Teamwork is an individual skill — Book Summary & Notes
After Responsibility Process, here is another gem from Christopher Avery summarized with important notes. I recommend both of his books and do check the website www.responsibility.com.
TEAMWORK IS AN INDIVIDUAL SKILL: SUMMARY
Introduction: Developing TeamWisdom for Personal Success
TeamWisdom refers to all the individual mental skills and behaviors that lead to highly responsible and productive relationships at work. The idea is based on my definition of “team”: A team is a group of individuals responding successfully to the opportunity presented by shared responsibility. Thus someone with TeamWisdom takes responsibility for ensuring that the group rises to the occasion, and in the process, makes sure his own work gets done and done well.
Hierarchies and Teams
Change consultants promote and build teams both as a means for achieving change and as a means for accomplishing work in changing environments. Because of their integrative nature, teams, we hold, are more flexible, innovative, permeable, responsive, and adaptive than are hierarchies. Teams also engender greater commitment from members who develop a sense ofpurpose and ownership by having a voice in what gets done.
Every individual at work can be far more productive if she will take complete responsibility for the quality and productivity of each team or relationship of which she is a part. What does this mean? In brief, it means:
· You may indeed have individual accountabilities, but accomplishing these will almost always depend on successful relationships with others and their work.
· You can better attend to your own accountabilities when you assume responsibility for a larger, shared task or deliverable.
· Your success depends on teams. Teamwork is an individual — not group skill and should be treated as such.
· Individuals make a huge difference in teams, for better or worse. You can easily learn what kind of difference you make and how to build and rebuild a team.
How Do You Get Things Done without Control?
To maximize team performance, it is recommended that team members engage in the following five conversations as the first order of business after the team has been formed:
Conversation One: Focusing on the Collective Task
If you are assigned to a team, or just want to create a team atmosphere at work, the first thing you should do is establish shared clarity about what the team was formed to do. Teambuilding starts with clarifying the reason for the team. It does not start with getting people to like each other better.
Conversation Two: Aligning Interests
The second conversation to have concerns members’ individual reasons for contributing to the collective task. Making sure everyone is at the same level of motivation is far more important to successful teamwork than matching appropriate skills.
Conversation Three: Establishing Behavioral Ground Rules
The widely used four-phase model of team formation (forming, storming, norming, and performing), suggests that norms don’t develop until phase three. You can accelerate the development of norms, however, by initiating a conversation about appropriate and inappropriate behavior in your collective effort and then enforcing those agreements.
Conversation Four: Setting Bold Goals and Anticipating Conflicts, Breakthroughs, and Synergy
The fourth conversation you must have with colleagues at the beginning of team formation then is about setting bold goals, the anticipation of conflicts in working toward such goals, breakthroughs, and synergy. When it comes to productivity, team performance corresponds to the first half of the classic S-curve. Due to the team’s flat organizational structure (shared responsibility without authority), members require time to orient themselves to each other and to the task. Thus, performance is frequently flat for the first half of the team’s investment of time and energy. After this initial period, however, breakthroughs will occur and the team’s performance turns up rapidly.
Conversation Five: Honoring Individuals and Their Differences
Differences in perspectives are powerful, especially when they are aimed at a collective task in an environment of trust. Team members must create explicit opportunities for each team member to participate and add value. The goal is to produce synergy through the discussion and appreciation of different perspectives. Two types of behavior kill synergy: people saying more than they know, and people saying less than they know. The fifth conversation, then, should be designed to discover what each member brings to the task and to honor differences in perspective and approach.
1. Teamwork As an Individual– Not Group–Skill
When I close my eyes and imagine a workplace in which all employees are totally responsible for their team experiences and results, I see several conditions that have made this possible:
· Teams have the power to select their own members.
· Everyone clearly understands team goals and feels personally responsible for attaining them.
· Expectations of performance and contributions of team members have been made explicit.
· Team members expect to give and receive regular feedback from each other and, thereby, hold each other to agreed upon standards.
· Rewards and recognition are based on team results.
To create and sustain this kind of workplace — not just in the imagination but in everyday experience — requires each of us to take personal responsibility for the ways we participate in teams.
What is Team Wisdom?
If you know your behavior will make a difference in the success of a team, you may already have TeamWisdom. If you don’t, develop it!
To understand what team wisdom is, first you need to know what it isn’t. Start with questioning the following myths:
Myth #1: Since teamwork is a group experience, individuals can’t be responsible for the quality of their team efforts.
Myth #2: Getting in a good team is mostly a matter of luck.
Myth #3: If you are in a poorly functioning team, and are not in charge, there is little you can do but grin and bear it.
Contradicting the myths above, people with TeamWisdom:
· Understand and act on all of their personal abilities to affect their entire team’s effectiveness.
· Know that being in a good team isn’t random. Instead, it is a function of one’s relationship behavior and what you and others do.
