Tag Archives: teams

CLASSIC POSTS REVISITED (new twists on old themes)

Teamwork is best – or IS IT?

April 2, 2017 Simon Black Leave a comment

An earlier version of this was first posted on 2nd April 2013

Group working is one of those topics that is awkwardly both straightforward and complex depending upon how you look at it. Conventional wisdom sets us to assume that ‘more heads are better than one’ and this maxim is often a justification for working in teams. But is it always a helpful perspective?

Teams may be created to simply fulfill a structural need; to fill an office space or to organise a number of individuals under the supervision of a particular manager. These are not necessarily good reasons for organising group working.

Tug of war — Clones with the same job is not a recipe for a successful team

What do we really know about team performance? And, if we are honest with ourselves, do groups always work better than individuals?

The answer, surely, is no. Have you ever sat on a committee and wondered ‘why are we all here?’?

Let’s take a sporting analogy. Put five excellent runners into a relay team. How well do they perform? In many cases, really well. In some cases they are good sometimes and poor another (the British men’s sprint relay team, in four of the last five Olympics and with largely the same personnel have been disqualified – 1996, 2000, 2008, 2012 – but won gold in 2004. Why is there such a wide difference between good and poor performances? It is easy to blame a mistake; incompetence or lack of attention, but the truth lies deeper.

The Ringelmann effect suggests that something different can happen in teams. If people’s personal roles are similar they can be disinclined to put everything into their work (this is a subconscious effect causing ‘free-riding’ rather than deliberate loafing). This effect has been shown in cases where a single worker has been put in a team with ‘non workers’ (i.e. people deliberately faking effort, but not actually doing real work). Even in these instances, the ‘real’ worker is often measured as putting in LESS effort than if they were doing the task on their own. In the classic experiment, assuming that men pulling a rope individually perform at 100% of their ability, apparently two-man groups perform at 93% of the average member’s pull, three-man groups at 85%, with eight-man groups pulling with only 49% of the average individual member’s ability.

So what is the solution? Never work in teams? No this would be a bit foolish, there are better questions…

1. Does the team have a clear sense of purpose?

2. Have we designed team work carefully – goals, roles, work ?

3. Have reasonable and relevant measures of performance been set?

4. Do we agree how to work together?

5. Are people ready to seek improvements as part of their role?

6. Do we encourage trust and mutual respect in the team?

7. Are our relationships based on an understanding of 1-5 above?

So, reverting to my previous blog on teamwork, we must focus on our purpose, our goals, understand our differing roles, agree how we work together at a practical level and look to build positive working relationships based on mutuality and trust.

Like anything in life, if we have a team of people, we need to regularly re-consider the purpose of the team. Do we have a team because it adds to achieving the purpose, or is it just because we have always had a team?

Next time you are in a turgid committee meeting, or your project team has ground to a halt, have a think about how the group could work better…

Four years of reflection: many years of learning

November 24, 2015 Simon Black Leave a comment

This article sees the completion of four years of blogging on this site and this is the 112th article. There is a wide range of material available across the site.

Use our search facility for any keywords you wish, to find a relevant resource.

Key themes we have highlighted over the years include:

• Don’t do it to people: understand the system of work first

• Don’t chase things that don’t
exist (like supposed trends in data)

• Build knowledge, not opinion

• Don’t rely on top down change Culture change is not something that you 'do' to people

• Change can be quick & painless at the right point of intervention

• Leadership is about followers more
than about the leader

• Decision making can involve people in many different ways

• Teamwork is about Purpose, Goals & Process more than about Behaviour

Some key searches which may be of interest include:
Team; Improvement; Leadership; Motivation

Key source articles include those by:
Deming; Herrero; Seddon; Senge; Covey; Scholtes

Leadership, Professionalism

The basics of teamwork

January 26, 2015 Simon Black Leave a comment

I cannot pass this week without mentioning the dramatic footballing efforts of Bradford City FC beating Premier League Giants Chelsea FC in the FA cup – the biggest shock result in the famous competition’s 143-year history.

