Teams Blog

“Be a team player” is one of the most abused phrases in business. Most of the time, what it really means is, “Shut up and go along with everyone.” You know: the way people at Enron and Lehman Brothers and Toyota were “team players.” How did that work out for them?

At Thursday’s meeting of the local chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth, Jacob Blass of Ethical Advocate made a convincing argument for the “bottom-line implication” to emphasizing ethics within a company. His company offers ethics training and an elegant solution for anonymous reporting and investigation of ethical issues. A former psychologist, he reported on a study that found 45% of companies are experiencing fraud at any given time, which in turns mean every company eventually will. Running the math shows that fraud adds 7% to company costs in the United States. But fraud is only one form of unethical behavior. As Blass said, it ranges from cheating customers to harassment in the workplace, so throwing in legal costs and negative judgments would probably drive the figure for all ethical issues much higher.

Changes in federal enforcement could make this all the more pertinent to business owners or top managers. “If an organization is convicted of a federal crime,” Blass said on a slide, “its failure to maintain ‘an effective compliance and ethics program’ may result in the assessment of harsher penalties.” We’re talking a 400% increase, Blass wrote.

You may be stunned to learn who commits fraud. About half are senior managers, Blass said. This isn’t just about line workers stealing pens. Most, 93%, had no prior record. Another study showed that 43% of people admitted to some form of unethical behavior on the job, and 75% admitted to having observed it but not reported it.

Among that last set, the top reason cited was because reporting the behavior was “not being a team player.” This was a much higher percentage, 96%, than fear of retaliation, coming in third on the list at 68%. Blass said people think, “It doesn’t affect me, so I’m not going to do anything.”

But it does. Ethical lapses hurt the company’s bottom line, and thus each team member’s job security and any profit-sharing. Many unethical behaviors will directly impact the reputation of the team or individual team members, in turn harming credibility, persuasiveness, motivation, and, ultimately, careers. I know of a situation at a nonprofit where a series of lapses, each in itself relatively minor, added up to drive out the organization’s top fundraiser.

Staying quiet is not “being a team player.” Researchers use the term “groupthink” to refer to the behavior of teams so averse to confrontation that everybody goes along with the first or easiest idea—or more often, the boss’s idea. Some have pointed to the Bay of Pigs disaster during the administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy as an example. The CIA proposed an invasion of Cuba by exiles to overthrow Cuban President Fidel Castro. Naysayers did not feel comfortable speaking up, and the April 1961 invasion was a horrid failure costing lives on both sides, damaging the U.S.’s reputation, and requiring another $53 million to free imprisoned invaders.

When the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, an event facilitated by the invasion fiasco and triggering a crisis in October of 1962, Kennedy wisely recognized the teamwork problem. He ordered people to speak up, promising no retribution for disagreement. Open debate in the White House led to a nuanced response that provided a peaceful resolution.

I asked Blass during the Q&A how he would get people to redefine being a team player to include speaking up. Having already stressed the need to “draw a clear line in the sand” about ethics through explicit, repeated communications, he now added that a leader must “walk the talk.” He gave a wonderful example from his own experience.

He was running a company whose building did not have enough parking spaces for all of the workers. It had implemented a rotation system for parking in which he included himself. From his office window, he was able to see people cheating. He sent out a memo asking, do you want me to name names in a company meeting, “or do you want me to treat you like adults?” The cheating stopped.

What also needs to stop is the use of “be a team player” as a cudgel to force people into supporting positions that are not supported by the facts. Persuasion, not retaliation, will move your team toward the high performance that ultimately reduces everyone’s pain.

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My book, The SuddenTeams Program, is featured in the current issue of Triangle Business Journal (Feb. 19, p. 11). How that happened is a lesson in laying groundwork, building relationships and taking chances. As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”

The groundwork is the book, of course. My teamwork training program took six months of full-time effort to research and write back in 2000, and I have updated it regularly since. Once when I plopped the 500-page binder on a prospect’s desk, he said, “That’s about 2000 hours, isn’t it?” At least that, I’m sure.

