Features of a high performing team

In the past I have made a several  links (some more oblique than others) to celebrated efforts and achievements of sportspeople over the past year including Bradley Wiggins, Usain Bolt, and the British Cycling team and the London 2012 Olympics.

Bradford City ‘picked up the ball and ran with it’ by working together, playing to their strengths, committing effort, taking responsibility, keeping discipline, and always believing the dream!

After a pulsating year of sporting moments in 2012 and having previously prodded at the excesses of football management, I simply cannot miss the chance to celebrate the achievements earlier this month by a humble, honest lower league football club. Bradford City FC are close to my heart, having spent many occasions at their Valley Parade home in years gone by and since then, despite a move down south, I have been able to follow their tortuous progress through financial misfortune and near-collapse with nevertheless genuinely  joyful moments amongst a few hundred Bradford faithful as a regular ‘away’ fan down south) …

 In the early weeks of 2013 lowly Bradford City, a club that have been in the doldrums of lower-league football for over 10 years,  set the media alight with successive victories against Premier League opposition in a winning run that has taken them to a major Cup Final for the first time in 101 years. This gives the team a further chance to shine in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley, the national stadium. At the time of their only previous success, winning the FA Cup in 1911 (a week-and-a half after the Titanic had sunk in the North Atlantic), the site at Wembley was still  a rural landscape of  fields and woodland copses. Bradford are the first 4th tier (lowest division) team to reach any final in England for 51 years.  The story is well documented elsewhere, but it is worth noting that Bradford’s entire squad of players was assembled for a total of £7500 of transfer fees – in a world where opposition players in the Premier League teams which were defeated to reach the final cost millions (often tens of millions) –  EACH.

How is this possible? Surely it is a matter of assembling a team of the best, to achieve success? Bradford illustrates that there is an alternative model – to build the best team you can with what you have. And how? To get the team members to prepare and focus on the things that matter. For Bradford this was all about playing to strengths, taking responsibility, keeping discipline, committing effort, working together, and of course always believing that they could achieve the dream! As the team’s winning run extended from August 2012 against lower league opposition through to a thrilling December night against the big-guns of Arsenal and later Aston Villa in the January semi-final, all of the team’s values and actions were validated and rewarded through the results that they achieved together. This builds both self-belief and belonging which enables performance; a difficult blend to achieve purely through big-money signings. In Premier League teams this process usually takes years to achieve – with a lot of waste and at great expense! It is not just a matter of ‘chemistry’, but rather a matter of focus and action.

So  in our teams let’s focus on our goals, our various roles, how we work together at a practical level and how we build positive working relationships based on mutuality and trust.

 

Further reading:

Beckhard, R. (1972) Optimizing Team Building Effort, J. Contemporary Business.  1:3,  pp.23-32

Coppin, A. and Barratt, J. (2002) Timeless Management, Palgrave MacMillan, New York.

Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) The Discipline of Teams, Harvard Business Review,March-April, 111-120.

McNulty, P. (2013) Bradford reaching League Cup final one of greatest football upsets, BBC Sport,23 January 2013 http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/21155111

 

Networking: talk, then work (and see the benefits).

It is easy to be busy and to forget the value of building positive working relationships with people. After all, working relationships are often the source of ideas, innovation, encouragement and better use of resources.

Finding time to make proper contact with people can be tricky, especially in roles where “meetings,meetings, meetings” rule, or if you are stuck behind a computer screen. Nevertheless, if we have the right mindset and a clear sense of purpose, we can make the most of personal networking, even if the opportunities are fleeting.

I recall an occasion when a colleague from an operational department picked up an idea with me for developing a training programme. She had previously drafted out a proposal which had been discussed with a couple of  colleagues, but had not yet discussed the idea at senior levels. We both worked up the idea and, with a minimum of scheduled meetings (I can recall three1/2 hour discussions), by simply keeping our bosses in the loop, within 2 months we had  the programme up and running, briefed to managers, marketed to 150+ people (many of whom voluntarily applied for a place with management approval) and the selected cohort had attended the first event. The normal turnaround for this type of activity – about 6-9 months.

How did things work so effectively on this occasion? Well, for one thing the personal enthusiasm of the people involved, secondly, the trust that each person had in delegating the work (and the trust shown by senior stakeholders in allowing us to get on with it) – and thirdly the purposeful use of time when we briefly met or had a conversation on the ‘phone. These behaviours set the tone when engaging other colleagues for support and encouraged a collaborative atmosphere in the project team. The work needed no significant new resources and the administration was hooked into existing procedures and workflow. The advantage  was a 60 – 80% improvement in turnaround time.

Of course networking may involve a host of other things; ideas, innovation, opening  up opportunities in new markets, new career pathways, business partnerships, research collaboration, cost saving opportunities, learning. There is no magic networking chemistry – ALL effective networking behaviours can be learned. If networking fails it is probably because one or both people choose for it to fail either consciously or sub-consciously…or they let the potential impact of the contact to ‘wither on the vine’ through lack of effort.

Networking is not just a social process – it needs to be far more than that in order to work properly. Good work involves the use of knowledge, understanding the psychology of people, understanding how systems work, and responding to the comings and goings of events in an appropriate manner. Networking that just involves chat delivers what it deserves…

Incidentally on a separate note – during the same two-month period described above, I had a contrasting experience. I was involved in various discussions (I lost count of the meetings, but it must have been at least six or seven) with essentially the same types of positive people (so the same positive chemistry SHOULD have been working), to resolve some minor concerns in a half-day training workshop. Now on this occasion maybe I was the problem, but progress in this instance was simply not very productive. Avenues were examined which did not require consideration and assumptions were taken which only served to delay decisions (until the real facts were extracted). This experience reminded me of some observations made in a recent blog which included some interesting ideas (attributed to the likes of Deming) but which were summarised as equations. A few choice ones are shown below:

  •              Opinions+opinions+opinions = opinions
  •              Meetings = opinions x people + documents

And the moral of these equations?   –    None of these activities is real value-adding work.

We need to be diligent in how we use our time. When networking, be purposeful – look to bring something to offer to a discussion as well as have in mind something that you want to get out of it for yourself. Remember that talking together is fine, but working together can be much more rewarding.

Further reading:

Coppin, A. and Barratt, J. (2002) Timeless Management, Palgrave MacMillan, New York.

Deming W.E. (1993) The New Economics, MIT CAES, Cambridge MA.