Q #78: Why are a majority of business teams dysfunctional?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Published in 2002, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is one in a series of “leadership fables” in which Patrick Lencioni shares his thoughts about the contemporary business world. His characters are fictitious human beings rather than anthropomorphic animals, such as a tortoise that wins a race against a hare or pigs that lead a revolution to overthrow a tyrant and seize control of his farm. In this instance, Lencioni focuses on “the rarity” of effective teamwork, noting that “teams, because they are made up of imperfect human beings, are inherently dysfunctional.” Is teamwork therefore doomed to failure? No. According to Lencioni, productive collaboration can be achieved by certain behaviors that are “at once theoretically uncomplicated, but extremely difficult to put into practice day after day.” Moreover, the principles that guide and inform these behaviors “apply to more than just teamwork. I fact, I stumbled upon them somewhat by accident in pursuit of a theory about leadership” that he discusses in an earlier work, The Five Temptations of the CEO (1998).

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he examines five reasons why that most business teams are dysfunctional. They are:

1. Absence of Trust. The fear of being vulnerable with team members prevents the development of mutual trust on the team.

2. Fear of Conflict. The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles the occurrence of productive, ideological conflict.

3. Lack of Commitment. The absence of clarity or buy-in prevents members from making decisions they will stick.

4: Avoidance of Accountability. The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort prevents members from holding one another (and themselves) accountable for attitude and behavior.

5: Inattention to Results. The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the focus on collective success.

I also highly recommend The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value co-authored by Frederick Reichheld and Thomas Teal and Reichheld’s Loyalty Rules: How Today’s Leaders Build Lasting Relationships as well as The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High Performance Organization co-authored by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #77: What are the defining characteristics of a “culture of collaboration”?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

In his just published book, Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results, Morton Hansen asserts, “Bad collaboration is worse than no collaboration” and explains why, identifying a set of principles he refers to as disciplined collaboration. First, he reviews several traps: collaborating in “hostile territory” (e.g. Sony’s divisions are encouraged to – and enjoy — competing against each other); overcollaborating (e.g. British Petroleum at which cross-unit networks focused on shared interests became so numerous that collaboration was an end rather than a means); overshooting the potential value (e.g. Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures failed to produce expected synergies because cultures and sub-cultures were incompatible; underestimating the costs (i.e. managers “do not fully appreciate the costs of working across the organization and resolving conflict”); misdiagnosing the problem (i.e. underestimating or ignoring the barriers to solving the real problem); implementing the wrong solution (i.e. failing to recognize that “different barriers require different solutions”).

Assuming that the correct problem to be solved or the correct objective has been identified, Hansen recommends a three-step process:

1. Evaluate opportunities for collaboration. The question to ask, “Will we gain a great upside by collaborating?” It is critically important to know when not to collaborate. Many times people collaborate for the sake of collaborating. “Yet the goal of collaboration is not collaboration, but better results.”

2. Spot barriers to collaboration. The question to ask, “What are the barriers to people collaborating well?” The disciplined collaboration framework Hansen recommends targets three barriers: not-invented-here, hoarding, search, and transfer.

3. Taylor solutions to tear down the barriers. “Motivational barriers require leaders to pull levers that make people willing to collaborate. Ability barriers mean that leaders need to pull levers that enable motivated people to collaborate throughout the company.”

To sum up, Hansen explains how and why leaders who create a culture of collaboration “know when the opportunities for collaboration exist and when to say no to lesser projects…avoid the traps of overestimating benefits and overcollaborating…tear down the barriers that separate their employees…set powerful, unifying goals and forge a value of teamwork…cultivate T-shaped management [i.e. deliver results alone and in collaboration with others]…help employees build nimble, not bloated networks…[and] look within themselves and work to change their own leadership styles.”

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #76: What are the essentials of an effective team?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

The first is leadership. In athletics, that could be provided by the coach or manager and/or veteran players. In business, by C-level executives, other supervisors, or workers whom everyone trusts and respects. Someone has to set the tone for effective collaboration, get everyone productively engaged, determine who does what, resolve conflicts, establish accountability, and in countless other ways help members of the team to produce the desired results. Case in point: J. Robert Oppenheimer who led the team involved with the Manhattan Project.

