"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune "Fast, funny, and highly stimulating!" -Business Book Review Get your signed copy of The NEW Why Teams Don't Work by Mike & Harvey Robbins from Berrett-Koehler Publishers Just click on the book cover!

Chapter 31
Long-Term Team Health

And so we draw near the end of the team journey. We've identified all the problems, confusions, and misconceptions that have been keeping the team from performing, and taken steps to get them working the way they should. You've kicked out the jams. Your group is a lean, mean teaming machine.

But the team journey doesn't end here. Having attained a solid groove, you need to find ways to keep the team there, and keep the groove from deteriorating into a rut. You want your team to stay hungry and in the chase -- even if it has already experienced solid success, even if it is being rewarded and recognized the way it deserves to be.

Sports cliché alert: As hard as it is to win once, it's tons harder to keep winning, year in and year out.

     Continuous clarity

How does a team survive success? By striving to maintain the same level of attention to its own processes that it maintained while it was first achieving success. The point of reference is continuous improvement, what the Japanese call kaizen -- the idea that processes can be improved infinitely.

Continuous improvement is the way teams should think about how their outputs are received by external groups -- end customers, internal customers, other teams, the enterprise as a whole.

For internal purposes, we propose a parallel practice called continuous clarity -- a never-relax attitude toward resurfacing team dynamics, checking in on and honoring one another's needs and wishes, refocusing on being the best team you can be.

The reason for continuous clarity: things change. The conditions that existed six months ago, as the team was enjoying obvious success, have given way to new conditions -- of the marketplace, of the organization, of the team itself.

The danger is that, as conditions change, the team slips out of congruency with itself. If team business is riding a roller coaster, then you want your team in the same train of cars, and on the same track.

Continuous clarity -- bear with this Zen riddle -- means you are constantly re-clarifying the clarity you first achieved during the team's inception. It's the reason why published "mission statements" continuously lose power over time. The memory of what it means is in constant decay.

Teams need to refresh their vision with new reasons, new perspectives, and deeper convictions. They have to do it today, and tomorrow, and the next day after that.

They need to obtain ongoing clarity on:

1)     high-priority goals with associated short-term tasks;

2)     accountabilities (who's responsible, for what, by when);

3)     barriers and strategies around the barriers;

4)     any interpersonal issues needing addressing;

5)     any needed modifications of leadership strategy; and

6)     suggestions for improving inter/intra team communications.

Continuous clarity means continually enumerating the things that lead to team success, and asking if they are working, or if they need work.

We ask if we have the resources we need. If not, where can we get 'em? And if we can't get 'em, how do we make do without 'em?

We think of the people adjuncts that are indispensable to team survival:

v     the team sponsor. This is our team angel, the person that runs interference for us. Is he or she apprised of our current doings, our problems, our needs? What does he or she need to know to continue saving our bacon?

v     the team champions. The individual or individuals high up in the organization whose idea we are, who helped get us going. Are channels to these persons open? Are they still our friends? What do they need to know to continue serving us? What do we need to know?

v     facilitators. The outside mediator, whether outside the team or outside the enterprise. This person has the objective eyes to help us see what we cannot see. Are we in touch? What does he or she think?

v     team leaders. Are the nominal team leaders and the de facto team leaders in synch with the team? What issues do they see coming down the pike? Are they having problems that they haven't informed the rest of the team about?

Without this continuous reclarification, the vision decays and the team, despite absolutely tip-top intentions, breaks up. Some team members may still be on the roller coaster track, but others have diverged and are be happily tooling in disconnected coaster cars down Hollywood Boulevard, the Apian Way, or down some lonely dirt road way up in the Adirondacks. And that's bad. Interesting, but bad.

Continuous clarity means that a team must adopt an ongoing diagnostic attitude about itself. Remember the grid at the beginning of the book, showing the ways that teams go bad, and proposed solutions? As a reader of this book you glanced at it once; you probably thought something like, Aha.

