I like to take a First Principles approach to everything.
Here is my First Principles approach to building a team.
Principle First:
Team /tiːm/ noun.
A stable group of people interdependent in achieving a shared goal.
🧠Today’s Framework: The Team
📚Today’s Story: The Transformation Team that did not Transform
📝Today’s Quote:
“The product I am most proud of is Apple, and the team I built at Apple.”
– Steve Jobs
as recounted by his biographer Walter Isaacson (YouTube – 4 minutes)
🧠Framework: The Team
Today I’ll breakdown the definition of a Team into a framework of it’s components.
A Team is a stable group of people interdependent in achieving a shared goal.
Stable:
This means the team roster is known.
Teams change all the time. Think of any sports team: the roster changes throughout the season with injuries and trades. The roster changes during the game as people get rests, specialists come in.
But the roster is known at any point in time.
Think of it – an athlete has opinions coming at her from all over. Reporters writing pieces critiquing performance. Fans cheering and yelling. Teammates shouting “give me the ball”.
The Roster clarifies who’s opinions actually count, who to practice with, and who is available to pass the ball too.
Just like your team – documenting the team roster clarifies who is available for delegation. It shows who is available for collaboration. It identifies who can comment on work products. It determines who should be included in meetings and even who can be ignored.
This feels very basic. I assure you, if you do this regularly, you are already ahead of most Team Leaders I’ve observed.
But I see it missed all the time.
Define the members of your team.
Shared Goal:
The team is Aligned on defined Problem Statement. This Problem Statement should be written down. If it’s a Project, it should be defined in a Project Charter.
This also feels very basic.
But I see this element missed all the time as well.
Any time spent on the wrong problem is time wasted.
Document the shared goal.
Achieving:
There should be metrics helping the team feel the progress towards the goal.
There should be a single goal.
All of the metrics flow out of it.
I like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). First created by Intel CEO Andy Grove, popularized by John Doerr and his work at Google.
Results without process are unrepeatable. Process without results are futile.
I see lots of both.
I fired two property managers in 6 months. Neither had metrics that showing they were achieving their goal. All they needed to do was call a plumber, the basic service a property manager sells. Both companies failed to track that to-do.
Interdependent:
The above are really table stakes. This should be the hard part. So do the prior, and focus here.
We spend our early lives developing “Independence”, it’s easy to miss Interdependence.
We have long believed we Independently went to the grocery store to get all sorts of goods. But COVID lay bare the Interdependence of the global supply chain. This made it difficult to buy toilet paper, hand sanitizer, flour, yeast, and bicycles.
People in factories couldn’t go to work, halting production of essential goods like masks and cleaning supplies. When factories resumed, shippers faced backlogs and delays due to increased demand and their labor shortages. Retailers then struggled to keep shelves stocked. This illustrated how each link in the chain relied on the others to function smoothly.
One big interdependent mess.
We are interdependent on achieving this shared goal. It is larger than any of us could achieve on our own. If it weren’t, we’d never have built a team.
We need to cope with our interdependence.
Steven Covey dedicates 3 of the “7 Habits of Highly Successful People” to Interdependence:
- Habit 4: Think “Win-Win”
- This is an outcome of a Negotiation. Charles Duhigg’s wonderful book Supercommunicators says every converastion is a negotiation.
- Habit 5: Seek First to understand, then to be understood.
- This is helped by Active Listening (I also mention Covey in this article).
- Habit 6: Synergize
“Synergize” can be found on office lingo bingo’s everywhere… But the point is getting more from the team than any individual could have gotten alone. This requires Psychological Safety – see my deep dive here.
📚The Story of the Transformational Team that did not Transform
Here is what happens with a team has no defined roster, and no defined goal.
There was a business project that had been going poorly for a couple years according to several metrics.
A new Functional Leader was put in place. He started to generate some interest in improving team communication . If it went well, it would define the a new way of working for a long time.
He started off very strong. He could see the problem fairly clearly. He visited stakeholders one-on-one to get consensus and to build potential solutions.
He then assembled this group of stakeholders in a meeting. But people were unsure of their particular purpose in the meeting. Some had been spoken to before, some had not. The membership of the meeting was unclear.
There were several strong opinions in the room. It was unclear how they were to be incorporated, or who’s job it was to do so.
I thought I was going to be assigned leader of this project.
I canceled some travel to prepare for this major undertaking.
But I was never tapped. Nobody was ever tapped to lead this project.
Most people left that meeting confused. Some left energized and started several activities which were towards a vague goal.
This group never met again.
Imagine you are making a lasagna and you need garlic.
You go to the grocery store and spend a lot of money on several things. But you forget the garlic.
You didn’t actually achieve the objective that initiated the grocery store trip.
This is an activity without achieving the intended result.
You would have achieved this goal if you had written it down.
This transformational team was full of such mishaps: activities without results.
This transformational project was very expensive. It did not achieve a result.
The major miss was the functional leader’s failure to build a team.
Had he done so, he would have assigned a leader, provided resources including the rest of the roster. They would have documented a shared goal that all of their actions served.
Instead, several people pursued a bunch of haphazard actions that did not tie together in a cohesive goal. They were not aware of what the other was doing, or who was being tasked by the Functional Leader.
They were supposed to transform a struggling project.
The struggling project it was intended to transform continued to limp over the finish line over the next 3 years, 2 years late.
📕1 Book, 🎧 1 Podcast, 📺1 Video, 📰1 Article
Here’s the best stuff I’ve found while researching this.
📕Today’s Book:
This book focuses on how trust and cooperation form the foundation of successful teams. Sinek emphasizes the importance of creating a “Circle of Safety” within teams. This allows them to feel secure and collaborate more effectively. It provides insights into how leaders can foster environments where interdependence thrives. This makes it an excellent fit for your theme on team dynamics.
“Leaders Eat Last” by Simon Sinek
🎧Today’s Podcast:
I spoke with Jean-François Nantel, a Paris-based consultant, on his podcast. We talked about building teams. We also discussed how to get them to high performance. We covered much of this article, but much deeper.
`“Innovation, Agility & Excellence.” – Episode 183: “The Secret to High-Performance Teams with Evan Hickok” (or on Apple Podcasts). (33 minutes – the intro is in French, start at 1:34)`
📺Today’s Video:
Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull asks “Why do successful companies end up failing?” And he dives into his philosophy for building creative teams. This philosophy is what enabled Pixar to turn Disney Animation around.
“Keep Your Crises Small” by Ed Catmull. Stanford Graduate School of Business. (58 minutes)
📰Today’s Article:
Amy Gallo asks 7 questions to help you gauge how psychologically safe your organization is.
“What is Psychological Safety” by Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review.
