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For Your Team's Success, Remember the How
by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback " 8:51 AM November 22, 2011
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You've been named head of a task force charged with determining how to respond to an emerging technological shift in your company's competitive landscape. At the end of roughly six months, you will have to answer for the joint efforts of fifteen people from across the organization whose work may determine the future success of your firm.
Task force members gather from across the globe for three days of intensive meetings. The group spends virtually all day every day, including meals, talking and arguing, with many small-group discussions lasting late into the evenings.
On the final day, the group coalesces around a clear statement of purpose — not just the what of your task but the why and who benefits in responding to the challenge. That afternoon, you hash out specific goals and plans that will fulfill your purpose.
Purpose, goals, plans. You end the meeting feeling satisfied that you've laid the foundation for productive work, which will be done over the coming months both online and in additional get-togethers.
But you're not done. The foundation is incomplete. You still have to do some crucial work that many teams forget or take for granted on the assumption it will take care of itself.
What's missing are the critical but often neglected mechanics of how the team will do its work. These may seem less important than the lofty subjects of purpose, goals, and plans, but without them the task force will never become a real team, a "we" dedicated to finding a solution rather than a collection of cooperating and often squabbling "I's."
These mechanics comprise four basic elements:
Roles and responsibilities. Every member needs to know their role or assignment on the team, what they're responsible for doing. In particular, they need to know how their work will contribute to the overall work of the team. Of course, roles need to remain flexible. You don't want people rigidly adhering to "my job" or exclaiming "not my job!" when others need help. Some work will be shared by all, but not everyone can do everything, and so members need roles because they need to know what they can expect from each other. Without this kind of clarity, no one will be able to feel they're a valuable and valued member of the team.
Work processes. These processes define how the team does its basic work. A good example is the way decisions are made. Who's involved in making what decisions? What are the agreed-upon steps for evaluating alternatives and making a choice? Internal communications is another important process. How often will the team meet online or face-to-face? What is the purpose of the meetings? How will members keep each other informed — through what reports and discussions and how often? Also, how will the team collaborate with other people and groups in the organization? How will the work of the team connect and flow into the broader organization? What sub-groups, if any, will be needed and for what purposes? Few teams need or should have a notebook full of policies and procedures. But every team needs common agreement about how ongoing work basics — such as decision-making or communicating — will be done.
Rules of engagement. These are the shared values, norms, beliefs, and expectations, sometimes called team culture, that shape and constrain the daily give-and-take of team members both live and online. They are the social glue that keeps interactions productive and prevents constructive disagreement from turning personal and dysfunctional. Every group harbors forces that pull members together into a team and other forces that push them apart into competing individuals. One of your key jobs as team leader is to foster the constructive forces while blocking the destructive forces. Setting out and discussing various rules of engagement — for example, how members should conduct themselves in meetings or what forms of conflict are acceptable and what forms are not — are key ways of countering the destructive forces.
Performance metrics and feedback. What measures of progress, developed how, by whom, and how often, will be used to assess progress? How often will performance reviews of the team as a whole be performed? The advantage of clearly defining how progress will be measured is that members will be able to assess themselves. Your role as leader then becomes guiding the search for solutions rather than convincing members that a problem exists.
In the teams you lead, have you taken the time to sort out these things? As mundane as they may seem, it's important to be explicit about them. Talk about them and write down the key ones. Don't assume, especially as teams become increasingly virtual and cross-cultural, that the ones you want will emerge spontaneously. These are the often forgotten ingredients so essential for team success.
More blog posts by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback
More on: Leading teams, Managing people
LINDA HILL & KENT LINEBACK
Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Kent Lineback spent many years as a manager and an executive in business and government. They are the coauthors of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader (HBR Press, 2011).
Define How Your Team Will Work
Most team leaders know to help their team define goals, but the conversation shouldn't stop there. You also need to agree on the mechanics of how the team will get the work done. Here are four things that need to be clear on every team:
Roles and responsibilities. Every member needs to know their tasks and how their work will contribute to the overall goals.
Work processes. You don't need a notebook full of procedures, but agree on how to carry out the basics — such as decision-making or communicating.
Rules of engagement. Establish a constructive team culture. Discuss the shared values, norms, and beliefs that will shape the daily give-and-take between team members.
Performance metrics. How will you measure progress? Define the measures for meeting the goals, and the consequences for not meeting them.
Adapted from "For Your Team's Success, Remember the How" by Linda Hill & Kent Lineback.
Get Your Team to Produce Results, Not Reports
Cross-functional teams can be notorious for generating reports, recommendations, and suggestions for implementation -- but no actual results. Next time you manage a team of people from different parts of the organization, focus them on making change, not proposing it. The first step is to alter the nature of the task. Don't ask your team to "look at" or "study" a certain issue. Challenge them to solve it: reduce costs by 10% or improve the speed of a process two-fold. Then, authorize them to experiment. Encourage them to try possible improvements to see which work. Not all will, of course, but the team will build momentum for implementation and prepare the organization for change. You may still want a report, but it should cover "what's been done," not "what can be done."
Adapted from "Do Your Teams Produce Reports or Results?" by Ron Ashkenas.
Do Your Teams Produce Reports or Results?
by Ron Ashkenas " 12:51 PM November 16, 2010
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From product development to strategy to technology management, much of the work done in organizations is assigned to teams. Yet often when the output from these teams is examined, few actually generate measurable results. Instead they produce reports, recommendations, and presentations — for a higher level decision and possible implementation. As a middle manager at a large pharmaceutical company once told me, "I've been on dozens of teams over the years, but can't recall ever being responsible for a result."
