Effective Teams: Camels of a Different Color? - Helpful Career Tips - Shore Paralax Incorporated

November 2002 Career Tip

Effective Teams:
Camels of a Different Color?
By Ed Hopkins
First called "committees, then "task forces" and now "teams," these corporate decisions making bodies often degenerate into self-absorbed red-tape machines that build camels when asked to make horses. Here is a basic recipe for reform.

   The year is 1907. An inventor named Henry Ford decides to build an affordable automobile for the common person.
   Imagine this: Rather than drawing upon his own knowledge of automotive design and manufacturing, Ford instead assembles a product development group and charges it with creating the Model-T. The group's membership is impressive Ford culls renowned scientists, technicians and marketers from Europe and America. These people are sure to produce a vehicle that will revolutionize transportation, he predicts.
   So, what miracles do they work?
   By 1930, the average American is still driving a horse-drawn carriage while Ford's team squabbles over how to leverage purchasing power to gain concessions from the steel, rubber, and petroleum suppliers. Meanwhile, the Model-T design engineers come to blows with marketing, because the marketers say customers will never buy a vehicle that looks like a threshing machine.
   Luckily, it didn't happen that way. We're fortunate that entrepreneurs like Ford did not come of age in the 1990s, a time when management by team was fashionable, albeit necessary.

From horseless carriages to horses by committee
   Our captains of industry were rugged individuals. For the most part, they challenged scientific and economic frontiers, Uncompromising and autocratic, single-handedly forged their personal visions into reality. But these innovators lived in a different age-a time when one person might possess all the technical skills and business acumen needed to create a revolutionary new product.
   Ingenious as he was, Thomas Edison was working with rudimentary sciences in a low-tech environment. Even so, it's said he experimented with nearly 10,000 materials before finding the one that illuminated the modern light bulb.
   As we moved into the twentieth century, stunning advances in fields ranging from chemistry and electrical engineering to market and finance made it more and more difficult for a solitary inventor to transform and industry single-handedly. It was no longer likely that one or two people could possess enough skills or formal education to solve basic business and technical problems. Solutions required the expertise of specialists working in fields that hadn't even existed only a few years earlier.
   By the 1950s, companies were finding it essential to assemble representatives from various business disciplines into committees. In theory, a committee's mission was to tackle a specific problem or project quickly. Unfortunately, the concept became a little too "couture." By the mid 1960s, many companies had as many committees as they did washrooms. Committees were so popular that multiple memberships became badge of one's prestige and a weather vane of future success. This was especially true for the stereotypical "man in the gray flannel suite," trying to climb his way out of middle management.
   The committee gave life to an entire corporate subculture, replete with Byzantine intrigue, inefficiency, and waste. More than one career crisis occurred when a ambitious executive failed to receive a plum committee appointment.
   Committee membership was so important that people began to send surrogates usually chosen from their subordinates, when they could not themselves attend one of the myriad of weekly meetings. Then somebody noticed that surrogates performed as well as the original members in such meetings. Soon it became commonplace to find entire meetings staffed with proxies.
   Like a aristocratic title, a committee spot was usually inherited by the manager's success. Like an old soldier, a committee never died. It rarely faded away either. A committee frequently survived reorganizations, resignations, terminations and acquisitions-upheavals that normally reshaped the whole operating structure of the company.
   The first widespread attempt to reform the committee system began in the 1970s with the development of the task-force concept. The idea was not to eliminate the committees, but to streamline them into more time-limited, and more focused mechanisms. The company task force-like a military task force-was supposed to focus on a specific mission, complete it as quickly and efficiently as possible, and then withdraw.
   The task force did possess significant advantages over the committee, and it did foster notable business achievements. But many task forces soon lost sight of their missions and became bogged down in bureaucratic quagmires.