· Take personal responsibility for the quality of their relationships. They never wait for those “in charge” to notice and act on a situation that needs attention.
In a nutshell, TeamWisdom is a specific set of attitudes and behaviors that make “teamwork” an individual skill, not some elusive outcome of group dynamics available only by the luck of the draw.
Teamwork As an Individual Event
Raise your standards for good team performance, and start being responsible for your own team experience.
Forget the popular phrase “There is no ‘I’ in team.” There is too, and it’s you! To make teamwork an individual event, start taking total responsibility for your own team experience. To do that:
· Recognize that you are not a passive recipient in teams, that your behavior shapes every team you serve, and that you affect the team at least as much as it affects you.
· Acknowledge that not attending to team performance is a choice and that you are choosing to put yourself at the mercy of chance.
· Accept that if you are in a situation of shared responsibility and/or shared reward, then the quality and productivity of the relationships are worthy of your focus.
· Learn what behaviors and processes lead to successful teams and exhibit them.
Agree to Response-Ability
When you choose to respond intentionally to whatever happens in life, you have the key to personal power and growth.
Have you noticed that people who face what they don’t like about their lives with denial, blame, or justification get to keep things that way? The reward for this choice of behavior is that they get to stay in their misery! Prefer to team with people who believe that they create all of their life’s results — good and bad, big and small. With such a belief, there is only one person who can change what isn’t working — oneself. The difference is a simple switch of mindset: Agree to internalize the cause of your results (“I did this to me”) rather than externalize (“They/It did this to me”).
Is Your Silence Consent?
Treat every action and decision in a relationship as one you “consent to.” Or decline the relationship.
If teamwork is an individual skill, then when we elect to become part of a team:
· We retain our personal power.
· We lend our consent to a group direction and purpose.
· We incur a responsibility to speak up when we disagree with the group’s direction or purpose.
Contrary to the popular definition, real “team players” never “go along” with something about which they have strong negative feelings. They retain and exercise their personal power at all times. They remain conscious that authority relationships are just agreements — consents — between people.
“Going along” without passion or commitment creates two phenomena:
· Entire groups going where no member wants to go.
· People hanging out together with low commitment, low energy, low performance, resentment, and low esteem.
When true teammates disagree with teammates, partners, bosses, or elected representatives, they push back, knowing that the group’s final direction will either represent their personal consent to that direction or represent the place where they withdraw from the group.
The Benefit of Showing You Can Be Provoked
Being provocable better supports responsible collaboration than “being nice.”
Needing to be nice — or needing to be seen as being nice — is evidence we need social approval more than we need inner congruence. Social approval is great to have. We all need and enjoy it. But, as health professionals will tell you, when social approval conflicts with personal experience, it actually can become destructive. It’s called lying.
To overcome this block, we can reduce our willingness to tolerate irresponsible behavior and increase our “provocability” — that is, our ability to show what really happens inside when others’ behavior hurts us. When we choose to show our true response to irresponsibility, we actually foster true collaboration with others. How? Because provocability signals integrity.
And it’s integrity that builds trust between coworkers.
Provocability is part of a collaborative communication strategy called “tit-for-tat.” To play tit-for-tat, start interactions with cooperative behavior and, after that, match others’ behavior. If they cooperate, then you cooperate. If they are uncooperative, then show provocability. Point out their uncooperative behavior and let them know you hold them responsible for the relationship.
Experience Judgments Completely So You Can Clear Them Away
Identify and clear your mind of judgments, so you can respond from choice, rather than from auto-pilot.
Upsets are opportunities to learn. But to benefit from upsets, we have to exercise our emotional intelligence with vigor. It’s our emotional intelligence that enables us to make distinctions around emotions and choose our responses. To make distinctions around emotions, we first have to examine them.
Whenever you feel a judgement against someone, stop, name the feeling, analyze the reason, and then look for the consequences of your possible actions. Consciously checking on your judgments can prevent you from ruining your professional relationships.
The Gift of a “Present Hero”
“Present Heroes” seize opportunities to maximally serve their teams and themselves simultaneously.
“Present Heroes” are persons who remain mindful of the abundance they enjoy as members of their communities/teams/families and assume it’s usually in their own self-interest to invest a little personal energy to help the group. When it comes to meeting individual and group needs, our willingness to think in terms of “both/ and” instead of “either/or” is a strong indicator of our personal TeamWisdom.
Master Your Intentions
For extraordinary TeamWisdom, discipline yourself to examine both conscious and unconscious intentions.
“Intention” is always both conscious and unconscious. And the majority of our behaviors are actually controlled unconsciously. If you doubt this, just recall the last time you consciously sent blood to your gastrointestinal system to grab some sugar or protein and report to your muscles with it. Unconscious drives, goals, desires, visions, dreams, urges, fears, images, thoughts, sounds, feelings, sensations, and intuitions operate in all of us all of the time. They form the basis of our unconscious intentions.
