Teams Blog

I always hesitate to write about “duh findings,” study results making so much sense, you wonder why the scientists bothered. But I know why they bother. Sometimes the expected answer proves incorrect. Also, though the information makes sense when you think about it, without the study you never would have thought about it. Those thoughts can lead to new insights.

Two Univ. of Maryland researchers asked a simple question, also the title of their study article: “When and Why Do Central Employees Speak Up?” As they point out, “When employees speak up openly on work-related matters, they aid in the early detection of problems and opportunities… and help their work groups respond successfully to unexpected situations…”

Logically, workers who are the most central to your work processes are the ones you want to hear from most. They are the most likely to see problems in the workflow or differences in the way teammates do the same work, for better or worse. Business professors Vijaya Venkataramani and Subrahmaniam Tangirala came up with the idea of surveying people of the same bank in India (see my study summary). This eliminated a lot of the factors that could complicate an experiment’s results. Everyone was in the same country within a distinct culture; subject to the same corporate policies, procedures and culture; in similar-sized units; doing basically the same work as the other groups. The professors asked about positive voice behaviors, defined in another study as “emphasizing expression of constructive challenge intended to improve rather than merely criticize. Voice is making innovative suggestions for change and recommending modifications to standard procedures even when others disagree.”

The survey asked group members whom they interacted with most (“central employees”) and other questions about other members. Central employees were found to speak up more only if they were considered influential, which was affected by whether they were considered good at their jobs (duh!). Even then, they spoke up only if they identified with the team, as shown by agreeing with statements like, “When I talk about my [work group], I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘they.’” The professors suggest that managers who want employees’ feedback should improve their job skills and build team spirit. I agree.

But, I ask, do managers really want their people to speak up? I hear about plenty who claim to, but in reality discourage critical input. This led me back to the library book stacks to look up the study mentioned above. Respected teamwork researchers Linn Van Dyne and Jeffrey LePine at Michigan State Univ. wanted to know if people really draw a distinction between actions that are part of the job and those that go beyond the call of duty. You may again be thinking “duh,” but at the time (1998) scientists had not tested the assumption. Van Dyne and LePine (gotta love that rhyme) looked at “in-role” behaviors versus two kinds of “extra-role behaviors,” helping behavior and those voice behaviors. They used survey items about each worker such as:

• In-Role
  • “fulfills the responsibilities specified in his/her job description.”
  • “meets performance expectations.”
• Helping
  • “volunteers to do things for this work group.”
  • “attends functions that help this work group.”
  • “helps others in this group learn about the work.”
• Voice
  • “develops and makes recommendations concerning issues that affect this work group.”
  • “speaks up and encourages others in this group to get involved in issues that affect the group.”
  • “speaks up in this group with ideas for new projects or changes in procedures.”

The researchers surveyed 95 work groups at 21 employers plus each group’s supervisor. Each person rated themselves and four peers, and the supervisor rated every member. Van Dyne and LePine also did something too few researchers do, testing twice over six months. This makes it more likely the result you see at Time 2 (T2) was caused by the factor tested at Time 1 (T1). Otherwise, you only know there was a link between one description of the subject and another, not which caused the other.

In the Van Dyne and LePine study, people reported as helpful and speaking up at T1 (and T2) were rated more highly by everyone at T2. The effect was small, only adding 3% over in-role ratings. But if your manager is deciding between giving you a 3 or a 4 on your annual appraisal, that’s enough to make the difference. And it didn’t hurt ratings, I’m pleased to see.

I know from other studies that teams fostering open debate perform better than ones where no one speaks up, and people seen as helpers get more help from their co-workers. So if you are a team member, it is worth your while to take on extra job duties (making yourself more central) and non-job duties, including speaking up in the ways described above. Since self-ratings on extra-role behavior had no link to supervisor performance ratings, you might ask an honest someone on the team whether they think you help and speak up appropriately. If you’re a team manager, this research adds yet another reason to provide ongoing training to improve your teams’ job skills and reinforce team identity. The monthly “team-building activity” is not what I mean. This has to be a daily effort involving your every interaction with the team.

