Reflections on Teams, 2017
2017, a year Inquisition learned a lot — from books and peers, of course, but mostly from teams, where the bulk of our work lies.
We worked with a variety of teams from wide-ranging disciplines: a resort and its management, banks, an insurance firm, tourism, a content and media agency, MBA students and even children!
Here’s what our team members learned:
Palesa Sibeko (palesa sibeko)
- Everyone has something to contribute, regardless of their position on the org chart or their history of non-performance in a team
- Historically disadvantaged people (e.g. black women) are less likely to feel that their contribution is valued
- Although there are tons of resources about how to improve teams, team leaders seldom make an effort to access or implement them
- The lack of basic data-related skills or orientation can be a huge barrier to team improvement efforts (inability to objectively measure changes)
- Little bets can make a huge difference in team performance and work “happiness”
- “Ego is the enemy”
- Aesthetics (incl. spatial elements in work environments) can make a significant difference in how well people perform and how well teams are want to collaborate (it sounds rather obvious but the extent at which this can be experienced reinforced this knowledge for me this year)
- People aren’t so much fearful of change itself as it happening to them without having been consulted or otherwise having gone through some meaningful process to better understand why the old way was a problem and why/how the new solution was chosen
Liz Dom
- Teamwork isn’t natural: If the conditions aren’t right for teamwork people have a tendency to work on their own, in the absence of feeling safe people retreat to solitary (not deep) work
- Teams want change — in theory — but in reality, find it hard to integrate new ways of working. They often stick to the way they’ve always done work, in spite of frustration or lack of results to avoid the challenge of changing
- Leadership plays a crucial role in driving team change and buy-in and continuous reinforcement of the narrative and process is required from the start
- One-role mentality persists in teams where job-specs are rigidily defined and regularly reiterated in process
- Small, persistent changes bring results — habits take 21 days to form — teams don’t execute on these tasks frequently enough and thus habits don’t form
- Different teams respond to different approaches — there’s no one size fits all person (facilitator) or approach
Thabo Ngcobo
- Teams aren’t skilled at returning to first principles and questioning the very foundational aspects of things they do and how they work
- Team behaviour/culture is often modelled on the behaviour of the most senior leaders, not what they say, and team members have a tendency to do as they do. Both good and, sometimes, bad things
- There’s always some cognitive dissonance that has to be managed typically because of what the team believes they stand for/value and what actually happens
- Remuneration and incentives play a huge role in signalling what matters and driving how well teams work together: this, as well as the unintended consequences of how incentives and remuneration are structured, should be looked at more carefully
Danielle Jaffit
- Leaders often know the ways in which the organisation needs to change, but due to their own resistance to trying something new, act as the greatest blockers to change
- Taking time to pause and assess how things could be done better, especially when the entire team is included, is incredibly potent in allowing people to feel empowered and valued
- There is a real need to acknowledge the cultural and relational dynamics in teams that arise when people of different race, gender and age come together to solve common problems. The tension that arises from differing perspectives can either act as a catalyst for great, inclusive workplace practices or be divisive and create stressful environments
- Strategy is important but so few teams leave strategy sessions with action items which validate or test if a strategic choice is the correct one. When people leave these big thinking sessions, having a short term goal, with associated actions and data points, it stop teams going down the wrong path and finding it too late to change once they realised they made the wrong choice
- When organisations make learning the mandate of one (learning) team, it takes the individual responsibility of continuous growth away. In an ideal scenario, continuous learning is part of how the team does their daily work, and as a result change is incremental and constant, instead of being a dramatic expectation following a 3 day training session
Vincent Hofmann
I’ve learned that most teams are trying to work fast in response to ever changing customer expectations.
At breakneck speed they don’t have time to contemplate whether their work is working. They become fixated on measures of delivery i.e. “did we hit the deadline, not impact”.
In the midst of churning out work the voice of the customer is drowned out by internal conversations related to internal demand for resources. You’ll know this is happening in your team when no-one can adequately ask the question “why would the customer need [x] and what are we hoping that they feel when they experience [x]”.
Because there’s a bias toward speed over impact, the meaning of the work drops off and teams face issues with accountability to and ownership of tasks. We know that meaning or purposeful work drives performance and so performance dips in teams going too fast.
When teams are short on time they skip over opportunities to learn and we’ve noticed that they ditch kicking off projects properly, don’t find time to coordinate reviews of their work and don’t reflect on the impact of their work.
It’s not that teams don’t know better, it’s just that they’re moving so quickly that they’ve lost the chance to learn.
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