When you announce an intention and an associate reminds you, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” she could be signaling that she perceives more about your unconscious intentions than you do. Many people with extraordinary TeamWisdom work hard at maintaining awareness of both their unconscious and their conscious intentions. They do this by reflecting (often through meditating or writing) on the differences between their conscious intentions and their actions, results, and perceptions.
Any incongruence between one’s conscious intentions and one’s actual behavior holds information about unconscious intentions. People with TeamWisdom use this awareness to fuel self-discovery and develop cooperation skills and harness these forces to build powerful integrity.
Living and Working “on” Purpose
If you want to take 100-percent responsibility for a successful life, discover or choose your life’s purpose and go for it.
What does finding a purpose have to do with TeamWisdom? Well, the clarity of direction that comes from being “on” purpose — be it inventing new technology, developing leaders, serving the sick and hurt, or leading people through the difficulties of change — is highly empowering. We experience people, things, and information with new and clear perspective once we are “on” purpose.
When we live and work with the conscious intention that accompanies purpose, we magnetize ourselves to attract three types of people:
· People who can help us learn what we need to learn
· People who can help us achieve our purpose
· People who will be served by our purpose
2. Creating Powerful Partnerships
People who can consistently create powerful relationships at work are people who are good team-workers. Their central characteristics include:
· Trustworthiness (keeping promises and commitments)
· Commitment to common goals and targets (refusing to slip from them because of external attractions)
· The ability to listen and be open to others’ ideas
· The ability to present a personal viewpoint logically and objectively
· The ability to self-criticize and receive others’ feedback with equanimity
· The ability to motivate others (free of manipulation)
· The ability to complete tasks and achieve results
What’s in It for Them?
To make yourself a powerful motivator, help other people tell you what’s in it for them to work on a project with you.
When one person is looking for another’s commitment to high performance, it’s much smarter (and a lot easier) for the first person to tap into the second person’s existing motivation, instead of dictating that motivation. Even if the follower’s motivation is hidden, it’s there. And it’s the follower’s motivation that fuels her performance, not the leader’s.
Examine the logic contained in the following five statements:
1. Everyone alive has hopes, dreams, and wants for themselves.
2. People who have no hopes, dreams, or wants are dead.
3. When people get out of bed and go to work, they have linked what they are going to do that day to their hopes, dreams, and wants in a way that makes sense to them. Or they wouldn’t get up, would they?
4. Therefore, all of us have our own excellent reasons for investing in work projects — even if we have learned to deny or hide those reasons, sometimes even from ourselves.
5. The best way for me to serve fellow workers is to help them uncover and focus on their own motivations — even if they attempt to convince me they have none.
It’s in Your Interest to Be Helpful to Other People
The more helpful you are to other people, the more they will give you access to what motivates them.
According to the great philosopher/inventor, Buckminster Fuller, the best way for one person to win is not by making others lose, but by making others win too. He taught from the 1940’s until his death that the more people a person helps to win, the more people that person can expect will help her win. Fuller’s teaching was in the forefront of a growing body of literature about the power and humanity of “servant leadership.” Being a servant leader means helping one’s followers become successful, instead of expecting followers to serve one’s personal success.
Protect the Interests of Other People
Discover the interests of your teammates and disallow any action that might disparage those interests.
The folks who occupy the position of integrity police are important to the maintenance of relationships between partners. Our research indicates that they possess three primary characteristics:
1. They display an endless capacity to record and remember both the explicit agreements and implicit expectations made between partners.
2. They exhibit extraordinary mindfulness of how entering a partnership exposes vulnerabilities on both sides. They don’t hesitate to sound the alarm when one partner’s actions threaten to violate another’s interests or boundaries.
3. They have irrepressible urges to “call it” when any party initiates action that could violate any other party.
Such people have extraordinary TeamWisdom! From them, we can all learn the importance of discovering “what’s in it” for each of our teammates. We learn that discovery and mindfulness of the whole scope of primary interests helps all members of the team protect their outcomes from the self-absorbed and potentially unintegrated actions of others.
The Miracle of Efficient Gifts
Give favors that cost little, yet provide real value. Ask for favors with the same principle in mind.
Economist Kenneth Boulding recommends that leaders focus on “efficient gifts.” Boulding defines efficient gifts as favors that cost the giver little or nothing to provide, yet provide great value to the receiver. Examples include:
· Early warning of an impending threat or opportunity
· Introductions and referrals
· Welcome feedback that reinforces or corrects a course of action
· Temporarily covering another’s post
· Receiving and forwarding messages
· Holding doors open
· Proofreading a document
· Answering a simple (or maybe even silly-sounding) question thoughtfully
Efficient gifts add more value — even in the business world — than transactional exchanges. It’s also been said that miracles are interpersonal in nature. In that light, people with TeamWisdom are both smart business people and miracle workers.
