How teamwork can be developed as an individual skill

Are you tired of hearing the excuse, "I was assigned to a bad team?" when teams fail to function as planned? It's the most common excuse for non-performance I hear from highly skilled professionals. I cringe when I hear it. In my experience, no team is "bad" unless each member gives up and consciously decides the team is unsuccessful. For this and plenty of other reasons, I conclude that teamwork should not be promoted as a group skill, but rather as an individual skill and responsibility of everyone in the workplace.

Why? Because teamwork is the primary means forgetting one's work done in a highly interdependent and changing environment. Treating teamwork as a group skill and responsibility rather than an individual one allows highly skilled employees to account for their non-performance by pointing fingers at others. This is an especially critical issue for highly capable professionals who seek to remain employed in environments of accelerating change.

To make my case, it is important to make distinctions between behavior in hierarchies and in teams. Teaming is one of three archetypal organizing mechanisms for getting work done. The others are

1) hierarchy and 2) exchange between a buyer and seller. However, the mind-set and behaviors for successfully participating in teams are not nearly as widespread and culturally developed in the workplace as are the mindset and behaviors for working in a hierarchy or for conducting transactions. Certainly one reason is that hierarchy and buyer/seller transactions have each been the subject of study and practice for centuries, some say for millennia. By contrast, teamwork has only a decades-long history of study and practice in the workplace. Read on for contrasts between hierarchy and teams in terms of getting work done.

Hierarchy and teams

Change consultants and their clients promote and build teams both as a means for achieving change as well as accomplishing work in changing environments. Because of their integrative nature, we hold that teams are more flexible, innovative, permeable, responsive, and adaptive than hierarchies. Teams also engender greater commitment from members who develop a sense of purpose and ownership by having a voice in what does and doesn't get done.

Teaming can be tough to incorporate and maintain, especially since teams are not necessarily permanent. And individuals, especially intelligent, high achievers, may experience great angst if asked to serve on teams. They can demonstrate supreme avoidance, not to mention ignorance, of anything resembling a team. Like the "starter" culture necessary for making a new batch of sourdough, the cultural ooze required for teamwork to flourish just doesn't seem to exist in some organizational environments.

People blame the hierarchical culture for this. I agree that, if not for the controlling mind-set that develops in many, or even most, hierarchies, there would be no need for a teambuilding industry, as teamwork often develops naturally and easily. Just visit any playground in the world to observe that girls and boys alike know innately by age five how to organize themselves around a shared task in which they each hold a stake. This suggests that teamwork is a natural human organizing process, and a skill set at least partially developed at an early age in nearly every individual.

Are hierarchies and teams compatible?

I have found images and an accompanying metaphor of "tall" and "flat" social structures to aid in comparing and contrasting the team and the hierarchy.

Consider Figure 1 at left. The figure labeled "tall structure" represents the typical accountability hierarchy, or chain of command. Now consider the figure on the right, labeled "flat structure." It represents the prototypical team in which people share responsibility for a result, but do not have authority over one another. On the left, we can easily envision acts of authority, direction, delegation, etc. These acts are respected because they get things done predictably, but criticized for being overly controlling and stodgy. On the right, we can envision opportunity for participation, more diverse perspectives on the task, emergent roles, and all the good qualities that we like (and the things that go wrong) about teams.

Two questions arise here: 1) Is either structure right or wrong? and 2) Does any organization exist as a pure type of one or the other structure?

My response is that both structures have good and bad qualities. While I am dedicated to understanding and developing team performance, I am in no way a hierarchy basher. I find the hierarchy and its chain of command extremely useful. I also don't ever recall seeing a pure hierarchy or a pure team in a collective larger than a few individuals. Every organization is obviously a hybrid of both flat and tall structures, using accountability hierarchies for role assignments, as well as teams (often not formalized) for managing complex interdependencies.

Forming teams in hierarchies.

So what's in the way of exhibiting team skills within some hierarchical organizations? One might answer that individualism, competitiveness, authority and accountability systems, professionalism (read: arms-length inauthentic behavior), control, and right/wrong thinking are all obstacles that have made the hierarchy and chain of command powerful. Does this mean that one should throw away the hierarchy as a basic organizing mechanism? Many proponents of teams do eschew the hierarchy, labeling it ancient, corrupt, and wrong. However, I've seen scant few large-scale team-based companies, and I have seen many large hierarchical organizations in which teams can and do flourish. Thus, I conclude that teams and hierarchies are quite compatible and complimentary organizing systems. Hierarchy alone is not the culprit when we fail to get teams to function in organizational systems. Rather, I believe that the challenges are mostly attitudinal and manifest in these forms:

avoiding responsibility (as different from a preference for individual accountability; distinctions will be addressed below);

right/wrong thinking;

win/lose thinking;

carrot/stick thinking; and

skill set/role thinking.

