The Team Approach: Gang Forward!
People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could ever hope to bring about.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach I play not my eleven best but my best eleven.
—Knute Rockne
Log: Mount Baker, Northwest Washington, June 1998, 6:30 A.M.
We have been on Mount Baker for a week participating in a mountain-climbing training seminar run by the American Alpine Institute. Now we are finally approaching the summit, a 10,778-foot snow-capped peak in the Cascade Mountains.
We have been climbing for two hours in a fairly intense blizzard with virtually no visibility. I’m on a rope of three with a mountain guide leading the rope and my 17-year-old son, Logan, on the back.
Progress up the mountain has been slow. At this elevation, each step is followed by a strong, exhaling pressure breath and 10 to 15 seconds of recovery. I’m glad we have an experienced guide who’s climbed the mountain many times, because frankly, I can’t see much ahead.
Log: Mount Baker, Northwest Washington, June 1998, 7:45 A.M.
I have read about close brushes with the abyss, and now I can write my own humble chapter.
Not long ago, suddenly, without warning, I felt the snow collapse under me and found myself hanging in a crevasse with my feet swinging freely. My backpack had arrested my fall, wedging against the side of the crevasse. I instantly realized there was nothing but air, space, and darkness below me. As I yelled “Falling!” Logan and the guide both dropped into a well-trained selfarrest—a three-point stance that kept me from falling farther in. I was able to reach up, grab the crevasse side, and with adrenaline-fed arms vault myself out of the hole.
The combination of the team, the rope, and my pack kept me from plunging deeper into the crevasse, and I’m safely out of it. Did I say I was glad to have an experienced guide? Now I am grateful to him, my son, my rope—and my backpack.
As my close call on Mount Baker illustrates, teamwork is a critical component of mountaineering. In fact, everything in climbing is designed around this component. Its most basic equipment is a rope—typically 60 meters long and suitable to link three or four climbers—and, under alpine conditions, crampons and ice axes. The quality of this equipment is vital. However, unless climbers know how to use the equipment properly and how to perform well as a team, even the best-made rope or axe will be worthless, if not outright dangerous. For instance, had my teammates on Mount Baker not been trained in executing a three-point stance, they could not have arrested my fall—and my ensuing plunge would also have been theirs, compliments of the rope.
In essence, your life in the mountains is intertwined with those who share your rope. You’re only safe to the degree that your teammates and you are capably trained.
Tenzig Norgay, the legendary Sherpa who climbed Mount Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, learned that lesson early on. In 1934, he was 20 years old and making his first trip to Everest as a porter for a British expedition. The team made it as high as the 22,600-foot pass known as the North Col. At the base of the pass, they came upon a gruesome scene: in a tent shredded by the wind sat the skeletal remains of Maurice Wilson, frozen in the act of putting his boots on. An eccentric Englishman, Wilson had secretly attempted to climb Everest when Tibetan authorities denied him a permit. Because of the secrecy, he hired only three porters, whom he intentionally left below at the base, opting to proceed on his own. With no support or help with deciphering the dire straits he evidently found himself in, Wilson failed to achieve his vision in the worst way possible.
This lone demise taught Norgay a valuable lesson about the importance of teamwork in mountain climbing. It would serve him well almost two decades later, in 1953, during his seventh Everest expedition, this one with a British group led by Colonel John Hunt. Norgay was the trip’s sirdar, or Sherpa leader, in charge of the Sherpa personnel required to get the expedition to the summit. This was a huge team-building operation, with a corps of members that resembled an army. It included 250 porters whose job was simply to move the two and a half tons of supplies and equipment to the various base camps.
The heart of the expedition team was a group of first-class highaltitude climbers, two of whom the team hoped to get to the summit. Norgay knew that objective, but had no idea if he would have the opportunity to achieve his own vision of reaching the summit. He was willing to accept whatever happened, though. In his own words:
You do not climb a mountain, like Everest, by trying to race ahead on your own, or by competing with your comrades. You do it slowly and carefully, by unselfish teamwork. Certainly, I wanted to reach the top myself; it was the thing I had dreamed of all my life. But if the lot fell to someone else, I would take it like a man and not a cry baby. For that is the mountain way. (Ullman, 1955, 250)
Tenzig Norgay obviously understood his position as a member of the team. The objective was to get someone on the summit. If he wasn’t chosen for the task, he was okay with that. He was a true team player.