Celebrate the Successes of Other People
When you routinely celebrate the successes of other people, you program yourself to expect success — from yourself and from other people.
Consider the following story of utter resentment. My friend, Steve, scored a hole-in-one recently while golfing with some buddies. A week later, one of those buddies bumped into Steve’s older (and highly competitive) brother, who remarked with sincerity how “sorry” he was to run into Steve’s buddy because he hadn’t believed Steve’s story and was “afraid” the buddy might verify it. This type of behavior is rampant in present day organizations. We have witnessed senior executives attempting to motivate employees by declaring hatred for a successful competitor. Peer managers use the politics of resentment at all levels of organizations.
People with TeamWisdom behave quite differently. They fertilize the ground in order to grow unlimited successes by always celebrating the wins and successes of others. And, in so doing, they perceive — and create — a world of unlimited abundance for themselves and others.
Appreciate Conflict
Viewing conflicts thoroughly is the TeamWisdom challenge. Operating with clarity is the reward.
Any upset, fear, or conflict, when thoroughly viewed, will disappear. Whether we practice this in ourselves or within our groups, this truth is the key to appreciating conflict and finding clarity on a situation considering the following lessons:
· There is tremendous power in conducting ourselves so that the people in our team feel free to express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with how we are investing time and attention.
· When disagreements arise in a relationship, it pays to treat them as an opportunity to learn.
· New opportunities will become available when we are willing to let go of our own agendas and create new ones.
· It can be wise for a leader to label a disagreement as “important” and then allow someone else to offer a new perspective that helps to resolve the disagreement.
· Listen for the “truth in the room” by observing both your reactions and those of the group to each new speaker.
Distinguish Criticism from Feedback
“Constructive” criticism is still criticism. Instead of criticizing, “feedback” your responses with compassion.
So, what replaces “constructive criticism” for the responsible team member? It’s something we call “compassionate revelation.” In fact, compassionate revelation is the essence of effective feedback. You practice it by pointing out the consequences of another person’s actions. The trick is to feed the consequences of someone’s actions back to them truthfully and compassionately.
Say you have a person reporting to you named Mary, and Mary places a proposal on your desk that, in your opinion, will have to be rewritten. Consider the following two responses to her work. You decide which one will get a better response and why: “Mary, I’m sorry to have to tell you this even though it’s for your own good. Your proposal is lousy. It will have to be completely rewritten if you want a chance of getting the business.” “Mary, in my experience, this proposal is not going to produce the result that I think you want. Let’s talk about it and determine what it might take to get the business.”
All Teams Need Closure
When dismantling a successful team, make sure team members “close” that chapter of their work lives so they can focus their energy on the new work before them.
The way some teams end can leave participants feeling incomplete, confused, or even abused. Ending this way costs the participants psychically and diminishes their productivity. People with TeamWisdom understand teams require closure. Most teams begin ceremoniously with announcements, formations, orientations, and launches. Too many teams, however, disregard the value of a ritual ending. Without one, members are left with the loose ends of their personal investment.
Unacknowledged endings create craters in productivity. All teams need either to celebrate together or to cry in their beer together. What they do together may not be nearly as important as the fact that they do something together to mark the end of their mutual investments.
To choose an appropriate vehicle for closure, ask yourself what activity would allow members to feel “complete.” The size, cost, and formality of the activity depends on the desires of the group.
3. Collaborating “on” Purpose
On a well-run team, team members are focused on a clearly understood, shared goal. Little or no time is spent on wheel spinning and low-yield activities. Team members get more done in less time, and technical expertise isn’t the only factor fueling the team’s efforts. Commitment to a common task drives the success of the team. The most powerful force for success in teamwork is intense commitment from each participant.
Clarity Is the Source of Power
To move forward together, establish shared clarity.
What does shared group clarity look like? Simple. Each member should be able to explain simply and clearly what the team is accountable for. The mental images behind these statements should be identical across the team. Thus when listening to each other, teammates should hear their own ideas reflected back at them. And there should be sufficient detail to assure that the ideas really are duplicated and not just approximated.
Shared clarity can be gained through early, aggressive alignment about direction. The charter, mission, deliverable, or outcome of the team’s work must be clarified together through discussion and conversation. Think about the times when you accepted ambiguous direction like, “Make money!” Then think about the times when you accepted clear direction like, “By the end of the year, design a second release of our product that we can build efficiently, and, that our customers want to buy from us.” In which situation were you more resourceful?
Come Together Over Commitment and Skills Will Follow
Select teammates for their commitment, then together find the needed skills. Select for skills, and commitment might never appear.
Conventional wisdom on teambuilding advises leaders to first attend to creating the “right” skill mix as they assemble teams. I couldn’t disagree more! Why? Because skills are much less critical to responsible relationships and high performance on teams than is aligned motivation, energy, enthusiasm, drive, and interest because:
· Talent doesn’t create teamwork, shared desire does.
