon copies. Nevertheless, we use the same formulas that made us successful as individuals to solving the problems of teams.
Many of the best teams are sports teams. In sports, it’s very obvious who’s playing at his potential and who’s not. You can see the problems right away. If a basketball player has a bad game, the coach can call a timeout and implement a correction.
Remember the worst teams exercise? Look at this list of typical behaviors seen in the best teams (Figure 3.2).
Individual contributors, usually chosen for their technical skills alone, rarely possess the skills to demonstrate these behaviors. This oversight is a force that can diminish an organization’s potential.
3. Cultural constraints
In my consulting practice, I was once called into a Boston tech company by a former client with a new Senior Vice President (SVP) role. He gave me an overview of the organization—not only the potential that attracted him to the company, but also the cultural malaise he experienced after arriving. Next, he introduced me to his new Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
As the two of us sat, one-on-one in his office, the CEO began to tell me what a horrible place this was to work. He described a leadership team and organization in the throes of dumbing down.
But then, as we talked, he had his “aha moment.” The revelatory moment consultants live for when the root problem suddenly becomes obvious to the client.
Figure 3.2 Best teams behaviors
In this case, it dawned on the CEO that, he, too, had dumbed down. He saw that if he and his leadership team weren’t happy with the culture and the organization’s performance, they had a responsibility to change it. They just needed the tools.
The behaviors that we accept and reward define an organization’s culture. It is a powerful force. As Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
So what kind of culture must we nurture if we’re to see our strategies succeed? Here are the core elements I’ve observed across numerous companies over the years:
• mutual trust and respect;
• deep individual understanding and belief in the vision of the organization;
• a sense of shared purpose coupled with an alignment of action;
• intolerance at every level of office politics and the vigilance to see it;
• eagerness to solve hard problems by working in the white spaces as much as in our functional boxes.
The overwhelming reason Compaq doesn’t exist as a corporation today is the change that occurred when the company’s board suddenly ousted founder Rod Canion. The firm could not withstand the damage that the firing inflicted on the foundation of its culture.
Why? It wasn’t just the loss of a beloved founder; other organizations have transitioned smoothly through that gate. It wasn’t because the new strategy or culture was inherently different. Certainly, the new leadership didn’t want the culture to dumb down.
In reality, the change caused decisions to be made very differently, from a distinct base, driven by a set of core values that allowed—and at times even encouraged—dumbing down and teamwork-as-usual. Internal strategies stopped supporting external ones.
Do you have a remedy to this potential draining dilemma? It’s no off-the-shelf team-training workshop. It goes much deeper than that. Once you recognize the problem, here’s what to do about it:
Create a Culture of No Dumbing Down
As a leader in your organization, you must:
• Value process as well as content.
It’s not enough to get stuff done. How it gets done is as important. If you want an organization full of high-performing teamwork, value the disciplined process that supports it.
• Ask for what you want, notice what you get.
There’s no substitute for describing your intentions to your organization. The more clarity, the more likely the 10,000 decisions that are made every day will be aligned with your vision.
Once you describe your intentions, it’s important you ensure you’ve communicated them effectively. All too often are directions misinterpreted because of ambiguous wording that the speaker assumes is obvious. Take this simple decision tree that most programmers use to diagram code. The initial input, or plan, is specifically defined. It clearly explains what are the necessary follow-ups based on the possible outcomes, and from there it begins to fracture into more and more possibilities, each clearly defined with its own explicit follow-up. See if you can use this same level of detail and clarity. Communication that goes this in-depth can make a huge difference in the quality of your staff’s understanding.
• Notice! Be vigilant. Watch for dumbing down, the conditions that incubate it (politics, mismatched skills, etc.), and the signs that it’s taking hold (straining vs. scaling, “active” disengagement, unplanned turnover, etc.).
• If you aren’t getting what you want, hire and train the interpersonal skills necessary for successful teamwork. These include:
decision-making methods;
conflict-resolution skills;
debriefing as an integral part of everyday communications.
Reward the behaviors that you want.
• Rewards come in many flavors. Compensation certainly, but also increased recognition, trust, and responsibility.
• Reward behaviors, not technical skills alone. Make sure that your own consistently align with your intentions. Wanting things to be different isn’t enough.
• Walk the talk. If there is variance in your own behavior, you can be sure that it will be reflected in the actions of your employees.
I recognize that it’s hard to hire, lead, and manage thousands of employees with the same passion and alignment as you would in a start-up. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. It’s demanding, not impossible.
And it must be done because dumbing down leads to exponential decreases in organizational productivity. With this in mind, what’s an incremental increase in performance worth to your organization? Do you want to attract more A-players? Do you desire higher retention rates and less rework?
This is up to you, senior leader. Only you have the influence and authority to create the culture, the processes, and the discipline required to successfully prevent or root out the dumbing down of your organization.
Dumbing down is a cultural issue. If you don’t dumb down, neither will your organization.
Now, jot down notes for yourself. Think about your organization. How are you promoting the best work? How are you creating high-performance opportunities for individuals and teams? How are you avoiding dumbing down in groups? Is there room for improvement? How will you hold yourself accountable?
