Teams Blog

Usually for fun—in the sense that it’s usually fun and usually not for pay—I do an occasional backstage gig, returning to my undergraduate roots. Recently I completed a production with a dance school. This round got me to reflecting on how the lack of role definition can cause friction on a work team, and how easily that friction can be minimized through simple communication.

My job was easy compared to the rest of the “running crew” (techies who work during the show, not just setting it up and “striking” afterwards). All I had to do was run projections displayed on a curtain at the back of the stage using PowerPoint on a laptop, plus raise and lower the houselights and make onstage fog. All of it boiled down to pushing buttons. However, as the only official crew member onstage, the others being in a booth at the back of the audience, I also served as the eyes and ears of the stage manager. The SM “calls the show,” which is to say she was telling the lighting guy and I when to do our next things. Next to me onstage, but not on headsets to the booth, were the technical director and director of the company.

Both are wonderful people  whom I enjoy working with. Like most directors and choreographers, the boss gets perfectionistic during a run. Most backstage personnel do, too, if they’re any good. But usually the boss is not backstage during the production, turning things over to the SM. It was sometimes unpleasant to be stuck between the bosses onstage and the person literally running the show in the booth. The former could not hear what the status was of the sound and lights. Furthermore, to save money, we had never run a “dry tech” in which the nonperformers talk through the “cues” (technical changes such as a shift in lighting or sound). So the stage manager didn’t know she was supposed to call the next projection cue with the next light cue, instead of calling it later with the music cue as she was doing. Meanwhile, the bosses kept pushing me to go with the next cue without recognizing the pattern. At more than one point I literally had three people talking to me at once and saying different things.

This is not intended as a complaint, but rather an allegory. How often have you found in the working world that you were getting different messages from well-meaning stakeholders who clearly weren’t talking to each other? How often has the fix been a simple matter of getting them together briefly? In this case, after the dress rehearsal, the stage manager rightly insisted that we run a dry tech right then. It took maybe 30 minutes, and as a result the performances went fine minus the usual minor glitches. Certainly the bosses and audiences expressed their approval.

Another friction point was cleared up when the stage manager gladly ceded the cue calls on the curtain to the director. Again I had been stuck between the SM telling us to “go” and the curtain puller refusing to do so. The director had told the puller she would make the call, but hadn’t told me or the SM about this change from the norm. After a rough rehearsal, I told the SM, and she had no issue with the change once told about it.

A few minutes to clarify who was to do each task, and to talk through how the work of the show was to be accomplished, would have saved far more time as well as heartache on the parts of five people. Anything like that going on in your team?

P.S. If you are in the Raleigh, N.C., USA, area, come visit with me next Tuesday (5/18/2010). I’ll be serving on a panel discussing “Sales, Service & Support: Working as a Team,” at a luncheon sponsored by Linking Raleigh NC. To join us, see http://bit.ly/dbNX2S. I’d love to meet you!

Any dip into history reminds me how poor we humans are at learning from the past. An article I came across on the history of teamwork by consulting psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman proves the point. So many of the lessons I try to get across in my practice have been known to work for decades, yet remain largely ignored by “team builders” and many managers.

Prior to the 1800s, “With the exception of music (i.e., orchestras) and the theater, there are few examples of the high levels of specialization of labor, interpersonal communication, integration of effort, cooperation, and problem solving that characterize modern teams,” the authors write. I smiled when I saw that. My first introduction to project teamwork came as a backstage “techie.” For the record, I wasn’t doing that prior to the 1800s.

Otherwise, the “work environment” was a line of orders from the king down, along with jostling for power by everyone who wasn’t trying simply to survive. Only in families was there some level of cooperation and division of labor, though again one spouse or the other usually ruled. That said, “Researchers who have studied group dynamics in the past often note the parallels with family dynamics…” Leonard and Freeman write.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim made fairly accurate predictions about group norms—informal rules people naturally create, usually without knowing it, as they do things together. Freud touched on groups as well, but the authors credit American psychologist William McDougall as the first “teambuilder,” based on his 1920 book The Group Mind. He offered five bases for better group effort, they write:

• “continuity of existence…”
• “development of an emotional relationship to the group as a whole by defining the nature, composition, functions, and capacity of the group”
• “interaction… with other groups similar to the group but differing in some key aspects”
• “traditions, customs, and habits that define the relationships between members”
• “a definite structure…”

Let’s stop right there. All of this perfectly matches what I said yesterday in a talk for a Chamber of Commerce event and that I create through The SuddenTeams Program. It is backed up by decades of subsequent research after McDougall. None of it matches what most “team builders” force work groups to do. And most managers still refuse to address these 90 years after McDougall first wrote about it. Okay, rant over.

The middle of the last century saw the growth of “social psychology,” so-called to differentiate it from the previous focus on individuals or pairs of people. What we now call social norms, groupthink, and peer pressure were first identified. A center for group dynamics research was founded around 1946. (The center’s Web site disagrees with the authors on the date.) That year, founder Kurt Lewin and his students also hosted “a conference on intergroup relations focusing on racial and religious discrimination” sponsored by a state agency and diversity groups. It attracted a number of people who would later be important researchers in the teamwork field, including names that appear in my bibliography. It may well have been the first use of the participatory training style so common today, and Leonard and Freeman say it was the birth of the field of group dynamics.

In another theatre reference, they write that Lewin conducted “shop-floor group meetings in a pajama factory (the play and then the movie Pajama Game reputedly were based on these experiences).”

Lewin was involved in the founding of the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, but died before he could participate in its first conference. The idea of ”training groups” (“T-groups”) began there. These, too, looked a lot like modern facilitated trainings (versus lectures) and presented the first diversity trainings. Many future teamwork researchers passed through the NTL. “Leaders from educational, religious, community, and business organizations came to Bethel each summer for several intense weeks of training aimed at improving… their effectiveness as individuals and change agents in society and organizations,” the authors write. “Bethel converts returned to their institutions and introduced flip-charts, innovative seating arrangements, and programs that balanced theory input with experiential learning modules.”

Ideas prevalent today moved from the lab into businesses. “Herb Shepard and Bob Blake, in their work with an Esso refinery, developed a managerial grid based on structured, leaderless groups in the late 1950s and called their approach ‘organization development’” (OD). I had to bite my tongue a few years ago when an HR person called self-directed teams ”passé” as if they were a recent fad.

The upheavals of the 1960s caused in the U.S. a cynicism about the possibility of large system change. Social psychologists focused more at the small group level where change seemed reasonable, the authors write. Researchers began to note the effect that job tasks had on organization (instead of the other way around), and developed a “sociotechnical” approach to OD that recognized how tasks, technology and organization evolve together.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” Leonard and Freeman write. Unfortunately, a series of handbooks on team building introduced the “touchie-feely” approach that was fun but ”much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations.” Sound familiar? It would if you had been at my talk yesterday!

More in a future post.

Go to Part 2.

Source: Leonard, H. S., and A. Freedman (2000), “From scientific management through fun and games to high performing teams: A historical perspective on consulting to team-based organizations,” Consulting Psychology Journal 52(1):3.

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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