As a team member committed to maintaining continuous clarity on team excellence, however, you should have a copy of that grid more or less stapled to your mind. Because you need to be thinking all the time about the various ways in which teams get stuck -- in order to prevent getting stuck, or to detect getting stuck as early as possible, so as to get quickly unstuck.

The new grid lists the pitfalls teams are prone to, then three measures:

ƒ      Where We Were a Year Ago (on a scale from 1 to7, with 1 being "rotten" and 7 being "outstanding");

ƒ      Where We Are Right Now (1-7);

ƒ      Where We Want to Be a Year from Now (1-7); and

ƒ      Action Plan Notes: What We Will Do to Get There

 

PROBLEM

Where We Were a Year Ago

Where We Are Now

Where We Want to Be in a Year

Action Plan Notes: What We Will Do to Get There

Mismatched Needs

Confused Goals, Cluttered Objectives

Unresolved Roles

Bad Decision Making

Uncertain Boundaries

Bad Policies, Stupid Procedures

Personality Conflicts

Bad Leadership

Bleary Vision

Anti-Team Culture

Insufficient Feedback and Information

Ill-Conceived Reward Systems

Lack of Team Trust

Unwillingness to Change

 

 

When in doubt about your team's current condition of alertness, the grid can serve as a five-minute diagnostic course to identify where problems are occurring, identify where targeted goals are not being met, and move teams to plan remedies.

By using this grid, or one of your own that lists problems your particular team is prone to, you can maintain a diagnostic attitude that keeps your team from slipping too far from its intended path.

     Diagnostic dangers

Having said what we just said, we feel the need to offer a proviso:

It is good for teams to cultivate a diagnostic attitude, to maintain this continuous clarity.
But it is bad to fall in love with the idea.

Usually there is someone on the team that has a knack for the kind of circumspect, see-around-corners thinking that ongoing diagnosis requires. This person is just wired a bit differently from most people. He or she may be a bit of a worrier, but quite good at seeing the big picture, and identifying minute variations of team behavior that are leading it astray.

Some teams don't have anyone matching this description. They aren't able to designate anyone as the clarity controller, and they have a dickens of a time staying focused.

Other teams have the opposite problem -- one or more members become infatuated with the task of diagnosis. They are indeed blessed with the ability to see where the group is slipping off the tracks, and that blessing becomes a curse. They go around all day spotting discrepancies, crying aha!, and generally confusing the team worse than it was confusing itself.

We call it diagnostic overload. It happens when the call to clarity itself becomes a distraction. You hear it as one of the wilder aphorisms of the TQM movement, like "If it ain't broke, break it," or "Don't put a fire out when you can prevent it in the first place."

These people are too in love with clarity. Their ego and self-esteem are too bound up in detecting minute variations. They envision the effective team as a crackling synaptic whip of self-correcting maniacs. A pleasant idea, but the reality is that fires are a part of most of our jobs, and when we are on fire, it makes sense to put it out, not pause for a lyrical meditation on the beauty of prevention.

Making a cult of clarification was one of the things teams were implemented to avoid. Teams, you will recall, replaced a system of multi-layered controls -- other people whose sole job was to keep an eye on you. Let's don't do that again.

 

NOW AVAILABLE from from Berrett-Koehler Publishers (San Francisco) and Texere (UK)!

The New WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK
What Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right

"The American business approach to workplace teams is filled with powerful subtleties and is also quite different from the Japanese. The phrase, "How come all this quality stuff don't work," nicely sums up the challenge making teams work in America. Authors Robbins and Finley present practical solutions to the problems with and misconceptions about teams that will be valuable to any organization inclined to assign teams to work on legitimate operational issues. Pragmatic team tips covered here include team decision-making, communication skills with teams, reward and recognition ideas, the importance of effective team leadership, and the fundamental factor of organizational culture that could help or hinder team success. The authors swap narration of chapters, enlivening this useful handbook on how to make the commitment to teams a success. Serves well any manager's interest in maximizing productivity and quality improvement with teams. Recommended for all quality professionals." -- Quality World