This reminds me of Bradford’s previous exploits in early 2013 which I discussed when referring to high performing teams. In that article I summarised the importance of a team’s focus on:

goals,
team member roles,
how people work together at a practical level
building positive working relationships through mutuality & trust

This weekend’s technically excellent performance by Bradford at Stamford Bridge (Chelseas home ground) highlighted the importance of clear work processes – how people do the work. In this particular case of football: passing and shooting when in posession, and tackling and blocking when defending. The Bradford players excelled and this simple and straightforward work, supporting each other throughout the game. Whilst the millionaire Chelsea players may have had more skill and flair, they were overwhelmed by a team displaying high technical proficiency, high temp (and determination) and close discpline on the simple task of competing in the match.

Bill Shankly, the iconic football manager at Liverpoolin the 1960s and70s described what football involved: ‘Football is a simple game based on the giving and taking of passes, of controlling the ball and of making yourself available to receive a pass. It is terribly simple.‘

Those were the basic blueprints of the work, to which Bradford stuck.

Bob Paisley followed Shankly as Liverpool manager also talked about simplicity: “Some (football) jargon is frightening. They talk of “gettin’ round the back” and sound like burglars. They say “You’ve got to make more positive runs” or “You’re too negative”. That sounds as though you’re filling the team with electricians. But people talk like this without real depth or knowledge of what they’re really talking about.”

People need to know how to do the work in a straightforward way, getting what needs to be done, done. Leaders need to know what is happening and be able to explain what needs to be done in clear terms. Bradford City did this and everyone was suprised.

*** Are we allowing our own teams to focus on the right work? ***

Links:

Calvin M. (2015) Bantams produce one of the all-time FA Cup shocks after fighting back from two down to beat the blues. The Indpendent. http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/fa-league-cups/chelsea-vs-bradford-city-match-report-bantams-produce-one-of-the-alltime-fa-cup-shocks-after-fighting-back-from-two-down-to-beat-blues-10000547.html

Bob Paisley Quotes. http://www.bobpaisley.com/article/2532

Bill Shankly in Quotes. http://www.liverpoolfc.com/news/latest-news/bill-shankly-in-quotes

Change Principles, Culture, Excellence

Lessons from the 2014 football World Cup!

July 14, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

In a late response to the drama of the football world cup I have a list of lessons learned prompted by HR Grapevine. I have amended their proposed list and have included a couple of items which I have interpreted quite differently, so here is my personal list:

1: Don’t be too reliant on one star player

A number of matches have shown balanced teams succeed ahead of those that relied on one star player. Argentina’s Lionel Messi underperformed in the final and the German team got the result. Brazil struggled as soon as Neymar was ruled out through injury. Uruguay were at sea without Suarez. Weeks earlier in the tournament England were too reliant on the Rooney factor and appeared simply not to set up to act as a unit.

The system should be greater than the sum of its parts, and no more so than in a team. Algeria, Mexico and Costa Rica performed above and beyond expectations.

The same is true about the capability of any team.

2: Trying hard will only get you so far

I think the England team were well prepared and earnest in their efforts (despite the hype – both negative and positive – from the tabloids). Best efforts are often a sure fire way to failure (Deming has a lot to say about this). However mediocrity can be turned around – but this needs a transformation in approach.

A huge amount can be achieved by engaged the people who are ‘good enough’ to enable them to perform even better (see point one above).

3: Utilise technology – if it makes sense to do so

FIFA endorsed the use of goal-line technology to deal with the age-old problem of knowing whether a ball had crossed the line for a goal or not. This is not new technology – similar approaches have been used in cricket since 2001 and tennis since 2006. The issue is will it solve the problem? It has been a great success.

Another nice innovation was the marker foam to set positions of defenders in a ‘wall’ at free kicks. Again this was a repeating problem – could we make the job of the referee easier to implement? Simple and effective and in this instance no digital technology in sight.

The first question with technology and innovation is – will it improve what we want to achieve?

4: You need to align team and individual goals

One of the big stories for England in the run up to the world cup concerned whether Wayne Rooney would finally get a goal after 3 unsuccessful tournaments. A bigger question for England fans should have been ‘who cares?’. Ultimately the world cup is not about individual players achieving anything it is about a team wining the championship. All else is a side story.

The problems occur when one person’s goal overrides the team’s goals. Did Rooney shoot when he could make passes to better placed team members? Did he dive into shots which other players were about to take themselves? Did he neglect his defensive duties on the left against Italy allowing them to win the match? There is evidence that points to all of these things. Did England switch off once Wayne had ‘got his goal’ in the game against Uruguay ? Who knows?

The winning German team successfully rotated a whole range of players to do the job. The Netherlands played a recognised centre-forward as a wing back (Dirk Kuyt) and he studiously grafted into that unfamiliar role with great effectiveness. The Dutch even drafted a substitute goalkeeper just for the penalty shootout.

5: Clarity of purpose, identity, belonging and vision pay off

Germany’s plan to recapture the world cup (which they last achieved in 1990) started back in 2000 after a poor showing in the European championships. The German Football Federation invested heavily in the future with new academies and a manager with a long-term plan.

They developed an identity for German international football and engaged players on the basis of playing to that philosophy.

A footnote to this is that German midfielder Sami Khedira picked up an injury in the warm up a few minutes before the start of the cup final and had to be replaced. Khedira will be devastated to have missed the game, but it was clear in the post match celebrations that he revelled in the team’s success and fully identified with the achievement of the team for the part that he had already played in the tournament up to that point (see point 4 above).

An alternative view is offered at HR Grapevine:

http://www.hrgrapevine.com/markets/hr/article/2014-07-14-hr-lessons-from-the-world-cup?utm_source=eshot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=HRM%20-%2014/07/2014

Change Principles, Excellence

It’s the environment isn’t it?

May 22, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

There has a been a recent flurry of interest in workspace design (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25355618). Google, Apple and Facebook are often cited for their creative office spaces, designed to enable or even enhance the creative thinking of their staff.

However it is not clear if a creative office space stimulates creative thinking, or whether it is the elimination of bad office design that appears to free up the minds of workers (i.e. workers may have been creative already, but just get it sucked out of them by a poor environment). After all did the innovative and creative workers of the past have wacky working environments (maybe they were not really as creative!)?

It could be that the managers of these organisations might just be fiddling with ‘hygiene factors’, the things that Herzberg identified in the 1960s as having no positive impact on motivation, but are merely the basics that need to be sorted out (along with pay, management style, working relationships etc). Over the long term there is a risk, unless the managers at these organisations are doing something else, that their workforce may not be motivated to make a real difference to the performance of the business – will they still have leading products and services of the future or will better alternatives emerge from their competitors?

Over the past few decades it has become clear that whilst many ‘enlightened’ managers have dutifully followed the good manager mantras: developed themselves as leaders, worked on motivating staff, built trust and rapport, coached and developed, and engaged in team-building, the things that really matter is a common sense of purpose, how work is designed and what power people have over decisions and quality of the work that they do. This sounds fine in theory, perhaps, but in reality job design often sits in the lap of central departments (like HR), rather than the worker or the team, so the power even to design jobs is not at the point of knowledge – the people doing the work. The result is that managers can only be left to fiddle around the edges with team-building and cheer-leading. Or perhaps some just repaint the office.

An effective manager will learn how to understand and design work and how to engage people to ensure improved performance. An effective team will seek a clear purpose, investigate how their performance affects users, will challenge thinking, ask questions and engage in improvement.

Reading:

Herzberg, F. (1968) “One more time: how do you motivate employees?”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 46, iss. 1, pp. 53–62

BBC (2013) 10 bizarre objects found in ‘cool’ offices. BBC News Magazine. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25355618

Wakefield, J. (2008) Google your way to a wacky office. BBC News website. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7290322.stm

Change Principles, Leadership

Cool runnings? Change perspectives. Just do it.

February 24, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

It is a sporting theme again, inspired by the thrills of the Winter Olympics. Let’s hark back to the 1988 Calgary Games, memorable since British involvement started to impress outside the ice-rink. Eccentricities of Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, our first Olympic ski-jumper matched Martin Bell’s efforts in the men’s downhill. Even our bob-sledders were competitive.

