Creating the conditions for great teams to form
Great teams can just happen but that would be by chance. In our experience there are areas leaders can invest in that support an environment where teams can thrive, tipping the scales.
During the early days of Seek Asia forming, after spending significant time getting to know everyone and observing how the businesses operated, we knew we had many great people within the organisation.
Good work had happened, after all both organisations were leaders in their space, and good work continued to happen in pockets but not consistently.
It was equally evident that within the area of Product Development we did not have great teamwork in all the places we needed it and we didn't have a great environment within which teams could thrive.
The evidence of this was broken down communication lines, never-ending projects (one was 6 years in without a release) and a variety of other hygiene issues.
What was inhibiting good teamwork?
People who worked together did not always collaborate such that there was an overall benefit from collaborating.
For example people that were in roles where close collaboration was essential were often situated on different floors or worse still, almost never in contact with each other.
This was the case for example with product managers and software engineers. When I inquired why I was told we tried that before and it didn't work. I empathise with this perspective as why persist with what isn't working?
From what I could see other issues were causing successful working relationships to fail so we would try again but focus on those aspects. A cause of misinterpreting cause and effect.
Disconnected work
Another case of cause and effect being unclear was in the work itself. Individuals diligently completed activities that seemed befitting of their role and function, completely disconnected from the positive outcome they were trying to achieve for their customers, internal or external.
If they were on the right path or the wrong one they had no way of knowing and this led to some odd prioritisation.
What I felt I knew was that if we were to compete successfully against global competitors we needed great teams oriented towards impactful outcomes, in tune with our purpose.
What we learned from a couple of years of trial and error and from voraciously consuming everything we can on the subject is that sense of purpose, team identity, taking time to understand and align values, making commitments to each other, trust and safety are essential starting ingredients of great teams.
Each of these elements is not ‘new news’ at all. This post seeks to report on where they showed up in this particular case study, how they come into play and how you might cultivate this in other contexts. [remember, copy the questions not the answers!]
This may seem all rather obvious but then its astounding how often an organisations desire to ‘Get Stuff Done’ step over such critical elements at the cost of ever working on the right thing or having the composition necessary to ever improve in the future.
Some of the ingredients for a thriving organisational system
The strength and alignment of the team will correspond with the level of intentional investment you put into each ingredient. If any of these areas are under-developed it can limit a team’s potential.
Purpose
For teams to be great they need to be effective and thus we need to set them up for success. This all starts with a strong purpose; at Seek Asia our purpose is ‘Improving lives through better careers’ — the thought of our role in social mobility inspires me personally and this north star I am sure is what attracted many of my colleagues also to join, work hard to make a difference and grow with our business.
Missions
But a purpose can be overwhelmingly broad for any individual or team to know where to start. Our understanding on how we can progress towards serving our purpose evolves constantly. We identify new ways to try and realise our vision for the future.
A sustained area of focus for a team we describe as the team’s mission; we define these together with each team, whether the team is to be together for a short or long time, and instill a sense of urgency for the team undertaking the mission.
The sense of urgency and meaning is stronger when we can define our impact in terms of an outcome for a specific customer rather than a intermediary or siloed activity within the skills-bounded notion of a function.
For this reason I will share a bit about how we organize our teams but before that, first some comments on tribalism and how to use these emergent behaviours amongst people to advantage and avoiding their potential detriment.
Our tribal nature & beyond bureaucracy
Tribes form among any collection of people whether we like it or not. But we can decide how we organize and align ourselves. Often within business tribes form around business functions.
We experience this in the average workplace in the form of silos such as departments that are good at being busy but disconnected from the core value the business provides, rigid rules and policies that seem ignorant of the organisations objectives, cultural differences between departments and a lot of other phenomena which are ill-fitted to modern needs of hyper-competitive industry.
That our social structures in the workplace are often strongly aligned to business functions can happen for a few reasons — first because often it begins because leadership is organised around functional responsibilities. To this day most executive roles align to functions.