Because there must be a division of labor, with different tasks requiring different talents, skills, and experience, effective teams have diversity among their members. Case in point: The team of animators that produced many of Disney’s feature films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi.

It is also essential for a team and its leader to have the full support of senior management, including but not limited to financial resources. Members of the team must have whatever is needed and allowed to work together without interference or second-guessing. Usually, the leader serves as a link between senior management and the team. Case in point: Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Program (the “Skunk Works”) whose designers, under the supervision of Clarence Leonard (“Kelly”), Johnson developed more than 40 aircraft.

In Q&A #78, I share some on Patrick Lencioni’s ideas about why a majority of business teams are dysfunctional.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #75: Which major corporation has been most adaptable to change?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

I know of none other that better exemplifies adaptability than does GE,  given the nature and number of changes this corporation and its leaders have faced since 1892 when it was established in New York, the result of a merger of the Thomson-Houston Company and the Edison General Electric Company. Charles Coffin was GE’s first president and Thomas Edison, who left the company two years later, initially served as a director.

In his recently published book, The Secrets to GE’s Success: A Former Insider Reveals the Management Strategies of the World’s Most Competitive Company, William Rothschild explains why nothing is sacred or indispensable at GE. These are the lessons he believes can be of value to other organizations and their leaders:

• Avoid trying to be all things to all people but be the best at what you do. Commit sufficient resources and your best people where you have (or could have) a decisive competitive advantage.

• Know what makes your company profitable. That differs among companies. Some require growth to succeed, others concentrate on protecting their margins, still others must constantly minimize operating costs.

• All “winners” are different in some real way. Differentiation is critically important. It could be their people, their operational efficiency, or the quality of their products.

• Keep it simple. Rothschild asserts, “If you can’t get the main ideas [about a new strategy, product, service, market, etc.] summarized on one or two pages, you probably don’t understand your business, and it is likely to fail.”

• Establish a bottom-up, not top-down, organization. When initiating major change or responding and adapting to it, Rothschild points out, “GE found that people could accept reality and not panic provided that the evaluations were done honestly and the people most affected by the changes were [centrally involved] in the process.”

• Admit mistakes and move on. When initiating major change or responding and adapting to it, no system or organization does everything right. Mistakes will be made, especially if the organization is moving in a different direction or industry. Rothschild suggests, “The key is to be willing to recognize when you have made a mistake and correct it before it is too late…and then move on.”

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob

Q #74: For both organizations and individuals, why is “adaptability” so important?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

Opinions vary about that. My own opinion is that significant changes are occurring in the business world faster now — and in greater number — than ever before. Although no one I know has read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), most business executives are familiar with his concept of natural selection. Darwin defined it as the “principle by which each slight variation [of a trait], if useful, is preserved.” This concept of natural selection among species also applies to organizations and even to individuals within an organization. Those that do not adapt do not survive; only those that do adapt thrive. Therein lie two of the greatest challenges now facing those entrusted with leadership responsibilities: How to prepare, launch, sustain, and then successfully complete change initiatives? How to respond effectively to change initiatives that originate elsewhere?

In their recently published book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky respond to these and other questions when sharing their thoughts about what adaptive leadership involves and what it requires of those who practice it. Almost immediately, they focus on the relationship of adaptive leadership to thriving: It is specifically about change; builds on the past rather than repudiating it; achieves organizational adaptation through continuous experimentation; heavily relies on diversity (i.e. talents, skills, experience, and perspectives); ensures that new adaptations significantly displace, re-regulate, or rearrange whatever is defective, obsolete, or irrelevant; and usually requires (as do biological adaptations) both time, patience, and persistence.

Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky observe, “There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way…As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, ‘There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets.’”

In Q&A #75, I summarize some key points about organizational adaptability that William Rothschild makes in his recently published book, The Secrets to GE’s Success: A Former Insider Reveals the Management Strategies of the World’s Most Competitive Company.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob