Bloomport U

I picked out an interview the other day in the HBR with J. Richard Hackman (thought leader on Teams and author of the book “Leading Teams”) titled “Why Teams Don’t Work”.  Mr. Hackman’s point was simple, most teams are generally ineffective and most destroy value instead of create it.  Compelling, no?  I stopped to think, is there anyone inside of P&G who is not part of a team?  Probably not.  Are all of those teams effective?  Likely not.  Are we better than average in team effectiveness?  Not sure.  As leaders, can we avoid the most common problems with teams?  Absolutely! 

So based on that premise, I bring you 3+ ideas from the article to make sure your teams are effective.

1. Protect the Deviant:

The deviant is the person who brings up an idea and you immediately think “oh no… not possible”  I had a guy on a team who once said “you know this XXXXX concept is a waste of time, let’s just get rid of it”.  Wow did that set off fireworks!  It was such an engrained process for so many good reasons that it was quickly shot down.  The first time.  When he brought it up again, the team was a little less violent and it opened it up for a real “what if”.  The net result of that discussion was a faster and more robust process that sped developments to market 2-3x as fast.  My learning:  protect and encourage the deviant, these people are catalyst for change, divergent thinking, and spark creativity.

2. Avoid double digits. 

If you have more that 9 people on your team, it’s too big.  The principle I liked comes from Jeff Bezos, (founder of Amazon) and his “Two pizza” principle.  If your team needs more than two pizzas to feed, it’s too big.  This seems to be especially an issue in North America; here the concept is either “more is better” or “we don’t want to exclude anyone” not sure which it is.

3. Keep the team together

Flux in a team causes disruption, thus the longer you can keep a team together the better performance will be.  In P&G, if you have a team of six people, on the average, you will 1-2 people changes per year, if you have a robust on-boarding program, this is manageable.  But what if you have 9 people?  Or worse, 15 people?!?  What that much turnover, can you really expect much synergy or “magic”? (See point 2 above).  Additionally, if you don’t know who’s on the team, you are in trouble, it should be black and white, if it’s not, the leader needs to setup up and fix it (hard choices or not!)  I would add… who is the leader?

 4. Other points

Other points were basic.  If you don’t know where you are going, the team is going to suffer, if you don’t have a common plan, moral will suffer, as a leader, you need to find your own style and be comfortable with it, the leader needs to focus on the group entity, not just individual behavior, etc.

In summary, teams are a basic foundation to our daily work life, as leaders, we need to be clear if we are enabling our teams to deliver value, versus destroy it.