Secondly is because there is a rich history of organizing departments around functions — and a business organised by functions is a bureaucracy. Bureacracy taking its name quite literally from functional departments being analogous to the drawers in a bureau.
Bureaucracy grew to greater prominence on the economic prosperity associated with the industrial revolution. Bureaucracies form naturally within capitalistic democracies where the rational response to making things more efficient and neutral is to introduce job scope, hierarchy and a system of rules.
At a time when options to communicate were physical — messages sent by mail departments which transacted through forms and strictly governed policies and procedures were relatively efficient and predictable. But since that period there has also been revolutions in communications and vast increases in the complexity and expectations of consumers that demand more.
The reasons to organize this way no longer make sense because the conditions under which these patterns formed no longer exist. Traditions, conventional wisdom and the well trodden grooves of ingrained habits leave many organisations working in outdated models outpaced by competitors who have shaken free of the shackles of comfortable, conflict free rhythms of ineptitude.
Organising around customers & value
A modern approach to addressing the shortcomings of the functionally arranged organisation is the concept of cross-functional teams organised around customers and value. The good aspects of our natural tribal tendencies; forming tight bonds with those we work closely with and are most familiar can work to our advantage. We can align our objectives in a simple manner toward a common goal. We form teams that have everything they need to deliver an outcome for a specific customer group.
We can further harness the better aspects of our tribal instincts by focusing on establishing common values, building trust, making commitments to each other, creating a safe environment when people can share their mind and by molding these elements into a team identity.
When we form teams we spend time on these aspects before we commence work because we know the time we spend on this is quickly repaid by the dramatically higher effectiveness of teams who have made this investment.
Identity
Identity is a critical element of teams to have a common purpose that bonds them. The strength of the identity is in the ability for the team to identify themselves, an understanding of the values they share, how they would like others to interact with them. It becomes a shorthand for what they stand for, how they behave and what they wish to be known for.
Identity being about identification works best when this can be tangible. Our teams invest time in their team name, logos, decoration of workspace, team kit such as hoodies or tees. They show these with pride and they become the tissue connecting the other elements.
Values
Spending time to explore and understand the values within a team can help increase understanding and empathy and helps define a more well-rounded perspective on what the team collectively values and will invest effort into.
Our teams are cross-functional so our backgrounds vary as do the values we bring in from our family and social lives. Knowing a certain team member values family or integrity or the quality of what the team produces or any other value can help teams quickly align and accommodate.
Commitments
In forming new teams things get harder before they get easier. From Bruce Tuckman’s model we know teams go through recognizable stages of forming, storming, norming and performing.
We found that deliberately supporting the norming stage by having teams work together to form commitments to each other takes advantage of the fact that all adjusting and aligning to new norms at the same time.
At no other time in the life-cycle of a team are teams likely to go through as much dramatic change and the opportunity to set a collection of behaviors connected to their performance. What can be achieved in this early period might take many months longer to achieve later in the lifetime of the team.
Trust
The day to day effectiveness of a team is heavily reliant on trust. Teams with high trust improve much more quickly as issues and areas for improvement are raised and addressed more quickly. Team members working with those they trust are more likely to share knowing they can discuss improvement areas without judgement. Taking deliberate time to invest in the trust within a team is essential.
Safety
Linked with trust is safety. Like trust, safety can be won or lost. The feeling of safety comes from a number of elements; familiarity, the behaviors of other team members and other stakeholders they interact with. Helping teams have awareness of what can help increase or decrease feelings of safety within the team can help keep the feeling of safety strong within the team.
In summary…
Building great teams is about starting right. The temptation can be to jump right in and doing and sometimes with experienced team members this can work but its just as likely to fail should we be weak in any of the essential ingredients.
By valuing deliberate effort to invest in the elements we know support great teams we know we maximize our chances for success and the productivity and quality of results we can achieve.
In future posts we will share some of the activities we use to work on each of these elements and more on how and why we form teams.
What are some of ingredients that you have found to be essential for teams to thrive. How did you approach supporting these in your environment? Share your experiences in the comments.