Here's a typical example: The operations manager for a financial services firm wanted to reduce the time required to set up new trading accounts for corporate clients. To make this happen, she pulled together a team of people from sales, trading, technology, operations, credit, and risk. Over the course of six months, the team (which met for an hour or two every week) analyzed the set-up cycle times, benchmarked competitors, mapped the current process, interviewed customers, and explored technology options. Based on this work, the team produced a thoughtful set of recommendationswhich they presented to the operations manager and other members of the executive group. After asking numerous questions, the executives were satisfied that they understood the situation, thanked the team for its excellent work, and agreed to debate the decision among themselves.
So what's wrong with this picture? The team did a good job and was recognized for it; the operations manager received the information she needed; and the executive team had a basis for its decision making. The only problem is that — after six months of effort — the set-up time for new corporate trading accounts had not improved one bit. Instead of results, the only outcome was a fancy slide deck.
In many organizations this oft repeated pattern becomes an accepted part of the culture. Success becomes defined as a good set of recommendations, even if there is no tangible change.
The simple alternative to the cycle is this: Challenge your teams to produce a real result and not just a report.
Imagine our case if the operations manager had asked her team to actually reduce set-up times over the course of three months? Instead of studying the issues, the team might have quickly identified possible improvements, initiated experiments, collaborated with a couple of new accounts, and mobilized people who worked on setting up the trading accounts. In three months they could have tried a number of creative approaches, some of which may have produced results and all of which would have produced added knowledge about how to proceed. In addition, the team would have built momentum for implementation and significantly increased the readiness for change. Compare that to a deck!
Naturally this approach may not be appropriate for every issue. But if you really need to drive change in your organization, and you are in position to commission a team, remember that you have a choice. You can allow the team to develop recommendations and plans that others will carry forward — or you can hold the team accountable for producing real results.
Does your organization have a culture that expects reports or results?
More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas
More on: Change management, Leading teams, Managing people
RON ASHKENAS
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting. He is a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.
September 2009
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How to Manage Your Negotiating Team
by Jeanne M. Brett, Ray Friedman, and Kristin Behfar
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You are leading a negotiating team for your company, facing off with a major client to work out a price increase. You think you're on solid footing—you've done your homework, and you know the terms you're looking for. But after some opening niceties, one of your team members blurts out: "Just tell us—what do we need to do to get more of your business?" And in that moment, you know you've lost the upper hand.
Gaffes like this are more common than most businesspeople would care to admit. Team members, often unwittingly, routinely undermine one another and thus their team's across-the-table strategies. We studied 45 negotiating teams from a wide array of organizations, including ones in the finance, health care, publishing, manufacturing, telecom, and nonprofit sectors. And they told us their biggest challenges came from their own side of the table.
Drawing on the lessons learned from the experiences of these teams, we offer advice on how to manage the two major obstacles to a negotiating team's success: aligning the conflicting interests held by members of your own team and implementing a disciplined strategy at the bargaining table.
Aligning Your Own Team's Interests
It's not surprising that negotiating teams wrestle with internal conflicts. After all, companies send teams to the negotiating table only when issues are political or complex and require input from various technical experts, functional groups, or geographic regions. Even though team members are all technically on the same side, they often have different priorities and imagine different ideal outcomes: Business development just wants to close the deal. Finance is most concerned about costs. The legal department is focused on patents and intellectual property. Teams that ignore or fail to resolve their differences over negotiation targets, trade-offs, concessions, and tactics will not come to the table with a coherent negotiation strategy. They risk ending up with an agreement that's good for one part of the company but bad for another. On the basis of our research, we recommend four techniques for managing conflicts of interest within the team.
Plot out the conflicts.
Confronting diverging interests helps clarify team goals, uncover personality conflicts, and ultimately build unity of purpose. Many managers examine competing interests by creating a matrix of the issues that need to be addressed. For each issue, they plot out their own priorities and position, as well as what they think are the priorities and positions of each of the other team members.
Consider the team whose conflicts of interest are represented in the exhibit "What Does This Team Want?" The general manager would like her company to earn more profit. The product manager is concerned that a price increase will erode market share. The sales representative is bent on preserving his account relationship no matter what the cost is. And the business manager wants to increase customer support so that his department will get more work. By plotting out each element up for negotiation, team members can recognize the internal trade-offs they must make before they can coalesce around the highest-margin proposal.
What Does This Team Want?
Work with constituents.
Underlying many conflicts of interest is the simple fact that members represent different constituencies within the organization. People don't want to let their departments down, so they dig in on an issue important to their constituents that might not be in the best interest of the whole company. If constituents are presented with all the facts, however, they might be willing to concede more ground because they'll also see the bigger picture.
To help get everyone on board with a single negotiation strategy, some leaders deliberately assemble teams that contain only individuals good at forming relationships across constituencies. Managers who don't have the luxury of choosing their team members, though, might have to go an extra mile to engage those constituencies themselves. One way is to invite important opinion leaders or decision makers to attend team planning sessions. Alternatively, team managers might have to embark on multiple rounds of bargaining with constituent departments. One manager described the many times he went back and forth between the customer service department, the program managers, and the engineers. He'd say, "OK, we need you to move a little bit more and get your number down a little bit more. We are close—just come this little extra bit."
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Jeanne M. Brett (
[email protected]) is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. Ray Friedman (
[email protected]) is the Brownlee O. Currey Professor of Management at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Kristin Behfar (
[email protected]) is an assistant professor of organization and management at the Paul Merage School of Business of the University of California, Irvine.