· Low motivation is more infectious in teams than is high motivation.
· Even highly skilled freeloaders will rapidly bring a team’s performance level down.
· Skilled individuals act within their roles. Committed team members do what needs to be done for the team, that is, they improvise.
Sure, you should aim for the best skill-fit possible for a job. But managing skill-fit is a project management concern, not a team leadership concern. It’s important not to confuse the two be.
What to do? If teamwork is important to you, choose team members for their motivation first, and their skills second.
Teammates Don’t Have to Like Each Other
You will achieve better cohesion when individual and group outcomes are aligned, rather than relying on interpersonal attractiveness.
While interpersonal attractiveness can be valuable on teams, investing one’s efforts there is actually not the most powerful strategy. Encouraging affinity to a shared task — instead of encouraging affinity with each other — has proven to be the fastest and surest way to create strong group cohesion.
What does this mean in practice? Instead of using techniques and exercises to promote friendships, work to get everyone to adopt a common focus so that each team member sees good reasons to work with others.
A more effective practice is to use people’s self-interest to seed powerful teamwork. For each individual, discover how she can win when the team wins. The easiest and best way to do this is to ask. When you align individual and collective outcomes in this way, what you will have is true collaboration. Once that is done, see if team members don’t like each other better.
Who Is the Most Powerful Member of Your Team?
Teams perform to the level of their least-committed member. To predict your team’s performance capacity, examine the commitment of all your partners.
Is the team leader the most powerful member of your team? Is the most inspired member the most powerful? The smartest member? Nope. None of the above. The most powerful member of your team is the one who cares the least about your team’s task. This is because his lack of commitment establishes a low baseline to which other team members may fall. The success — or mediocrity — of your team likely will be determined by him.
Many people say they don’t let the freeloaders (least-committed people) bother them, but in true team situations, such “safe” positioning costs everyone. When a freeloader comes into a team and can’t be rejected because of bureaucratic policy, the other hardworking members of the team immediately and drastically reduce their work level and channel their attention and commitment to other parts of their lives. Why? Because it’s human nature to want to apply our attention to that which will produce the greatest results. Whether we say it aloud or not, everyone knows that freeloaders leverage our efforts downward, not upward.
Consensus
Consensus isn’t about being nice. It’s high-octane fuel for team direction and energy.
What some people love and others hate about the process of consensus building is that it requires participants to seek each group member’s sincere consent to move forward. My definition of consensus is 100% agreement to move forward together. Why is consensus important to a high-performing team?
· High-performing team is measured by energy and direction. Without consensus, a group has no shared direction. Without consensus, people work literally at cross-purposes, canceling out each other’s efforts.
· When groups pursue a direction determined by majority or authority, those who dissent can lose energy and their commitment.
· The effect of low commitment on teams is dramatic. When low commitment is present, it will always be more infectious than high commitment.
The key to consensus building is steering the discussion away from “right versus wrong” arguments. Use language that doesn’t vilify dissenters, such as “That works for me,” or “That doesn’t work for me.” And, above all, keep asking the group, “What could move us forward together?”
Don’t Rely on a “Common Enemy” for a Sustainable Goal
Instead of simply rallying to beat a “common enemy,” look for more sustaining and expansive goals that lie beyond beating an opponent.
The two largest risks stem from the “us-versus-them” context:
1. Us-versus-them creates impermeable boundaries and halts the information flow in and out of a team as the fear of suspicion clamps off communication. People evaluate all others as either “for us, or against us,” so anyone not obviously in the team is assumed to be the enemy.
2. Us-versus-them focuses on a “surrogate” outcome instead of a genuine. Achievement as it is possible to beat a “common enemy” without adding an ounce of value to your customer or improving your score.
Leaders with strong TeamWisdom reach beyond “common enemies” for a lasting goal that expands opportunity and wellbeing at every level of an organization. It’s okay to use a “common enemy” as a launch pad. But then, it’s time to ask, “What about this race is so important that we and our competitor(s) are both in it?” Other questions should occur to you shortly thereafter: “What customer benefits lie beyond the us-versus-them-battle?” And, “What sustainable team purpose stands on the other side of this competition?”
4. Trusting Just Right
Learning to trust just right can make any relationship better. Although trust is something that is hard to establish and even harder to maintain, it is arguably the most vital resource a company has to draw upon in order to support and sustain long-term working relationships in the new economy.
Trust Reflects Responsibility
As your ability to respond grows, so does your trust in others.
Want more trust in your life? Consider this: We think of trust as something that only happens between particular people for particular reasons. But, if trust exists only between people, how do we explain those all-trusting persons who seem able to trust everybody all the time?
As you focus on teamwork as an individual skill, you will find the level of trust you are able to achieve in a relationship reflects the level of your individual response-ability. That is, the more you are able to respond to the actions of others, the more you are likely to trust them. As your ability to respond grows, then, your trust in others will grow as well. In the end, how much you trust others is really a reflection of how much you trust yourself.