As it turned out, the first team from his group to attempt the summit consisted of Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans. It was only when their valiant effort failed that Tenzig Norgay got his chance to fulfill his dream with Sir Edmund Hillary. Roped together, the pair made their summit bid. Their ascent went safely until, very close to the summit, Hillary lost his footing on a massive chunk of ice and started to fall. As he rapidly slid downward toward certain death, Norgay dug in his ice axe in a three-point self-arrest. Hillary came to a stop. Both were safe! That day, May 29, 1953, Tenzig Norgay and Edmund Hillary went on to accomplish what many thought impossible: the incredible feat of summitting on Mount Everest.
The teamwork and dedication required to accomplish that feat was monumental. The pair alone could never have succeeded without a strong team to carry the loads to the various camps and to guide their ascent and descent. Absent the team, they could have easily ended up like Maurice Wilson and only reached the North Col before they died.
Is the situation really any different in business? All businesses that have more than one employee or owner consist of teams. Some have one team; some have hundreds or thousands of teams. On a business team, members are tethered together not by a rope but by a common need and desire to fulfill their objective. They are highly reliant on one another for the success or failure of the enterprise or project at hand. Businesses need the power of teams, and teams need the power of each individual member.
Team Power: Strength and Feedback
The main force of any team is found in its ability to provide two essentials:
1. Strength in carrying out the mission at hand
2. Feedback within its membership and to the leaders or managers at the mission’s ultimate helm
When you’re climbing a mountain, team strength provides a measure of safety, via the rope, that otherwise would not exist; it also provides physical strength to share the load.
Feedback is also a vital element of teamwork. One of the biggest risks in high-altitude mountain climbing is acute mountain sickness (AMS). This potentially fatal illness results from improper acclimatization to your elevation, and includes the symptoms of appetite loss, fatigue, dizziness, and disorientation. The latter is especially dangerous as it diminishes your understanding of your condition: classically, climbers developing AMS cannot “connect all the dots” to realize what is happening to them. Lack of oxygen and the intense desire to summit only contribute to this blinding. In such a situation, teammates are crucial. With members on the alert for hazards like this and focused on the moment, the climb to the summit is safer, and the summit more attainable on a collective team level.
A business team needs its members to provide feedback to each other so that the hazards of business can be avoided. One member may see the big risks that are out there, while the leadership may not. A well-oiled team will digest feedback and adjust its course.
There’s a lot of strength in a business team that can be organized and utilized much like a mountain-climbing team. The members of the business team need to recognize that they are “roped together.” Their successes and failures proceed from a common mission. If they work it right, they can capitalize on that common goal. If a team has a clearly articulated goal with objectives that lead it to the goal, its members are more apt to become a powerful force in accomplishing that goal.
The Critical Factor: Managing for High Performance
The amount of strength and quality of feedback provided by a team is dependent on the team’s ability to work well as a cohesive unit. For mountaineering teams, this kind of high performance is a matter of survival. The situation is similar in business, where lowperforming groups can undermine an entire organization. It’s thus critical that teams be properly managed and their strengths capitalized upon.
Managing or coaching teams for high performance is an art onto itself. A good example of management’s own power in this area is the successful turnaround that CEO Gordon Bethune and his team achieved for Continental Airlines. On the jacket of his book, From Worst to First, Bethune summarizes and describes the status of the organization when he assumed leadership in 1994:
It was a company coming apart at the seams. Running at a loss of nearly $55 million a month and unable to pay its bills, Continental was on the verge of filing for bankruptcy for the third time in a decade.… In terms of quality, Continental was rated the worst across the board and by a wide margin, among the nation’s biggest ten airlines. Employee morale was at rock bottom. Underpaid and embittered over having to take the rap for ineffective revolving-door management, many of the rank-and-file actually ripped the company logos off their uniforms. (1998)
Within months of taking the helm at Continental, Bethune and his new team were able to completely reverse direction. Bethune ascribes the major thrust of this reversal to a radical change in the company’s team dynamics. That change was facilitated by the adoption of three key performance indicators that were tracked in real time: on-time arrivals, lost luggage, and customer complaints.
