Imagine this – you arrive to work on Monday morning and find that your team has won the right to handle the company’s most important client. As a result the team will be expanded to deal with the extra workload.

There is already a huge list of well qualified and high quality applicants for the expansion – your team has the ‘pick of the litter’ because everyone in the company knows your team develops their people to their highest potential.

Mondays are a great day of the week for your high performing team. Members arrive refreshed from the week-end and look forward to meeting up for another challenging but rewarding week. There is a palpable sense of clarity and focus on the team objectives. Balanced with a playful approach to learning something new everyday and towards overcoming the evitable set backs and challenges. By the end of the week you know that team will be a little wiser, a little stronger and the sense of community a little deeper than before.

Then the alarm clock goes off. And you awake to your real world. And it is Monday morning and you have had such a lovely dream you were sad to leave it. Ahead of you is the commute, the pile of ‘stuff’ that will greet you when you get to work. The silent, trudging along, colleagues trying to conceal their quiet desperation about another Monday morning and a week ahead of sporadic at best, team-work.

There will be the evitable ‘crises during the week leaving you feeling physically and emotionally spent by the weeks end (or even earlier). A good portion of your week-end is spent ‘recovering’ form the effects of the week. Rinse and repeat.

What distinguishes these two scenarios? Simple – collaborative team work.

If building a collaborative team (one with high Collaborative Intelligence)was easy everyone would belong to one. That’s the bad news. The good news is that with the right tools people can do to develop their team from the ‘inside out’. Articles on ways to improve teamwork point to the fact that a great team never consists of an assembly of unmotivated and dysfunctional individuals.

‘High Performing Team’ (HPT) rule number one: HPTs are made up of well-developed individuals.

Conclusion: to grow great teams – grow great people

Training that grows people and teams in tandem is the secret of most successful organizations. You are frying two fish in the one pan. Beyond growing the individual the team requires a reason to exist and know its prime function. High perfuming teams are self-aware.

‘High Performing Team’ (HPT) rule number two: HPTs are very aware of what their team ‘does’. The role it plays in the overall success of the business or organization.

Conclusion: to get the best out of your team provide them with a challenging but achievable objective and never let them forget their role in the overall success of the enterprise.

A literature review on employee motivation provides some insights about how employees become motivated and part of a cohesive team.

1. They like to be treated as human beings – not parts of a big machine
2. They want to know that their work is appreciated
3. They like to know how their contribution fits into serving ‘greater good’ of the company
4. They want to have input into how their work is done
5. They want a sense of community – one to which they belong that they provide support for and in turn provides support them, when they need it.

How difficult is it to provide these things in the workplace? Well it doesn’t have to be ‘rocket surgery’. There is a seven point system that paves the way toward that high performing team you visited in your dream at the beginning of this article. It is presented in a series of questions:

A) What are the shared assumptions your team is using to generate the ‘team-effect’ they presently have?

B) What does your team think is possible?

C) What would it take for you and your colleagues to develop a deeper trust of each other?

D) Is leadership concentrated in a small number of the team?

E) What would it take to have that leadership spread throughout the entire team?

F) What changes in the culture of your workplace would have to take place for your team to be able to function more like a network and less like a hierarchy?

These are not easy questions and creating a high performance team is not always an easy process but it must start somewhere. These questions can act as a catalyst to conversations within your team that can have far-reaching implications.

Articles on ways to improve teamwork frequently imply that personal development has no place in the workplace. This is a delusion – you cannot develop an employee in sustainable way professionally, without helping them to grow personally.

A literature review on employee motivation often displays approaches toward employees as troops being sent into battle, rather than people who have personal as well as professional aspirations. A more rounded view of employees enables us to grow high performance teams that are connected and effective at many levels.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that running things with many layered, and expensive, chains of command is failing. Information flows in two main directions within a organization. Top-down and Bottom-Up. The transition from hierarchy to network is taking place but the pace of change will have to accelerate. Increasingly I bump into leader who are at their wits end trying to keep their team responsive to the rate of change in the market place and society in general.

Here are just some of the changes (ref: Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The World is Flat’):
1. Fall of the Berlin Wall – tilting the world toward free markets
2. Netscape IPO – creating a massive investment in fiber-optic cables (connection!)
3. Work flow software – enabling people from all over the world to collaborate on-line
4. Open-Sourcing – free software creating massive collaborative and self-organizing communities
5. Outsourcing – the migration of business functions to third world countries
6. Off-shoring – the proliferation of contract manufacture to China
7. Supply-chaining – the development of resilient networks of to achieve business efficiencies between retailers , suppliers and customer demand (e.g. Wal mart)
8. In-sourcing – logistics companies (e.g. UPS) enabling small companies act big through enhanced distribution networks
9. In-forming – the growth of information on the net e.g. the emergence of ‘Google’
10. Wireless – further enhancing the effect IT is having on business collaboration, personalization and mobility accelerated

Friedman goes on in his book to admit that the world really isn’t ‘flat’. It made for a great title. The field is very much tilted toward those parts of the world that can afford the technology and so forth, required to make the advances he talks about.