One story, now globally famous, concerns the Jamaican soldiers formed into an unlikely bobsleigh team on a shoestring budget, qualifying in 1988 as the first tropical nation at the Winter Olympics. American expats George Fitch and William Maloney were inspired by watching Jamaican push-kart racing and had initially raised the idea. At the outset, one of the eventual Jamaican team members, Devon Harris, thought the idea was ridiculous. Another, Dudley Stokes, only got involved because his superior officer in the military told him to participate.

The story was largely fictionalised for dramatic effect in the comedy film ‘Cool Runnings’. In reality the team were warmly welcomed by co-competitors and enjoyed the support of other national teams to access equipment ahead of the Games. The Jamaicans performances improved during the Games programme, but unfortunately they crashed in their final competitive run so did not reach the final. However the precedent had been set and Jamaican teams have qualified for several Winter Games over subsequent decades including the Sochi 2014 Olympics.

So what can we learn? How does this relate to our ideas for change and improvement?

Just do it – and keep trying. If things don’t quite work, don’t give up. George Fitch failed to recruit Jamaican athletes, so asked the Jamaican military to find volunteers.
Other people respond to your initiative. Jamaica’s competitors welcomed the team as co-athletes, whilst the Olympic crowds were fanatically enthusiastic about the team’s efforts.
People can be inspired – your team may have skeptics and cynics, but they can all be inspired by purpose and vision of what is possible and what they can do.
Learn from disappointments. Since the crash of 1988, Jamaica have performed at a high level, beating established winter sport nations such as France, the USA, Russia and Canada.
The unlikely can become the norm. A later Jamaican team-member, Lascelles Brown, married a Canadian, and subsequently won medals for Canada at two Olympic Games.
Seize the opportunity – even unlikely ideas can set a new way of doing things. Small initiatives can have a lasting effect. It just takes the effort to start the ball rolling…

Links:

BBC Sport (2014) Jamaica’s ‘Cool Runnings’ bobsleigh team in 1988, Sochi 2014http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/winter-olympics/25144672

Evanovitch (2005) Interview with Devon ‘Pele’ Harris Jamaica Bobsled Team Member, Jamaica Primetime. http://www.jamaicans.com/articles/primeinterviews/interviewdevonharris.shtml

Jones E. (2014) Va. Mayor’s Little Known Link to Jamaican Bobsledding, NBC Washington http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Va-Mayor-Cool-Connection-to-Jamaicas-Bobsled-Team-243973451.html

Change Principles

Stuck in a rut? How to reinvigorate your team

June 13, 2013 Simon Black Leave a comment

Are the same old issues arising in your team?
Have you joined a team that is stuck in its ways?
Is the team intimidated by new challenges which seem like one step too far?
Have you ever felt “we’ve been here before“?
Are the moaners still moaning?
Would the team, if honest, say that they are stagnant, uninspired, or just jogging along?

What would make a difference; how can things change; are people the problem or is it something else?

In the words of Douglas Adams: DON’T PANIC

All teams go through various stages of development, from confidence to crisis, from challenge to success, from discomfort to familiarity, from suspicion to support. These cycles can occur in any order, sometimes a positive progression forwards but occasionally involving backsliding and disillusionment. A third common state is no change at all – being stuck in a rut – for months, or years.

The classic observation on team development was made by Bruce Tuckman and his memorable ‘Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing’ model. It is helpful because it sets out some of things to address which will help to oil the wheels of positive team development.

Clear goals, clear ground-rules (i.e. the ways we work together, talk to each other and use the time and space that we share), clear roles. These are the simple building blocks of effective teams. These things give space for individuals to get on with the work that they do alone and to interact effectively in the things that they need to do together. Clarifying these things as a team should also give space for people to raise questions or challenge things which don’t work well or appear to have little purpose.

So change the way the team works without meddling with the people in it. This gives everyone the choice to make progress alongside their colleagues – which, frankly, most people are quite happy to do.

Reading:

Tuckman, B.W. (1965) Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin 65, no.6: 384–99.

Tuckman, B.W. and Jensen M.A. (1977) Stages of small-group development revisited. Group and Organization Studies 2, no. 4: 419–27.

Optional bedtime reading:

Adams, D. (1979) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Pan Books Ltd., London.

Myths

Teamwork is best – or IS IT?

April 2, 2013 Simon Black 1 Comment

Group working is one of those topics that is awkwardly both straightforward and complex depending upon how you look at it.

Conventional wisdom sets us to assume that more heads are better than one and this maxim is often used as a justification for working in teams. But is it always a helpful perspective? In the spirit of Change Academy, we need to consider alternative views in order to get a more complete picture.

Cindy Vallance recently posted the question “When are many heads better than one?” This is a sensible question to ask when considering group working. As Cindy points out, sometimes teams are created to simply fulfill a structural need; to fill an office space or to organise a number of individuals under the supervision of a manager. These, as Cindy implies, are not good reasons for organising group working.

What do we really know about team performance? And, if we are honest with ourselves, do groups always work better than individuals?

The answer, surely , is no. Have you ever sat on a committee and wondered ‘why are we all here?’?

Let’s take a sporting analogy. Put five excellent runners into a relay team. How well do they perform? In many cases, really well.

However if I think of the British men’s sprint relay team, in four of the last five Olympics they have been disqualified (1996, 2000, 2008, 2012). In 2004 they won the gold. In each Olympic competition the job is the same and, for the British team over this period, several individuals participated in the team more than once . So why is there such a wide difference between good and poor performances? It is sometimes easy to put it down to a mistake; incompetence or lack of attention, but sometimes the truth lies deeper.

The Ringlemann effect suggests that something different can happen in teams. If people’s personal roles are similar they can be disinclined to put everything into their work (this is a subconscious effect causing ‘free-riding’ rather than deliberate loafing). This effect has been shown in cases where a single worker has been put in a team with ‘non workers’ (i.e. people deliberately faking effort, but not actually doing real work). Even in these instances, the ‘real’ worker is often measured as putting in LESS effort than if they were doing the task on their own. In the classic experiment, assuming that men pulling a rope individually perform at 100% of their ability, apparently two-man groups perform at 93% of the average member’s pull, three-man groups at 85%, with eight-man groups pulling with only 49% of the average individual member’s ability.

So what is the solution? Never work in teams? No this would be a bit foolish, there are better questions…

1. Design team work carefully? Yes

2. Ensure a clear sense of purpose? Yes

3. Establish some reasonable measure of performance or achievement? Yes

4. Agree ways of working together, along with a readiness and willingness to improve ? Of course

5. Encourage trust and mutual respect amongst team members? Yes, but make sure that at its foundation is an understanding of 1-4 above.

Next time you are in a turgid committee meeting, or your project team has ground to a halt, – have a think about how the group could work better…

Building and Maintaining Resilience

February 24, 2013 cdv Leave a comment

By @cdvallance

The past few weeks since my last blog have been a struggle. Like many others around the University I have been battling what a colleague referred to as ‘the ubiquitous Kent bug.’ While I very much doubt that Kent is alone as an organisation that has had many of its members fall victim to a range of winter colds and flus, it has certainly been difficult for me to identify anyone absolutely brimming with energy and enthusiasm of late. Add to this a bout of cold, wet, grey weather, short days, dark nights and many work challenges. So what can be done?

For me, the only way to regain and then maintain my personal and professional resilience in relation to work is to reflect on the question ‘why do I bother?’ What do I believe about why I get up every morning and go to work? Of course I need and want a pay cheque. That is a given. But this isn’t enough for me and I believe it isn’t enough for others either. I believe we all (or at least the great majority of us) want to feel that we are making a positive difference in what we do and that we also want to share these feelings of pursuing a common purpose with others.

How do we do this? In my last blog, I shared six keys to successful change coined by leading thinker Rosabeth Moss Kanter. To recap, these were:

Show up, speak up, team up, look up, don’t give up, lift others up.

In my next few blogs I will discuss why I believe groups and teams are key to organisational success. This is partly selfish. My hope is that sharing my thinking about something I care about – team work and collaboration – will also help me rebuild my own resilience and restore my own energy in trying to make a positive difference at the University of Kent.

Change Principles, Excellence

Features of a high performing team

January 28, 2013 Simon Black 1 Comment

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.

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