The CEO’s account of one of his regularly scheduled meetings with employees gives us some insight into his idea of teamwork. The subject was employee bonuses that management had set up based upon on-time aircraft. Everyone in the organization was eligible to receive those rewards, prompting one worker to ask: “I can understand that for the baggage handlers, pilots, and others directly involved in the process, but why are people like reservation agents getting bonuses?” Bethune replied that the situation was like his watch. Every part of the watch was doing a job that ultimately resulted in an accurate timepiece. Which part of the watch should he get rid of? Which part would not deserve a bonus for the work it was doing?
Bethune’s team vision brought about a complete cultural shift within the company. Many disgruntled employees with fractured relationships among themselves and with management ultimately achieved the seemingly impossible: they scaled an Everest of problems to develop into a cohesive team. Their motivation? Key performance indicators that, in their limited number, were comprehensible and brought the true team concept to the forefront. Bethune credits the team concept and development as the most important element in lifting Continental from its worst-airline status to its 1997 designation as “Airline of the Year” by Transport World.
Of course, in both mountaineering and business, a well-managed team is a stronger team, with a significant increase in the likelihood of success. Let us now consider how to build and manage a strong team.
The Requirements of High Performance
In managing teams, you must keep in mind that the all-important factor of high performance comes with its demands. To reach a true “summit” of performance, teams require all of the following:
• A shared mission or purpose that motivates or inspires members
• Autonomy and authority for the tasks they must perform
• Interdependence and shared leadership
• Broadly defined jobs and responsibilities
• Meaningful participation in decision making
Teams should achieve higher performance than individuals working solo, with the sum of the collective greater than that of the individual parts. In essence, a high-performance team should be a self-managing, multifunctional group of people organized around a goal and empowered with full responsibility for their success.
The Elements of a Team Model
There are three elements of a team model:
1. Charter. The charter for a team should include the team’s purpose, goals, vision, and a list of its internal and external customers. For example, the team’s vision for a climbing expedition would have everyone on the summit, and its goals would include a safe and injury-free expedition. For a business sales team, the goal might be sales of $1 million per month with a gross margin of 30 percent.
2. Design. The design for the team includes what core work processes may be involved, how roles and responsibilities will be shared or delineated, the procedures and norms that will be followed, and the systems that need to be in place for the team to function properly.
3. Relationships. The relationships for the team include the level of trust and respect that will exist within the team, how communication will flow, what sort of cohesion there will be, and what synergy will be involved.
The team-model elements are interdependent, but their development generally requires the sequence shown above. For instance, you need to start with a vision for the team; then the other elements, such as communication, procedures, norms, and systems can be aligned with achieving that vision.
Think about the teams you’ve been involved with. How clearly have the elements of the team model been defined?
Team Types
High-performance teams share a number of common characteristics, but generally they can be classified as one of the four team types shown below.
Type 1 teams have a high level of specialization, with specialty skills that vary with each team member or team subgroup. The work is divided among the various specialties, with very little coordination between them. For instance, on a track team, you have field events as well as track events. The 280-pound shot putter doesn’t have much in common with the 170-pound 100-yard dash sprinter. Moreover, the success of the shot putter is not dependent on the speed that the 100-yard dash is run. Yet the two athletes are bound together on a team whose success is interdependent at the team level. They can be stars in their own individual right—in fact, in Type 1 teams, individual results are usually prized more than team results. Still, any team success relies on the whole team.
Type 2 teams are composed of people from different types of disciplines, but require a higher degree of coordination than Type 1 teams. For example, on a football team, you can have the best quarterback in the world, but if the receivers lack the talent to get downfield and into the open and actually catch the ball, the team’s not going to win many games. Success requires coordination between all 11 players.
Type 3 teams, like wrestling teams, are low in specialization and coordination. All the wrestlers basically do the same thing; they just come in a variety of sizes and occupy different weight classes. The coordination is not important because each of them is on the mat at a different time: what happens in the 119-pound class has no effect on what occurs in the heavyweight class. The ultimate team score is based on the compilation of the members’ individual results.