One point the Maryland researchers missed, I think, is that making more workers “central” to the group’s efforts could encourage more positive voice behaviors. You can do this by providing more cross-training, so more people take on the critical roles as needed due to overload, absences, and people moving on. There are so many wins in that for you, them, and the company, I would run out of hyphens to describe the situation: “Win-win-win-win-…”

Action Item: Do some reading about how to build team identity, or contact me for suggestions.

Sources:

• Van Dyne, L., and J. LePine (1998), “Helping and Voice Extra-Role Behaviors: Evidence of Construct and Predictive Validity,” Academy of Management Journal 41(1):108.
• Venkataramani, V., and S. Tangirala (2010), “When and Why Do Central Employees Speak Up? An Examination of Mediating and Moderating Variables,” Journal of Applied Psychology 95(3):582.

Group members believe in using rewards instead of punishment to foster cooperation and will back that belief with money, according to a study on cooperation in groups I have summarized in TeamResearch News. If you use punishment instead, you are acting irrationally to your long-term harm within the team, the article suggests.

Psychology professors Toko Kiyonari and Pat Barclay put undergraduates in front of computers in groups of four, with no way to communicate with the other members or match people to the computer names they were given. They were told they could keep $5 Canadian or donate it to the group. The researchers would take the donated amount, double it, and split it. Each person was gambling on how to get the most money: by cooperating, or via the “Take the Money and Run” approach, as the Steve Miller Band would put it. The scientists called this “defecting” in the article, which actually reported on a series of three studies. Only then were the members told they would get to either reward (in some cases) or punish group members who had defected, if they wanted to. After that, they were given another option, of rewarding or punishing members who had rewarded or punished in the previous round.

As you would expect, most people given the choice punished defectors. However, even more people rewarded the first-round cooperators. In the third round, those who in the second round punished the first-round defectors did not get rewarded. Perhaps more interesting, people who chose not to punish defectors did not get punished themselves. Few took the attitude of “you’re either with us or against us,” in other words. Over all the studies, people who actively rewarded came out ahead financially, above punishers and people who neither rewarded nor punished.

Let’s put this in business terms. Say you and I are on an Inside Sales Team. The team decides that any member approached by the Outside Sales Team for help should drop everything and do it, because we need a better relationship with that team. Maybe we’re trying to get the Marketing Team to make a change and want Outside support (there’s a pun there). Say we then find out two of our eight members refused to go along, telling Outside members to go… “sell” themselves when they asked for help. In the next team meeting, two members yell at the defectors, two more opt to thank and praise members who cooperated with the Outside Team, and two say nothing. Later, when 360-degree performance appraisals go out, what happens?

These studies say most of the cooperators will ding the defectors on their teamwork and give higher ratings to the cooperators, obviously. But most of the team will also downgrade the people who yelled in the team meeting and upgrade those who used praise instead. Those who sat quietly will not get downgraded, however. More research is needed, as the scientific cliché goes. After all, if you try to stay mutual friends with people who are divorcing, often you will be forced to make a choice by one person or the other and cut off if you refuse.

The article (see the summary for the source) nonetheless shows the relative “rightness” of using reward instead of punishment when trying to build cooperation in a group. Subconsciously, it’s what people expect. This leads to some interesting guesswork as to why people still resort to punishment if we have evolved to rely more on rewards.  “By demonstrating that one experiences anger toward defectors and that one will irrationally punish them… punishers demonstrate that it is not in others’ best interests to defect on the punisher,” the professors point out.

In the summary I call this the “bully explanation.” We know from repeated studies that people usually quit due to their managers, not their employers. Yet bad managers persist, and companies refuse to do anything about them until too late. Sounds irrational to me.

Action Item:  Whether you are a team manager or member, the next time you feel like punishing someone for not cooperating, instead go into your next team meeting with them present and praise everyone who cooperated. The person will likely get the message, and you’ll build a better relationship with everyone else. If you would like details, or teamwork coaching to improve cooperation, let me know.