I came to this position after years of observing and helping to develop collaboration under competitive conditions, and long after devising a model of simultaneity, the observation that all relationships have simultaneously collaborative and competitive forces. (We respond to whichever force is greater in our perceptual field.) I am now confident that successful operation in teams and hierarchies are complimentary skill sets that already exist within most professionals, although the skills are frequently dormant.

My premise is simply this: Every individual at work can be far more productive if they take complete responsibility for the quality and productivity of each team or relationship of which they are a part. What does that mean? In brief, it means:

1. One may indeed have individual accountabilities, but accomplishing these will almost always depend on successful relationships with others and their work.

2. One can better complete his/her own accountabilities when they assume responsibility for a larger, shared task or deliverable.

3. One's success depends upon teams. Teamwork is an individual skill, not a group skill, and should be treated as such.

4. One cannot be on a "bad" team unless one gives up and consciously decides the team is unsuccessful.

5. Individuals make a huge difference in teams, for better and for worse. Anyone can easily learn what difference they make, and how to build and rebuild a team.

So, how do you get things done without control?

Teambuilding is simply a set of messages successfully shared between a group of people. Any individual can easily learn and practice teambuilding if they so choose. Professionals often use challenge courses, personality inventories, and other games and exercises to provoke groups into sharing these messages. But when we do that, the critical communications remain veiled. Thus the results appear to be magical. Individuals who want to get their work done through interaction with others must learn to go straight to the following five conversations during the course of their work.

1) Tackle collective tasks and create space for others to engage.

Teambuilding does not start with getting people to like one another better. Instead, the task itself is the reason for the team's existence. This is why Tom Peters' new passion for taking a project focus in everything one does is on target. Thirty years ago the academic literature on group cohesion was focused on interpersonal attractiveness. However, today it points more to shared affinity toward a common result. So the first conversation for the individual looking to build a team is a discussion with others about working to accomplish something larger than any one of themperhaps even to solve a problem that exists between them. If you think about it, you will see that the move from independence to interdependence begins with asking for or giving help.

2) Align interests.

The second most important conversation concerns members' individual reasons for committing to the collective task. Remember, commitment to other members is a by-product of having an individual stake in the collective outcome. Matching levels of motivation is far more important to successful teamwork than are concerns about matching appropriate skills. Skill mix is a vitally important issue for project management, but not necessary at all for teamwork. Why? If members don't have the required skills, a high performance team will improvise. Improvising is what teams do! However, regarding motivation, every team performs to the level of its least invested member. Always. We call this the principle of the least invested co-worker. Because it is not widely taught, most team members don't know about it and therefore don't know how to respond when it occurs-and it occurs frequently. I figure that ignorance of this one human dynamic costs billions of dollars in lost productivity annually.

People do recognize one element of the principle: freeloading. Freeloaders, individuals who don't do their part, are actually an institutional invention. Naturally forming teams don't have them; sanctioned teams with assigned members do. If not for the bureaucracy protecting the freeloader's membership, a team would boot a freeloader out immediately if he/she didn't quit on their own. When freeloaders are assigned to teams and demonstrate low interest, the rest of us tend to reduce our commitment to that effort and increase our commitment to our other work. We artfully bide our time until we can get off the team.

Most team members aren't currently equipped to surface and align motivations or confront freeloaders. It's not so much a lack of skill but a lack of permission and responsibility. The most common excuse I hear for not addressing issues of low team motivation and commitment is: "That's management's job."

3) Establish behavioral ground rules.

In the widely used four-phase model of team formation (forming, storming, norming, and performing), norms develop in phase three. Anyone can accelerate the development of norms by initiating a conversation about appropriate and inappropriate behavior in their collective effort, and then enforcing those agreements. Look again at the graphic of the tall structure (hierarchy) and flat structure (team). Notice that the hierarchy is rife with inherent assumptions regarding who can decide direction, who can judge, how communication and feedback will flow, who can and can't evaluate work, etc. That's the tremendous power of the tall structure. The flat structure has far fewer such inherent relationship guidelines-which gives it its unique power, too! Accordingly, a third critical teambuilding conversation must happen concerning how members are to treat each other when working together on the team.

Whatever operating agreements are made must be policed within the team. Team members must be equipped to "call" each other on broken agreements. Until employees learn the distinctions between hierarchy and team, and how it's in their individual and collective interest to provide behavioral feedback to teammates, most won't do so for the same reason they don't deal with motivation issues: "It's management's job."

4) Honor individuals and their differences.