Type 4 teams basically do the same thing. For instance, in soccer, players need to kick and dribble the ball as well as pass it, and require high coordination. If you watch a winning soccer team, you’ll soon realize why it’s successful: each member is skilled at passing the ball and advancing it to where someone gets a shot at the goal. The team is also able to coordinate defensive efforts to avoid getting scored against.
Type 4 teams are generally organized around completing a whole task, but their members are also cross-trained to do one another’s jobs. Each of them could potentially move into another position on the team and do reasonably well. They wouldn’t be fully trained as a defenseman or winger, but a forward could pinch-hit in those positions. Obviously, success here resides at the team level. Fans might watch the star forward who scores often, but everyone cares most about the team results.
Think again about the teams you’ve been involved with. With what type of team have you worked most often? If you have worked with a variety of team types, which team type met with the greatest success?
Team Building: The Four Stages of Team Development
For us to understand how a high-performance team is built and managed, it is useful to consider the enduring work of psychologist B. W. Tuckman. In 1965, he clearly identified the stages of development necessary to build a team into an effectively productive unit. There are four stages in all:
1. Forming 3. Norming
2. Storming4. Performing
Over time, Tuckman’s work on these stages has seasoned well and is no less useful to business leaders today than when it was first advanced. Let’s take a closer look at Tuckman’s explanation of these stages.
1. Forming
During this first stage, steps are taken to assemble the group, which at this point is simply a collection of individuals. In the forming stage, the group’s purpose or vision is discussed along with its title, intended lifespan, composition, and leadership. Consensus, to some degree, is usually reached. Individuals work at establishing their personal identities in the group and make some impression on the others.
Here, people typically start out with a lack of direction and unity, and seek both as relationships begin to develop. This behavior was evident in our Kilimanjaro team during our first get together. Once we met one another, relationships started to form and communication lines started to develop.
2. Storming
According to Tuckman (1965), this is where the group attempts to work together. Storming is generally an accurate description of this stage, as the group’s initial consensus often fragments and some measure of frustration and disharmony develops. It’s a difficult stage for a team. Members begin to realize the amount of work that lies ahead of them. They start to understand some of the strengths and weaknesses of their teammates, and irritability may result from that.
In the storming process, people may argue about the future of the team, its goals, and how to put it together. Various leaders may try to rise to the top and sub-groups may develop, trying to exert power within the team. Members have not yet worked out their roles, and are inexperienced enough with one another that interpersonal clashes may result.
However tough this stage can be, it’s essential to team building. If properly handled, storming leads to the formation of more realistic objectives, procedures, and norms. Members also learn a great deal more about one another.
3. Norming
The norming stage is where members are finally able to reconcile and establish some direction around their relationships. They become more function oriented and are able to work on roles and responsibilities. Here the team’s vision and goals become clearer. Normally, conflict lessens as people start to accept the limitations and weaknesses of others and allow a more natural process of development to occur.
The team, at this point, is able to experience some stability. Its processes and systems as well as interrelationships develop further, providing members with a means of moving toward the team vision.
4. Performing
Only when the previous three stages have been completed will the team reach the optimum performance level, the performing stage. This is where the full power and effectiveness of the team comes to the forefront. Now the challenge is to keep the team at this stage.
Normally, performing does not remain completely consistent. A performing team may suffer changes that cause it to slip into bad habits. Members need to stay clearly focused on the team vision and correct any rising disharmony. Quite often, by changing procedures or communication lines, the team can be put back on a performing basis.
A basic understanding of these team-development stages and the other topics that have been presented in this chapter should help you build stronger teams and manage them for high performance.
Keep in mind that a business team, like a mountaineering team, can encounter crevasses and unstable ground in its quest to meet its goals. In such a situation, the kind of teamwork and dedication exemplified by Tenzig Norgay is just as applicable to business as to mountaineering. Help the members of your teams reach these heights through an approach to leadership and coaching that, like Gordon Bethune’s, acknowledges the value of teams and their important contribution to strengthening the entire organization.