When you are tempted or told to do some “team building,” you have a stark choice:

1. Fix the issue that prompted the thought, or
2. Waste your time and money.

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that standard team building does not work, and given how adults learn, could not work. The team building industry is built on the quicksand of mass delusion among purveyors and buyers.

By “team building,” I am referring to occasional exercises, games, personality tests, drum circles, scavenger hunts, ropes courses, and so on. When I say it “does not work,” I mean the activity has no lasting positive impact on the team. In other words, standard team building provides less return than you invest even if all you invest is time (i.e., you get zero or negative ROI). Worse, when team members see managers resort to these activities rather than fixing the problems, that is seen as “lip service” or a “Band-Aid approach” and drives morale downward.

I have found zero scientific studies showing that any of the actions I listed above provide a benefit. I can say this, first, because I have now gone through more than 475 sources, most of them studies or analysis of multiple studies by researchers, and exactly one asserted support for team building as defined here. That one was thoroughly debunked later in the same journal (see blog post). Second, to double-check, I searched two databases of journal articles covering hundreds of journals and going back decades, one focused on psychology and the other on business articles. I used every relevant keyword I could think of: not just team building, but ropes, games, exercises, and such. No articles supporting team building turned up.

Of course, there are plenty of supporting claims in the popular business literature—the books and magazines you can pick up at any bookstore. You will also hear managers and consultants weave tales of successful team-building events. But as I detail in ”About Business Stories” on TeamResearch News, these have to be taken with a grain of salt for several reasons. One, clearly, is self-interest: a company or consultant who earns money selling these things, and a manager talked into spending money on one, both have reasons to:

• interpret team actions after the event as “changes,” positive ones at that;
• assume those changes were due to the team building;
• assume the team members see them as positive (or that members asked directly are willing to speak honestly); and
• assume the changes will last.

Studies that put self-serving perceptions up against measurement by objective outsiders routinely show the perceiver is wrong. It’s a built-in bias, which is why I double-checked my anti-team-building stance using the database review even though my opinion grew out of my in-depth literature review, not just personal experiences.

Success stories are ”anecdotal evidence,” which has often been proven inaccurate when tested scientifically. Along with the other problems, even if team building worked in one instance, that doesn’t mean it usually does. Give the worst hitter on a baseball team enough at-bats, and eventually they’ll get a hit. When a lottery winner says, “I just knew I was going to win,” no one asks how many of the non-winners thought the same thing… or how many times the winner thought they would win and didn’t… or whether the winner is unconsciously creating that memory based on prior weeks.

What I have never seen in one of these business stories about a team-building event are data from measurable goals or analysis to show the success was not due to other factors. If a sales team did a team building event last month, March 2010, and their sales went up this month, is that due to the team building or the fact that the economy is picking up? At least sales teams have quantifiable performance measures. I have yet to see a team of software engineers create objectively measurable performance standards before a team building event, then retest them immediately after and three months after (as scientific studies often do) to see if there were lasting positive changes.

One reason team building does not work is it violates the most basic tenets of adult learning. A pioneer of the field, Malcolm Knowles, said adults require among other traits that the training be relevant and practical. Unless your team is a troupe of drummers, a drum circle is not going be relevant to their work. Lessons arising from a scavenger hunt are not practical because they are not easily recognized and applied when a similar issue arises at work.

Life experience provides other reasons team building can’t work. Did you master golf or cooking after a single lesson? Do you want to fly with a pilot who has only played Flight Simulator? Of course not. Taking a team out for a “morale boosting” day of go-kart racing, when the next day you’re going to put them right back in the situation that is lowering their morale, simply defies logic. Even if you can remember the results of someone’s personality test during a conflict, that abstract knowledge isn’t easily translated into a specific situation. Much easier to apply is a list of agreed-upon behaviors with a safe enforcement method, plus a formal plan for what will be communicated and when. Why? Humans are not great at applying the abstract to the specific, but we learn and apply behavior-based rules every day. 