Paring the manual into a “do-it-yourself” version, editing over and over, designing the cover, and doing all the little things it takes to complete publication took me at least three more labor-months. It wasn’t all hard work. One draft was done in Orlando, punctuated by fun with my “odd-daughter” Gina and trips to rough spots like Cape Canaveral National Seashore, where you can have a big plot of undeveloped beach to yourself within site of the Space Shuttle gantries. (Although I am technically her godfather, I prefer ”odd-father,” hence my funny sobriquet for her. My thanks to Melisse and Lee for putting me up and putting up with me.)

In addition to that preparation, I also regularly attended TBJ events and got to know one of the paper’s staff members. I had noticed the book write-ups in its “Tip Sheet” column, and the last time I saw him, I asked who the contact was. He directed me to Managing Editor Dale Gibson, which made me gulp. When I got to the TBJ Web site to look up Mr. Gibson’s e-mail address, I was bummed to find only a phone number. Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I have a hard time picking up the phone to ask for something. But I took a deep breath and a chance.

He was politely professional, asked a couple of appropriately pointed questions, and then referred me to Associate Editor Jeff Drew. After a similar exchange, Mr. Drew said that in fact, he had an opening in the next issue if I could get the book information and a graphic of the cover to him that morning. This instantly became my top priority, of course. First thing Friday I downloaded the PDF version of the paper and was thrilled to see my book. Lest you think Mr. Drew just used what I gave him, the words are his except where I’m directly quoted, and it was clear he had researched my background.

If you are a team member or entrepreneur trying to get things going your way, this incident provides some tools. I hate general lists like this, but I’ll indulge myself since I’ve given you concrete examples already:

1. Do your homework.
2. Show up.
3. Be nice to people.
4. Reach out rather than waiting for others to find you.
5. Have priorities, but flex to changing conditions.

I don’t know if this exposure will sell another copy of my book. But it has granted me free publicity in the best-read business publication in my new locale a mere four months after restarting TeamTrainers here.

P.S. The book is available at CreateSpace.com, Amazon.com, and Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh.

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In 1986, when I dropped out of my first attempt at grad school, my best friend Steve Charry was taking another stab at a bachelor’s degree. We met during his first try at what I still call North Carolina School of the Arts despite its name change; another was at the University of Wisconsin; and he was trying again at Washington State University. (Baseball management kept luring him away.) I asked if he could use a roommate, and ended up in tiny Pullman on the Idaho border for four years. Thus he was responsible for my becoming a fan of WSU sports, and my love of the University of North Carolina Tar Heels rubbed off on him.

I moved on after he met his eventual wife, cutting down on our hangout time, and my working hours at WSU were cut back. Over the next 20 years we stayed close despite shifting around the country. I tried again and earned an M.A., while he continued to a Ph.D. from WSU and eventually became a history professor at Illinois Valley Community College. As long-distance phone charges dropped and cell phones took over, we got to the point of talking at least twice a game anytime we could both see UNC or WSU men’s basketball games on TV.

An occasional topic of fantasy was what would happen if the two teams played each other. A fantasy it seemed: Not only do they play in different conferences on opposite coasts, UNC is among basketball’s elite programs, and WSU is, shall we say, the opposite thereof.

Then WSU lured a former Wisconsin coach, Dick Bennett, out of retirement to put his unique system in place in Pullman. In an earlier post, I quoted an NHL coach saying you could quickly figure out the system of really good teams, while bad teams had none. In sports terms, this means the way the players arrange themselves on the court or ice, how they move, what they focus on, and so forth. Dick took the job on the understanding that his son, Tony, a respected small-college coach, would come along as assistant coach and take over when Dick re-retired.

Almost miraculously, it worked. WSU began to win games with a recognizable style of defense-oriented, slow, no-turnover play, despite having players of modest talent compared to the better-known programs they routinely beat. By 2007, with Tony now at the helm, WSU reached the national championship tournament fans call “March Madness.” Steve and I were disappointed to see that the way the teams were placed in the brackets, WSU couldn’t survive long enough for them to meet UNC. In 2008 both returned, and when the brackets came out, I was stunned to see that our fantasy could easily become real: if both teams won their first games, they would play each other in the second round.