Differences in perspectives, when aimed at a collective task, are powerful. Members must create explicit opportunities for each to participate and add their value. Differences, when combined and worked, lead to breakthroughs and synergy. Synergy happens only through interaction. Two types of behavior kill synergy: 1) people stating more than they know, and 2) people stating less than they know. Thus, the fourth conversation is one that uncovers all that each member brings to the task and honors differences in perspective and approach. From this utilitarian viewpoint, diversity is not about morality. It's not even about opportunity as an end in itself Diversity is about productivity, breakthrough, and synergy!

5) Expect breakthroughs and synergy. gy.

Few employees appreciate and anticipate how their interaction with others on a team will lead to breakthroughs. Yet well-functioning teams consistently demonstrate the bottom half of the classic S-curve, illustrated in Figure 2, when it comes to productivity. Due to the flat structure (shared responsibility without authority over each other) and members' need to orient to one another and the task, performance is frequently flat for up to halfway through the team's investment of time and energy. Breakthroughs predictably occur and the team's output turns up rapidly. Thus the "high performance" part of teamwork is always temporal, not sustained; and teams, unlike departments, do have beginnings and ends as their collective tasks begin and end.

Individual contributors must learn how to stay engaged with each other under time and performance pressures, expecting their interactions to lead to breakthroughs that create results beyond their imaginations. More importantly, individuals need to learn how to talk about this dynamic in ways that encourage team members to expect and create breakthroughs rather than breakdowns.

What must change?

What must change so that individuals treat teamwork as an individual skill? The single most important thing is to offer employees support for taking responsibility for relationships, in addition to being accountable for deliverables. To do so we must begin to distinguish between accountability and responsibility in the workplace.

RESPONSIBILITY

JUSTIFICATION LAYING BLAME

Figure 3-Responsibility chart

Accountability refers to being held to account for something (often expressed in terms of a quality and quantity of results within a time horizon) to someone. The hierarchy relies in large measure on accountability. Each position in the hierarchy is accountable for all operations performed by the chain that reports to that position. The inhabitant of a post distributes and delegates her accountabilities (without giving up accountability) to others to perform. Each post remains accountable to whomever delegated the accountability to that post. Accountability is negotiated and assigned, often via employment agreements.

If you work within an hierarchy and are not absolutely certain to whom you are accountable (the person who evaluates your performance) and for what you are accountable (the quality and quantity of results within time frames), you may be in danger of never knowing whether your work is relevant. I suggest that you take responsibility for your own actions in allowing this to happen and correct the situation.

Responsibility means, literally, the ability to respond. One of the first agreements I ask of any group is that we each operate from the position of responsibility for our actions and results. I use the Responsibility Chart (see Figure 3 on previous page) to illustrate what I mean. Below the line lie justification and laying blame, actions humans engage in with amazing consistency and success when things don't go our way (denial, shame, quitting, and obligation also fall below the line). But there is an alternative: responsibility. We can completely own our choices and results: "Oh, I did that. Look at my mess. Now, what can I learn from this so that I can correct, improve, and move on?" In ten years of asking thousands of individuals to operate with me above the line in a seminar or on a team, none has ever refused. Some have squirmed uncomfortably at first, but come to honor the opportunity. Most find it refreshing. Some find it long overdue in their environment. Everyone finds it challenging and appreciates being in a group that will support them in learning to operate from this mind-set.

When people talk of responsibility as "taking ownership," I think they refer to demonstrating both an intention for overseeing the course of a project (such as a shared task), and a corresponding intention to respond to that project's outcome. Thus "responsibility" is an internal experience. It's an urge, feeling, or mind-set with which one will interact in their environment in order to bring about a result.

While responsibility is an internal quality, accountability is an external one. To say it another way, accountability can be assigned, but responsibility can only be taken.

Just as tall structures rely on accountability, flat structures rely on responsibility. The two are not at all mutually exclusive; in fact, they are extremely complimentary. It is time for us to expect individuals to take responsibility for relationships as well as accountability for deliverables, and for those employees to engage in the conversations that build productive relationships at work.

Christopher M. Avery, Ph.D. is a speaker, author, and president of Partnerwerks, Inc., located in Austin, Texas. Partnerwerks, Inc. is an organizational performance firm that helps companies achieve outstanding business results by building extraordinarily aligned and responsible work relationships. This article is adapted from Avery's

forthcoming book, Teamwork is an Individual Skill: How to Effectively Share Responsibility (Berrett-Koehler, March 2001). Visit the Partnerwerks Inc. website at www partnerwerks. com. Receive TeamWisdom Tips each week by sending a blank e-mail to teamwisdomon@mail-list.com. Avery may be reached at 512-342-9970 or via e-mail at cavery@partnerwerks.com.

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