The authors of the influential team development book The Wisdom of Teams wrote elsewhere, “Sending a bunch of men and women on an (outdoor) course to simulate teaming may be fun, but it doesn’t accomplish much.” Adult learning is enhanced by fun, and the teams I work with get plenty of laughs. But fun should not be the emphasis when you are trying to accomplish something serious. And if you don’t accomplish that something, don’t permanently solve the issue, you’re going to be killing a lot more fun at work over the course of a week than you can give them in an afternoon of Lego play.

One of my favorite blogging activities is showing that many of the buzz words of management are nothing new, are unproven, or both. The latest to stumble a bit is “transformational leadership.” For a study summary I recently posted in TeamResearch News, I described this as “a popular management style focused on the leader’s charisma and extolling of shared values.” According to About.com, the term was coined by presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns in 1978 and popularized by a researcher in a 1985 book. That popularity is gauged by the 1 million links turned up by a Yahoo search on the exact phrase.

I advocate all of the behaviors attributed to transformational leaders. These include encouraging people to try new things, supporting individuals emotionally, articulating “the vision thing” (yes, there are hard numbers to support that recommendation), and being a role model. But whenever I saw transformational leadership discussed in the popular literature, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that the writers saw it as an either/or style that did not address lower levels of human motivation. A sense of mission is important to a team, but people always end up wanting to know, “What’s in it for me?” You may consider this selfish. I don’t, because it is basic human psychology. It becomes selfish when getting what you want is taken to the extreme of blocking others from getting what they need.

The study was a kind called a “meta-analysis” in which researchers pull data from all relevant studies on a topic to see what the consensus seems to be. This team looked at more than a thousand data points from nearly 90 studies. The researchers concluded that transformational leadership overlaps so much with a goal-and-reward style of managing, it is fair to say the former is a layer atop the other that cannot stand alone. It is a good addition, linked with higher satisfaction from workers with the leader and higher job performance by the leader. But it is no better than the reward system for group performance, and worse on a couple of the leadership measures they found in the studies.

Clear losers in the study were managers whose only leadership efforts are to try to anticipate problems; worse were those who merely fixed problems after the fact; and worst of all were those who didn’t manage at all. On the other hand, if you try to get by with management by cheerleading alone, that won’t work. As if in support of this, another study I just posted found student teams in a lab experiment who used “we” and “success” a lot as they talked through their work did worse than their competitors. The communications scientists in that study, who did not expect that result, speculated people talk about teamwork and performance when they don’t have them. In response to the insipid line, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’” I have always pointed there is no “we,” either.

On the history front, the meta-analysis found that the traits attributed to transformational leadership are so similar to an earlier style called “charismatic leadership,” there was no point to separating the styles statistically. Charismatic leadership dates as far back as a book published in 1921.

The study reinforces what I teach in my teamwork training about how to create high performance, such as:

• Create a mission and/or vision for the team.
• Set measurable goals for achieving it.
• Let the team take the lead in creating a plan to meet those goals.
• Set rewards for achieving the plan milestones and goals.
• Let the team figure out its roles, internal rules, and processes.
• Ask what it needs from you and supply that.
• Monitor progress, praise profusely, and nudge the team when needed.

The words may change, but more often than not, the group management methods that work have been around for decades. It’s up to you to decide whether you’ve had enough of firefighting to do some fire prevention by putting them in place.

The benefits of empowered teamwork are one subset of the benefits of Agile software development. Having served as a project manager in an Agile company, I have seen this firsthand, but a talk by an “Agilista” last night confirmed my belief.

If you know about Agile, you might want to skip down three paragraphs as I explain it to newcomers. Traditional “waterfall” methods start a software project with an attempt to capture everything the end user needs to do and estimate the time and money needed. Once that information is approved, next comes design of the software. Then the software is created (“coded”). Next comes the testing phase, during which mistakes (“bugs”) are fixed until the client accepts the software. Finally comes rollout of the product. Each step flows downward into the next, hence the “waterfall” allusion.