The Formula for Building Trust
Making and keeping small agreements is how to begin building trust.
The formula to build trust looks like this: First, make a small, low-risk agreement with someone, an agreement you can afford to have broken. Second, complete the agreement, keep your end of it, and find out whether or not the other parties keep theirs. Third, make a larger, riskier agreement and repeat the process.
Small agreements are easy to make and forget because, obviously enough, they are small. But trust is almost always built by making and keeping small agreements. Why? Because if you don’t keep small agreements, you won’t get the chance to make large agreements.
1. Two rules about agreements:
2. Never make an agreement you don’t fully intend to keep (no matter how small).
Talking about Violations of Trust
When someone leaves you holding the bag, make sure to discuss the causes and effects of the falling out.
If you feel that someone has violated your trust, you can either live with the relationship in its damaged state, or you can remove yourself from the relationship completely. If the relationship is important to you, however, you must engage the people involved in a conversation about the broken agreement. Prepare yourself for such a conversation by following the seven-step process described below:
Step 1: Acknowledge your Feelings. Acknowledge your own feelings about calling someone on a broken agreement.
Step 2: Be invited. Conventional wisdom tells us we can’t tell other people anything they are not yet ready to hear. Since this is the case, it’s our personal responsibility to prepare others to receive our feedback.
Step 3: Be explicit. Describe the actions that have caused your concern. Be specific in your description of behaviors and deliverables.
Step 4: Use cause-and-effect language. Report the consequences to you (and to your team) of the broken agreement.
Step 5: Tell how the broken agreement affected you personally. If you have made judgments about the person, this is the place to say them. Start with words like, “I assumed…” or “I interpreted.…” The point is to take responsibility for your judgments and your feelings.
Step 6: Stop talking and listen. If your words have been compassionate and accurate, you are likely to have tapped into the other person’s integrity, and he will be pre- pared to make amends.
Step 7: Make a new agreement. This is the time to tell the other person what you want, how the relationship will be different this time around. You might describe what should happen if trusting becomes difficult.
Clean Up Broken Agreements
Don’t sweep your broken agreements under the rug. Clean them up immediately.
You build trust by making and keeping incrementally larger agreements. Although most of your relationships will develop positively if you follow the formula, broken agreements do happen, and there is always fallout after the event.
By applying the following four-step clean-up process, you can resuscitate any relationship:
Step One: Acknowledge you broke the agreement.
Step Two: Apologize for breaking the agreement.
Step Three: Ask your partner what you can do to correct the situation.
Step Four: Recommit to the relationship.
Acknowledge Mistakes
Acknowledge relationship mistakes quickly and move to resolution.
How you acknowledge a relationship mistake makes a big difference. Be careful about the language you use, and make sure the other party knows you are sincere. Here are some different phrases you can try:
· I blew it.
· I made a mistake.
· I let you down.
· I screwed up.
· I said I would do something and I didn’t.
· I failed to keep an agreement.
Apologize Effectively
A successful apology signals responsibility and learning, not subordination or shame.
People with TeamWisdom apologize readily, with grace, and with integrity, because their apologies come from intentions of responsibility and contrition, not from reluctance or shame. A responsible apology might sound like this: “You didn’t deserve what you got from me.” Or, “I learned a lesson and am ready to demonstrate my growth in this relationship.” Skilled apologies hit their mark immediately.
How to Make Amends
To get back to normal following a relationship mistake, ask how you can make amends.
Here are three practices people with TeamWisdom use when they are in the midst of cleaning up relationship mistakes:
1. Don’t assume you know what to do to get the relationship back into exchange. As responsible and introspective as you may be, it’s impossible to fully predict how the offended party is interpreting your broken agreement or relationship mistake. Make a new agreement and keep it.
2. Avoid making amends in a way that encourages the offended party to say something like, “Oh, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” This could be perceived as attempting to slip off the hook.
3. When others do try to penalize or shame you, don’t accept their response! Remember, you can negotiate the level of exchange in any relationship. If the other party is unreasonable, you can always decide the relationship is not so important to you as your own integrity.
How to Recommit after Making Amends
After making amends for a relationship mistake, recommit by describing how the relationship will work better in the future.
Recommit to the relationship by telling the other party (who has already received your acknowledgment, apology, and negotiated amends) exactly how you intend to treat the relationship in the future.
State your recommitment out loud. When recommitment is stated out loud, the new standard for your own behavior becomes public, and you declare a willingness to be held to that standard by
other people. Such public commitment is irrevocable. An expectation of responsibility is imbedded in your public statement, and everyone knows that every effort is going to be made.
5. The Collaborative Mindset
What are the characteristics of people with a collaborative mindset?
· People with a collaborative mindset stay focused on long-term goals while being sympathetic to the individual needs and goals of participants.