Steve didn’t know. He was in a coma, felled by a stroke at 49 a few days earlier.

Soon we learned his case was hopeless, and his wife made the hard but correct decision to take him off life support. At his memorial service a week later, during my eulogy, I told the story I just told you. And I asked everyone to watch at least a little of the UNC-WSU game scheduled for… that night. Had this been a movie, WSU would have won. But the Bennett system ran into too much talent within another extremely successful system, and UNC moved on easily.

Last season I missed about half the games on TV. It was just too painful to watch knowing I would not be hearing from Steve. Fortunately I adjusted in time to watch Carolina win the national championship. At season’s end Tony Bennett left WSU, and in a double whammy for me, took the job at the University of Virginia, a team in Carolina’s conference. I knew this was bad news for the rest of the league.

When those two teams played a couple weeks ago, I was more apprehensive than most UNC fans. The Tar Heels are struggling this year, having lost four key players to the NBA. Although I would not dare tell Coach Roy Williams how to coach basketball, I know something about teams, and he knows his hyper-talented freshmen have not bought into his system. My only hope before the game was that Virginia’s players had not yet bought into “Bennett Ball.” They had. They beat Carolina soundly, 75-60.

Steve would not have been surprised. One team accepted a way of doing things which had worked for other teams in the past. The other has not. The Virginia players did so despite having to radically change the way they interacted with each other. And this is the moral of the story for business people. There are a number of systems for running a team. Even the least cost-effective is better than having no system at all. But few teams I have encountered, probably fewer than 10%, have adopted a significant portion of any of these systems.

Whether you are competing against other companies or only against your own past performance, Bennett Ball teaches you what can happen when you drop some ego and invest some effort. As for Steve Charry, his story teaches you to drop everything else and find the problem if your blood pressure is north of 200. Maybe it would have made no difference, but I think he would agree with the advice nonetheless. He left a wife, three children, parents, a sister, many respectful colleagues, and a wounded best friend who will never fully heal.

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When your team is juggling multiple goals, how do you tackle them? Do you:

• Try to do all of them at once?
• Split them among subteams or individuals?
• Take them one at a time?
• Or, focus on the biggie and hope you get to the rest of them? 

Most teams I’ve worked with do it the last way, with the result that they might get that one goal done and have mixed results on the rest. One common mistake is to take on too many goals, but this is often exacerbated by managers who pile more work on without prioritizing it against the existing goals. In the managers’ defense, though, most teams don’t ask for prioritization. Plus, some set their goals without taking the time to ask stakeholders in every direction what those folks need, so it’s not surprising they soon feel pulled in every direction by demands they didn’t expect.

A study I posted to TeamResearch News recently tackles the timing issue in an interesting way. The researchers ran a computer simulation based on a model that has proven useful in predicting how actual humans act in a variety of fields. They found that in a complex organizations that require internal coordination to achieve goals (like a cross-functional team), having too many goals guarantees failure. No surprise there, but they came up with a number. Specifically, if the organization had eight goals, it always failed to attain four of them, no matter the strategy it chose to address them. This supports my long-held recommendation that a team (or company) have only 3-5 goals for a given time period or project.

The biggest surprise for me lay in the strategies. Focusing on one goal helped performance of all the goals, versus having the whole organization tackle them all at the same time. I can only guess that this works because getting at least one done frees up people to focus on the other goals. However, the better strategies were either to divide them among different people or have the whole organization take them one at a time.

When your team creates its goals for the quarter or year or project, one approach is to immediately assign members or subteams of members to spearhead each. That doesn’t mean other members won’t pitch in, or the subteam won’t bring tasks to the larger group at some point, but it ensures someone is taking full accountability to drive the change. Call it the “divide and conquer” approach.

The other approach is to sequence the goals. If they fall into a logical chain, where you have to do A before you can do B, that’s easy. If not, prioritize them and do them in order. That way the whole team brings its resources to bear on each goal, but if you don’t get through them all, you at least have done the most important.

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