In Agile, an initial set of requirements is collected and prioritized by a “product owner” working with the client. These are broken into small chunks, feature by feature, and captured in a “product backlog.” The product owner, a facilitator, and the other team members take a short period to do some initial design work. Then they decide how many of the features they can finish within a pre-selected time, usually two to four weeks. In perhaps the best known Agile method, the period is a “Scrum” and the facilitator is a “Scrum Master.” Once the team decides what to do, that set cannot be changed short of an emergency. The team then does a mini-waterfall of sorts, finishing the selected set of features to the degree they could be released to the customer (whether or not they are right then). After a demo and lessons-learned review, they repeat the whole process with the next set of features, starting the next business day. They’re done with the whole thing when the customer says they’re done.

At a meeting of the local chapter of the Association of IT Professionals, Robert Galen spoke on “Mature Agile Teams–Sixteen Essential Patterns.” Galen is director of research and development at iContact, an e-mail marketing company, and also has his own Agile consulting practice. Along with making me feel better about two points over which I parted ways with the aforementioned company–for those keeping score, I was right on one and half-right on the other–he provided a number of points about teamwork that work in any environment.

One of his 16 “patterns” was “Truly Collaborative Work.” Examples on his slide included, “Developers willingly engage in Testing.” This is not common in waterfall projects, and I have witnessed how it improves quality and cooperation. Another point was, “Members help each other out.” Science has shown that “organizational citizenship behaviors” improve team performance. “Listening to each other; mutual respect” appeared as well. In poorly performing teams, people listen at each other, listening but not really hearing (hence my Active Listening class).

“Behaving Like a Team” was another of Galen’s patterns. I especially liked his point about “Providing each other congruent feedback.” Agile promotes a practice I suggest for all teams in my teamwork book, daily “stand-up” meetings. These are conducted literally standing up, for a maximum of 15 minutes. Each member reports on only three things: what I did in the prior work day, what I plan on doing the next day, and any blocks I’ve run into. The last item becomes a top-priority action item for the facilitator. Galen said members of effective teams also participate in “Passionate debate.” He added “conflict,” but I later suggested the word “confrontation.” The scientific evidence shows that conflict of any type harms teams, but members must be willing to confront each other to make better decisions. Galen also said members will spend personal time together and succeed or fail “as a team.”

The research literature supports the use of self-managed or self-directed teams in most circumstances. Under his pattern, ”Quality on all fronts,” Galen said Agile teams are “Self-inspecting; self-policing; self-learning.”

He did an excellent job of defining the role of the supervisor of a self-managed team. My oft-repeated summary is, ”Tell the team what direction you need it to go, give it its boundaries, and get out of the way.” Then you fall in behind, making sure the team has the resources it needs and nudging it to stay on course. A previous speaker last night had a great analogy. Josh Anderson, Agile Coach at Teradata, likened this to raising the bumpers when you take kids bowling, so their balls stay out of the gutters. Galen’s related pattern was “Saying NO as a Leader.” He emphasized that managers can’t just walk away from the team, and added in bullet points:

• “Sometimes direction is required.”
• “Courage to tell it like it is.”
• “Behind the scenes, 1:1 Coaching…”

Finally, he emphasized, members’ first loyalty must be to the team. This made me uncomfortable, because plenty of teams have failed by focusing too much on themselves. But Agile’s emphasis on including at each step the customer’s representative (the product owner), and often the customer, is a perfect way to align team cohesion with business goals.

“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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This week I met with a new referral partner, marketing expert Angela Ursprung of Strategic Guru, and she mentioned an incident that brought up a teamwork issue. She talked about once giving a partner a sales lead, and the person never followed up. She never gave the person another lead, and rightfully so. When it comes to sales leads, use it or lose it, I say.

Two of the underlying needs of us humans are the needs for relationships and esteem (refer to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs). When that person ignored Angela’s lead, he or she disrespected the effort Angela had made to build a relationship and her expertise in mapping a marketing opportunity to a provider. At the very least, if the person had a solid reason for not following up, he or she could have communicated that fact back.

When a team member makes an unusual effort on your behalf, a simple thank-you is not enough. A strong effort comes from a strong motivation, and encouraging a repeat of that behavior requires a strong response. The best way is to match the effort. Try the action your colleague suggests, if you have the resources—even if you don’t think it will work. After all, you could be wrong! If you cannot follow up for some reason, at least respect your colleague enough to explain why. This will feed their motivating needs and raise the likelihood of their providing help to you in the future.