· They demonstrate a strong ability to step into another person’s shoes and understand the world from that person’s point of view.
· They can strongly support another person’s agenda without losing sight of the overall mission.
· They maintain a strong sense of personal power and integrity — caring for themselves and never losing their backbone.
Play a “Big” Game Instead of a “Small” One
Expanding the boundaries of your game will provide opportunities and make people want to play on your team.
Collaborators are inclusive players. They see themselves as responsible to and for themselves and also to and for the people with which they work. To become truly inclusive players requires us to expand our circles of reference, our playing fields, or what we might call our life “games.”
When a team leader who has narrowed her focus to include only her team’s success widens this focus to include the entire company’s success, other teams become potential partners instead of roadblocks. Of course, a leader can always restrict her responsibility to just her team. If she chooses to be responsible to all company teams, however, her success can extend over a much wider field.
The TeamWisdom Theory of Relativity
Treat whatever people tell you as true for them.
People with TeamWisdom listen completely and respectfully to speakers who represent different views. Why? Because they know that “right” and “wrong” are always relative, because they are evaluative. People with TeamWisdom don’t fear different points of view: They know different points of view offer opportunities to build and to expand. They know different points of view will not threaten them with extinction.
To adopt the TeamWisdom theory of relativity, consider all of your knowledge, ideas, and opinions as functions of your unique perspective or point of view. Consider other people’s knowledge, ideas, and opinions as functions of their points of view. All are valid and true. Some are more applicable than others in certain circumstances, but all are equally valid and true from their relative positions.
Honor Differences
Treat diversity as a functional challenge, not a political or moral issue
As lateral-thinking guru Edward de Bono teaches, to arrive at high quality ideas, we need lots of ideas to choose from. Most often, the best ideas appear after we have considered something from several different points of view. (De Bono calls this “lateral” thinking.)
Now, if we overlay this principle of lateral thinking onto the explosion of diversity in the workplace, it becomes easier to see one of the primary benefits of diversity. From which team then would one expect the best ideas to emerge — a team of similar people or a team of diverse people? I thought you would say that.
People with strong TeamWisdom treat diversity as a functional imperative, not a political or moral issue. Those who agree with this point of view will actually amplify the contributions of other people and ignore differences that have nothing to do with the focus of their work.
Competitor or Antagonist?
Distinguish between antagonism and competitiveness when you are sizing up the competition and figuring out how to inspire your team.
People can be motivated through cooperation or competition, and both have the potential of adding value to a team’s work. Cooperation supports synergy while competition fosters invention and choice. They can both be useful forces in group relationships. The trouble comes when we think of cooperation and competition as mutually exclusive. It’s politically correct these days to deem competition “bad” or destructive and cooperation “good” and constructive. Neither force, however, can exist without the other.
Every day I hear people in business speak of competitors with disdain, sarcasm, contempt, and cynicism. Coworkers chuckle and deem this an exercise of “the old competitive spirit.” From my viewpoint, however, such behavior demonstrates antagonism, not competition. And, in my experience, antagonism is incapable of producing the kind of sustainable, high performance actually needed to compete successfully in the marketplace.
Competitors with TeamWisdom respect, revere, admire, honor, and even love their competition. Try it. It’s a good place to make your stand in business.
Intentional and Reactive Relationship Outcomes
Identify relationship values that transcend win/win, win/lose, and lose/lose. Then establish an acceptable range of outcomes for every relationship.
If cooperation and competition are not opposites, then, what are they? We don’t have to choose between cooperation and competition. We have many more choices in any relationship than to “either” cooperate or compete as:
· People behave based on their conscious intentions and their unconscious reactions. The relationship between their conscious intentions and unconscious reactions makes up a behavioral range, not a set behavior.
· People differ in their abilities to perceive and to own their behavior as opposed to blaming them on circumstance or an antagonist.
· People with TeamWisdom consciously choose their value orientations and outcomes in every possible relationship. And they strive to correct their behavior rapidly when they feel themselves reacting outside their range instead of choosing within it.
Keys to Extraordinary Collaboration
Extraordinary Collaboration = Exchange + Expansion + Integrity.
Here are three keys to producing extraordinary collaborations:
1. Get in exchange.
Exchange is the foundation for all business relationships. We take turns granting favors, taking risks, talking and listening, giving and receiving, back-scratching, etc. The cornerstone of collaboration is positioning one’s relationships so that each party is providing value and receiving value and perceives that the relationship is fair in that regard. If the relationship is not considered to be in exchange by each party, collaboration attempts will fail.
2. Apply the power of expansion. Create a bright future for the relationship by developing a system-wide goal that (1) is bigger than any of the parties to the collaboration, (2) requires that all parties achieve this goal equally, and (3) promises much larger rewards (or exchanges) for the participants.
3. Build integrity into the relationship. Pursuing expansion is risky because investments and rewards may not always be in one-to-one correspondence.