Building the better camel
   By the mid-1980s, senior management was getting the point. A committee, by any name, when charged with creating a horse, will build a camel of a different color.
   Enter the concept of the team.
   Although it shares some characteristics with committees and task forces, the team is a nonhierarchical group designed to provide an egalitarian environment for exchanging information and ideas. Each member has an assigned role, is allowed to input freely into discussions and-most importantly-has the power to influence directly the final decisions of the group.
   The committee mirrored the organizational structure of the company at large; the team is much more loosely organized. It allows for free expression by employees, and it requires input from customers and suppliers as well. In theory the team produces results that satisfy business goals rather than producing results that do nothing more than satisfy the egos of the committee chairs.
   Unfortunately, some of the problems of the task force and the committee seemed already to have crept into the operation of today's teams.
   Here is a typical example. An East Coast transportation company recently formed an eight-member, multidisciplinary team. It charged the team with identifying and evaluating several potential suppliers who can design and provide a service.
   As team members explain it, their mission is simply to identify vendors and pass on their recommendations to a "sponsoring team" at higher level, which will evaluate their findings and pass them on to a third team at a still higher level, which will make the final decision.
   The assignment is quite important to the company. But frankly, it's not brain surgery. Yet, the final decision is expected to take nine to 10 months. These layers of teams have created a politic and structure that overlay the existing organization.
   A 400-employee heath-care company recently embarked on a total-quality-management process. Consultants advised senior managers that the first order of business was to set up about 40 teams-so that every employee in the organization would wind up on a team with nine or 10 other people. But nobody knew what the teams would be doing. They understood only that teams are the only way to operate in the new millennium and that companies should immediately assemble as many as possible.
   In other words, we have entered the age of teams for the sake of teams.
   These all-to-common examples are unfortunate. The team concept represents an excellent system for sharing vital information and reaching conclusions that are both consensus-driven and beneficial to everyone connected with the organization. But teams have problems too, just as committees and task forces did before them.
   The earlier types of groups suffered from inherent inertia, inflexibility, and a tendency to propagate; teams suffer from lack of discipline. When a committee sets out to design a horse, it usually builds a camel. When a team sets out to design a horse, it may build a four-humped, five-legged camel.
   Teams need not suffer the fate of their predecessors. The recipe for team reform is as simple as discipline. Eight guidelines can help.

Have a goal
Select members carefully
Define success
Set a lifespan
Know who's doing what
Establish accountability
Develop a team agenda
Make meetings meaningful

The box, "Eight Edicts for Effective Teams," gives more details. Together the eight edicts constitute a recipe for team reform.

Eight Edicts for Effective Teams
These eight guidelines for teams are often quoted, but they are seldom heeded.
Have a goal. Develop a clearly stated purpose, and put it in writing. A mission that the team only vaguely identifies on day one is likely to become even more vague within a matter of weeks
Select members carefully. Determine who should be on the team, and why. If the mission statement is clear, then assembling the lean and effective group should not be a problem During the Age of Committee, memberships swelled because organizations appointed people to them as a way of honoring certain employees. If possible, keep the number of people on a team to fewer than 10-much fewer if possible.
Define success. How will the team know that it has accomplished its mission? Members must define, in advance what constitutes a victory. If the goal is clearly stated, it will be easier to know when the mission is complete.
Set a lifespan. Establish a lifespan for the team. If the lifespan is linked to the team's definition of success, then the date of termination will be self-evident; there will be no excuse for keeping the corpse on life-support systems. As a rule of thumb, reconsider any life-span of more than six months.
Know who's doing what. Assign specific roles to each team member and determine the relationship among the people in the group.
Establish accountability. To whom does the team report? A team is likely to be more efficient if it reports to an individual. If it reports to a higher-level team, then make sure the higher-level team has fewer members and understands its responsibilities.
Develop a team agenda. How is the team going to accomplish its mission? If team members can't state a plan of action in five or six sentences, then they might want to go back to the first guideline above.
Make meetings meaningful. Meetings are often like a dentist chair for teams, a painful place team members would like to avoid. They'll hurt a lot less if you use rules for meeting discipline: Keep meetings short-no more than 90 minutes long. Any longer is a waste of time. At each meeting, have an agenda with three or four items that will be covered. You can photocopy the minutes (in their handwritten form) to give to team members as they leave. Who said everything has to be typed? Remember that meetings provide time for team members to report on their progress and problems, they are not the most efficient vehicles for solving problems.

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