One of the most publicized factors in the ‘flattening process’ is outsourcing – and yet how this will play out is not clear.

I’d prefer to call the world ‘bumpy’ and it’s only going to get ‘bumpier’ as time passes – the inequalities that underpin the world economy are going to jeopardize the fantastic world Friedman envisages.

…and yes you’ve guessed it – I think we need to exercise a deeper more profound degree of collaboration to make the transition into a ‘flatter’ world.

A video about the ‘other side’ of outsourcing.

Over the last ten years organizational teams have become more distributed and very complex. Despite the number of technologies available to assist teams and groups, it is still exceedingly difficult to manage teams.

I use the term ‘organizational’ very loosely. By “organizational teams,” I mean teams working within organizations that could be solid, vertically integrated corporate entities, government departments, networked business clusters, ‘not for profit’ communities, informal “task forces,” social groupings and special interest groups.

Individual team members may belong to many of these teams on a part-time and ad hoc basis – they may see each other frequently, or never ever meet physically – conducting all communications electronically or via the web.

And contrary to popular belief, the introduction of all real-time conferencing and collaboration technologies can actually make things worse. It may distract team members from their real business objectives and drive them into ongoing loops of technology experimentations. In these situations, the focus on the work mission is often lost in favor of mastering and attempting to extract ever increasing benefits from the technology itself.

So why is it so difficult to successfully manage teams today? I believe there are two main reasons:

• Teams are using the wrong model to organize themselves
• Teams are not keeping pace with the rapid changes in their business environments’

So says Ken Thompson the author of ‘Bioteams‘. Ken’s book provides a convincing argument that to survive and thrive in to-days rapidly changing environment, teams need to mimic the structure of nature’s most successful designs. For example those found in beehives, anthills, and viruses. This book is a fascinating read for anyone curious about what its going to take to move teams and organizations into the hyper-linked, knowledge economy of the mid-21st century.

In an essay entitled ‘The Nueroeconomics of Trust’ Paul Zak demonstrates (check out the video attached) with the use of extensive experimental research that we human are predisposed to cooperate with and trust each other. By carrying out a series of ‘trust games’ Zak revealed a number of quite surprising results. One of the most fascinating conclusions was that when participants of the experiment extended trust to other subjects – the recipients of the trust experienced significant increase in oxytocin levels in their blood stream. Oxytocin is a human hormone that triggers feelings of connection and bonding.

This research has many implications. One is that when we extend trust toward another person we are changing their body chemistry. In the case of oxytocin we are actually increasing the desire in the other person to reciprocate trust and help.

The other is that trust begins with us – by extending it to others we can begin a process within which everyone starts to be capable of greater levels of trust. The reason this experimental research is so interesting to me is that trust is the foundation of collaboration. Without it there will always be significant limitations on the depth of the Collaborative Intelligence within a group.

Extract from ‘Presense – Human Purpose and the Field of the Future’ (Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers)

‘What seems tangible is continually changing: in fact, a hand is completely re-created within a year or so.’ This same observation could be made of business and organizations. When we look at teams we are tempted to think of them as concrete stable things – when in fact they are constantly changing. Even the bodies making up the team are being continually replaced. Trying to keep a team in fixed state is like a person rowing a boat furiously in an attempt to stay in the one place in a river. Eventuly they tire and have to allow the flow to carry the boat. We should remember that although we can’t hold the boat in the same place – we CAN steer the boat – and that is what collaborative leadership is.

When we look for a definition of ‘life’ we find it best described as something with the capacity to learn. In other words anything incapable of learning is (by this particular definition) as ‘dead’.  Is your team dead or alive by this definition. The team and organization most capable of learning is going to be the most capable of coping with the rapid rate of change occurring  in the business (and global) arena. Developing the Collaborative Intelligence of a team is a really good way to encourage the learning that is so vital to it’s health.

Taken from ‘The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook’ Peter Senge, Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, Richard Ross and Bryan Smith:

‘If there is one single thing a learning organization does well, it is helping people embrace change. People in learning organizations react more quickly when their environment changes because they know how to anticipate changes that are going to occur (which is different than trying to predict the future), and how to create the kinds of changes they want. Change and learning may not exactly be synonymous, but they are inextricably linked.’

(from the article) ‘Among the conclusions the study reaches are:

• The more a company empowers its employees to make decisions, the more likely it is to perform better financially and competitively.
• True enablers use technology to improve collaboration, encourage risk-taking, and optimize decision-making.
• Companies categorizing themselves as “true enablers” are three times more likely to be more profitable than their competitors.
• Compared with other types of firms, companies described as “true enablers” have a higher proportion that are more profitable than their competitors.’ Read on….

Thanks to Ty Franks for this reference.