TEAM UP

Take a deliberate approach to team performance

Keegan Luiters

• Publisher: Keegan Luiters
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780648917113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Teams are essential to achieving more together in a fast-moving and complex world.

Without a deliberate approach to team performance, how are you going to support high performing teams?

Are you responsible for developing leaders or leading teams yourself?

This book is for you.

Whether you look at it financially, professionally or strategically, team performance is a competitive advantage for leaders and organisations. The time is now for leaders who can step bravely beyond thinking of teams simply as a unit of resources under command and control to recognising teams as a dynamic collection of people who can be greater than the sum of their parts. Team Up will help you to be clearer about:

• How teams are changing in the 2020s and why that matters if you want to stay relevant.
• The Team Performance System - a way of working in teams, not just another team building program.
• Supporting the shift from being individually busy to collectively productive through an approach that is resilient, flexible and adaptable by design.

Filled with anecdotes, examples and exercises for you to implement, this book gives you both a call to action and a path to action.

PART I

WHAT WAS

The ways that most teams in organisations operate are influenced heavily by what has come before us. If we are to design and implement better ways of operating as teams for now and next, the ability to articulate and understand what has got us here is an advantage. Part I of this book is dedicated to exploring ‘what was’ for teams. It is not a linear recollection of history, it is an exploration of some of the big influences on your teams today.

We will also take some time to differentiate teams from other ways of getting work done. This is not about semantics, it’s about being clear on what teams offer and when they offer the most value. This broader view of teams helps us get a sense of what teams are capable of and how we can use those principles in our time and place.

CHAPTER 1

TEAMS AND HUMANITY

In this chapter we’re going to look at:

• what we can learn from a zebra and a giraffe

• why it can be a good idea to channel Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes

• how a nineteenth century industrialist is casting

a shadow over twenty-first century organisational structures.

I n 2015, my family and I were on holiday in South Africa for a family wedding. We extended the trip (naturally!) and took the opportunity to include a safari. On the recommendation of my uncle, we went to Hluhluwe (pronounced more like Schloo-Schloowee) National Park. It was a life changing experience – as many people who are fortunate enough to see great animals in their natural habitat will tell you.

At Hluhluwe, we were able to drive ourselves in certain areas. One morning we were doing exactly that as a couple of animals decided to walk out in front of us. Out of the bushes arrived a giraffe and his companion – a zebra. We slowed down and simply watched as they went about their morning. They certainly appeared to be very friendly and enjoying each other’s company.

When we returned to the accommodation, we spoke to the ranger on duty about what we had witnessed. It turns out that it was no accident or surprise that we saw the giraffe hanging out with the zebra. In fact (and as we saw a lot more during our stay), zebra and giraffe often hang out together. The reason is that they complement each other. Zebra have great hearing, particularly for low range sounds, which means that they are able to detect predators and threats that their giraffe friends cannot. In case it isn’t obvious, being tall means that the giraffe are able to see predators and dangers in the distance much better than their striped mates. By working together, they can get more food and decrease their chances of becoming food.

Let’s be honest, in Hluhluwe National Park, performance is measured by population numbers. If the number of you and your tribe is stable or increasing over time, you are doing well. If you and your tribe are decreasing in numbers, things aren’t so good. In other words, because the zebra and giraffe work together in a way that utilises their complementary capabilities and strengths, they are able to improve their performance.

This behaviour has been shaped by their context. Over thousands of years, their predecessors have discovered, taught, passed on and embedded this way of operating. It is very unlikely that this has required PowerPoint presentations, strategy decks or leadership offsites (would they go to a city for that?).

As we will discover in this book, there is a lot about the way (and the reasons) that the zebra and the giraffe work together that are similar to what we call teams.

HUMANITY IS BUILT ON TEAMS

The idea of teams or working cooperatively to improve performance is a phenomenon that has served in many settings across nature. Most often, this is within the same species, but as the story of our African friends shows, it can even span across species. Humans are no exception.

If we look around our world, it’s clear that we couldn’t have achieved what we have on this planet by working as individuals.

Can you imagine how long it would take one person to build an office block? What about to build something like Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Taj Mahal, the pyramids of Giza or the Eiffel Tower? To construct an Airbus A380 aircraft, design a smartphone or tunnel from the UK to mainland Europe? Most of those things would be effectively impossible for an individual – either physically (the labour required would require living longer than we do) or intellectually (one person couldn’t know everything that they needed to).

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that humanity is built on teams.

Anthropologists and researchers in different fields have come to this same conclusion – even if the words are slightly different. According to a 2006 paper by Steve Kozlowski and Daniel Ilgen of Michigan State University, ‘human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer’.¹ A similar statement that is often attributed to anthropologist, Margaret Mead (but doesn’t seem to appear in any of her published work!) encourages readers to ‘never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has’.

TEAMS ARE BUILT ON HUMANITY

The idea that humanity is built on teams is fairly easy for most of us to acknowledge and accept. What challenges many of the leaders and teams that I work with is that the inverse is also true: teams are built on humanity.

I mean this in two ways. Firstly, our teams are literally made up of people. In the same way that a wall is made of bricks, teams are made of humans. This is an important concept to remind ourselves of, and brings me to my second point. The success of teams is a result of our humanity. The reasons that we can be greater than the sum of our parts and achieve incredible things together is a result of many of the things that make us human – like our ability to communicate, use language and to empathise with others.

HUMANS, NOT RESOURCES

Resources are things that we use to get tasks done. People are not things, they are wonderfully complex, sentient beings who, (according to behavioural economist Dr Dan Ariely) are predictably irrational.

The inherently irrational nature of humans is exactly why we can’t afford treat our teams as a bunch of resources. Resources are consistent, mechanical and excellent at repeating prescribed tasks. Humans are irrational and idiosyncratic. The...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• About The Author
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I: WHAT WAS
• PART II: WHAT IS
• PART III: WHAT WILL BE
• References
• Back Cover