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Epilog:
Toward Team Intelligence

We began by pledging this wasn't going to be another team happy-talk book. Hope we didn’t come across as too negative, though. We believe in teams. But teams are trouble, because they're made of people, and people are trouble.

The happy-talk books pretended that just murmuring the mantra of teams would cause all the creepy organizational goblins -- inefficiency, low productivity, befuddled processes, high cost, bloated workforce, poor morale, poor return on investment -- to fall away.

Teams would magically outperform the old hierarchical system, and everybody would get along, and you wouldn't need the metal detector at shareholders meetings. Quality without tears.

But hey, guess what -- ain't no such thing as quality, or any kind of organizational transformation, without tears. In fact, tears -- meaning, sincerity, commitment, and caring about the people you work with -- are probably the best sign you'll get that you're on the right track.

We talked for so many years about "the bottom line," meaning quarterly profits, that we have trouble admitting that there are multiple bottom lines to what we do. Besides lying awake at night worrying about return on outlays, team leaders worry about:

ƒ      whether leadership is leading;

ƒ      whether the team "gets" the organizational vision, or its own goals;

ƒ      whether the full knowledge and intelligence of every team member is being tapped;

ƒ      whether the people who make up the team are getting their non-team needs met.

These are not concerns that business schools teach. And yet, in the brave new world of teams that is materializing around us, they are the concerns that will keep the heart of the modern organization pumping blood.

Team members don't have to be best friends to be a good team. Every team has people who would not pick one another to affiliate with in a thousand millenniums.

But we're not lovers, or even best friends -- we're a team. All we have to do is take one another's side on the main issues – doing the job the team exists to do.

Philosopher Terry Warner talks about a "principle of agency," by which all team members become agents for one another, charged with the task of making one another's dreams come true.

A better analogy than friends is family. Like members of a family, team members do not generally ask to be thrown together. Like families, all teams are flawed. Like families, teams have their high points and their low points. Fights break out. Emotions flare.

And just as families usually pool together in crisis, and set their misgivings aside, so must teams. After all, we spend as much or more time with team members as we do with our real families. And, the dreams of our real families often are so bound up in the aspirations of the teams we belong to.

In the best teams you see a circle -- of sympathy, support, and a limited kind of love. It is the love engendered when team members sincerely want the best for one another.

In good teams, you see at the very least an ongoing curiosity about one another. How can we be so different and still work together? How do we harness the power of our differentness? What must we do to continue to share information and create new knowledge? Curiosity, the key to our our intelligence, is the key to team intelligence.

If the team movement arose from any single ethic it was that people are not cogs and levers, as the old organizational diagrams suggested. We are human beings. Ignore the interior workings, the strivings and desires, and team failure is inevitable.

But when people take the time to learn about one another, what is in their hearts as well as in their minds, we rise to a higher level.

Call it love, call it curiosity, call it team intelligence, or don't call it anything at all.

But somehow or other, you have to get there. It is the glory of working together, and getting things right.

 

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