This is not a “manipulation,” by the way. Every relationship you have is based upon feeding each others’ needs. I’m talking about not messing up your work relationships by ignoring basic psychology.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, I followed up on Angela’s lead this morning. When an expert helps me, I pay attention (and respect).

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I am working as a volunteer stagehand for the City Ballet of Raleigh production of The Nutcracker Suite, and it reminded me how I got started as a team leader. My undergraduate degree was in that kind of work from North Carolina School of the Arts (as it was called then), which may seem to have little to do with team coaching. But it was there I first led a team, ten students working as the lighting crew. Someone else designed the lighting, but as “master electrician” it was my job on “load-in” day to get the 120 or so lights hung where they belonged, connected to the right circuits, and the circuits connected to the right dimmers.

I planned that thing half to death. I led the team in preparing the lights, developed a process, and trained the members on it. As a result, we got the load-in done very quickly—one “techie” not on the crew said our time had to be “some kind of record.” Without knowing it, I had just become a project manager. The parallels between a show and a business project are obvious: each has a budget, schedule, and scope and quality requirements. Unlike a lot of projects, though, a show has a “hard deadline.” Most business projects that supposedly have such don’t really. If enough things go wrong, the deadline moves. But with a show, when the curtain is scheduled to go up, it has to go up.

Oddly, most shows I’ve been involved with did so without massive last-minute pushes. (Not all, of course—I recall loading out one show’s costumes the night of the final dress rehearsal after nearly pulling two all-nighters in a row to get done.) And conflicts break out, but most of the time they get smoothed over at least to the degree that everyone does their job professionally. I can’t say either of those positives applied to most of the business projects I have observed, even in mature companies. Techies and onstage performers alike are rightly known for their “whatever it takes” attitude, but the same is true of most of the team members I’ve worked with. Is the difference in show “project” success the clarity of the goal in putting on the show? The fact that roles and responsibilities (on- and offstage) are extremely well defined? How well understood the process and tasks are by everyone on the team, across all functions? The fact that everybody including the techies has a backup with the training to step in on a moment’s notice?

I’m not sure. But I am sure if your team had all those best practices in place, it would be performing a lot better than any of your competitors’ teams.

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Paul Maurice, coach of the Carolina Hurricanes professional hockey team, spoke on “Building a Winning Team” at an Association for Corporate Growth meeting recently. The title is somewhat ironic, given that the team was 2-11-3 on the season at the time, as he noted. Although I think sports metaphors are often misapplied in the business context, some of his comments mirrored what I have seen in business teams. A great way to tell that a team is in trouble, he said, is to observe members at a meal. If you have the stars at one table, the rookies at another, and the struggling players in a third, you have a problem. I have seen this in corporate lunch rooms, and it usually means your team has broken into subteams and is not working together. I asked what he did in that situation, and he said he would address individuals in each subteam to have them reach out across the borders. That’s a good first step.

He was surprisingly introspective given the stereotype of a professional coach. A few years ago, he said, the team was doing reasonably well, but after a loss to Florida he went into the locker room and lit into them as their heads hung down. The team lost a large number of games in a row afterward. He said many variables go into losing streaks, but he could not help but wonder how things might have differed if he had picked a better way and time to express his concerns.

But the most powerful thing he stated regarding teams is that you can tell within ten minutes of watching video of a good team what their system is. He listed all kinds of hockey terms I didn’t recognize, being a basketball fan, but the point was that the hockey equivalent of the team’s work processes were done in repeatable ways that an outsider could quickly recognize. On the other hand, he said, you could watch hours of videos of poorly performing teams and never figure out their systems.

In other words, if you want quality, you have to take the time to formalize your processes. Common to every quality control method from Total Quality Management to Six Sigma is writing down or diagramming of processes. That’s the only way you can ensure smooth coordination and handoffs of work—or the hockey puck.

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