The Bedrock of Collaboration
“Contractual” exchange is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for collaboration. For rock-solid collaboration, practice “relational” exchange too.
People with TeamWisdom (and companies that collaborate well) make two powerful distinctions in determining who to approach for collaboration.
Distinction # 1. Being in contractual exchange does not necessarily constitute “partnering,” but many people act as if it does.
Distinction #2. How we treat one another in the business relationship can support or threaten the continuation of the contractual exchange; therefore, it’s critical to make a distinction between contractual exchange and relational exchange. A relationship is in exchange when each party perceives that he is being treated fairly by the other party. Even a relationship that is in contractual exchange may be too costly to maintain due to reasons outside the contractual agreements.
People with TeamWisdom know that staying in relational exchange requires that they keep the following two principles in mind: First, you must remain sensitive to and learn from others’ relationship requirements (those requirements that go beyond contractual values); and second, you must keep communication channels open so that any party can suggest an adjustment to the agreement at any time.
Expansion Is the Collaborative Leader ’s Most Powerful Tool
Expansion creates collaborative opportunities.
Expansion, the second key to collaboration, is the most powerful tool available to any leader. Don’t be afraid to set a large goal, even a huge goal, one that will require many collaborators to achieve. Here are some guidelines for generating expansion:
· An expansive goal is larger than any one participant can achieve by herself. If it were not, it wouldn’t demand collaborators.
· The more expansive the goal, the more opportunity will be created. Some teams never turn away newcomers because they see every newcomer as extending the opportunity.
· The greatest opportunities for expansion often arise from what appear to be the most threatening circumstances.
· Expansive goals are usually so clear and specific that they require little if any verification.
· Expansive goals are usually so bold that participants don’t immediately recognize how the goals will be met. Such goals afford collaborators a sense of urgency.
· Expanding a goal is one of the best ways to integrate different people’s views. At the same time, integrating people’s views is one of the best ways to expand a goal.
Relationship Integrity Makes Collaboration Possible
Whatever else you do, don’t be the first to defect.
As Buckminster Fuller put it: Integrity is the ability of a system to maintain shape under pressure. Here are four practices to buttress integrity in relationships:
1. Develop your collaboration deliberately and communicate very frequently to affirm your interdependence, to update information, and to maintain rapport.
2. Always communicate what’s true for you, so suspicion never has a chance to arise.
3. Make and keep agreements about participation in the collaboration. Pay close attention to alignment, so trust can build.
4. Create a conflict resolution process by planning in advance what you will do to maintain exchange, expansion, and integrity when something goes wrong. This process gives everyone something to hold onto when pressures make things feel uncertain.
Integrate for Expansion: Expand for Integration
The largest purpose integrates all perspectives and expands to fulfill all needs.
People with TeamWisdom looking to live and work “on” purpose know the relationship between integration and expansion: integrate to expand, and expand to integrate. To apply these dynamics consciously, people with TeamWisdom practice the following:
1. “Integrate in order to expand” as a way to draw people towards each other and hold them there until two or more points of view mesh into a larger, more expansive whole.
2. “Expand in order to integrate” by suspending judgment and looking beyond preconceptions for the purpose of defining a vision or a “game” large enough to include or integrate people previously not included.
Conclusion: Demonstrating TeamWisdom from This Point Forward
There are many ways to incorporate the ideas in this book into your work life. The following five-step action plan is my suggestion for how to get started.
Step One: Assume personal responsibility for team productivity. At your next opportunity, whether in individual informal encounters or at a team meeting, announce to team members that you will only do work that leads to the entire team’s success.
Step Two: Get in the same boat together. At the next meeting, ask teammates to put aside individual roles and have a conversation about what you will collectively accomplish.
Step Three: Determine “What’s in it for me?” and then “What’s in it for you?” Once you know your super-objective, sit down at your keyboard or with pen and paper and generate a series of answers to this question: “What is in it for me to pursue this task, assignment, or super-objective?”
Step Four: Make and keep agreements. Since you have made your interests known, wouldn’t you like to protect them? While at your keyboard or sitting with pencil and paper, inventory your “shoulds.” These are the expectations you have about how others “should” behave in your presence, in your teams. List them all. Most people have “shoulds” about who, what, when, where, how, and why to communicate.
Step Five: “Call it!” By this time, you know how to craft the foundational elements for TeamWisdom. But they are fragile and must be protected. While the agreements are still fresh, ask others if they will help you “call” each other on behavior that is inconsistent with the team’s task, team members’ interests, and your stated agreements. They will most likely say, “Yes.” That is the easy part. Actually keeping to your agreements is not so easy. Next, tune your antennae to recognize all actions by yourself or your teammates that are inconsistent with the foundation you have created. When you recognize inconsistent behavior in yourself or others — and you will — immediately “call it” in a manner that allows the behavior to be examined and corrected.
