Emphasis on the differences between communities and teams has tended to hide an important truth: high-performance teams resemble communities. Relatively few communities are teams, because their typical goals relate to enhancing understanding rather than doing something. But all high-performance teams have the characteristics of communities. High-performance teams are exceptional. In addition to having the basics in place—clear goal, appropriate leadership and membership, and adequate resources and support—high-performance teams exhibit characteristics of community as well:
High-performance teams actively shape the expectations of those who use their output—and then exceed the resulting expectations.5
High-performance teams rapidly adjust their performance to the shifting needs of the situation. They innovate on the fly, seizing opportunities and turning setbacks into good fortune.6
High-performance teams grow steadily stronger. Over time, members come to know one another's strengths and weaknesses and become highly skilled in coordinating their activities, anticipating each other's next moves, and initiating appropriate responses as those moves are occurring.7
The members of a high-performance team grow individually. Mutual concern for each other's personal growth enables high-performance teams to develop interchangeable skills and hence greater flexibility.8
Fueled by interpersonal commitments, the purposes of high-performance teams become nobler, team performance goals more urgent, and team approach more powerful.9
High-performance teams carry out their work with shared passion. The notion that “if one of us fails, we all fail” pervades the team.10
The experience of being a member of a high-performance team is deeply meaningful. As Peter Senge has written, “When you ask people about what it is like being part of a great team, what is most striking is the meaningfulness of the experience. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes quite clear that for many, their experiences as part of truly great teams stand out as singular periods of life lived to the fullest. Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.”11 Thus even when the job is over and the team has disbanded, the members tend to have reunions to reminisce and relive the experience.
High-performance teams differ markedly from merely competent teams. Competent teams get the job done, generally without hostility or alienation. Yet the sense of excitement that might have brought them to the job in the first place isn't there. Being on the team is just a job.12 As Katzenbach and Smith say in The Wisdom of Teams, “What sets apart high-performance teams…is the degree of commitment, particularly how deeply committed the members are to one another. Such commitments go well beyond civility and teamwork. Each genuinely helps the others to achieve both personal and professional goals. Furthermore, such commitments extend beyond company activities and even beyond the life of the team itself.”13 To put this another way, high-performance teams have the characteristics of effective communities: a web of affect-laden relationships; a commitment to shared values, norms, and meanings; a shared history and identity; and a relatively high level of responsiveness to members and to the world.14
Managers Can't Force High-Performance Teams or Communities
Managers have important roles in establishing the basic operating arrangements for both teams and communities. In the case of teams, managers need to establish direction, membership, resources, recognition, and accountability.15 In the case of communities, they need to provide recognition, support, resources, and integration of the outputs of communities into the work of the organization.16 Managers can implement these basics with conventional management techniques by taking the necessary hierarchical decisions.
But hierarchical approaches cannot generate either high-performance teams or communities. As Richard Hackman writes in Leading Teams “There is no way to ‘make’ a team perform well. Teams create their own realities and control their own destinies to a far greater extent, and far sooner in their lives, than we generally recognized.”17
And the same can be said of communities, as Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder note in Cultivating Communities of Practice: “You cannot cultivate communities of practice in the same way you develop traditional organizational structures.”18
It's not merely that the standard management techniques are ineffective in the area of high-performance teams and communities. They can be actively harmful. Attempts to formalize or blueprint processes typically kill the passion of high-performance teams or communities,. The result is that high-performance teams slide back into mere competence, and communities simply evaporate.
The techniques of directing, controlling, and deciding that are used in traditional management to optimize and standardize repetitive processes are ill suited to inspiring and energizing high-performance teams or communities. That's because these techniques aren't “designed for aliveness.”19
Collaboration Rests on Shared Values
If collaboration is so important for organizational performance, why isn't it a more prominent aspect of organizational life? Why do so many company mountain-climbing expeditions or white-water rafting trips leave people less likely to collaborate than before they began? Why is it so hard to get from “me” to “we”?
It's partly the rah-rah cheerleading that isn't backed by substance. Often the basics aren't in place to enable teamwork to happen. Sometimes management practices and incentive systems are geared to the traditional work unit and individual responsibility and accountability, so that processes systematically undermine well-intentioned team-building exercises.
These are partial causes of the bad odor surrounding the whole notion of collaboration. But the root cause lies deeper: collaboration rests on values. And in traditional management, the espoused values of collaboration and the operational values at work often exist on opposite sides of a deep gulf.
Even Richard Hackman, a champion of teams, describes an experience that is common to many of us who have worked in an organization:
A few years [ago], the president of the university where I worked had asked me to serve on a committee to identify candidates for a deanship that had become vacant. According to the first of the three criteria for team success or team effectiveness [that is, getting the job done; the other two are growing as a team and growing as individuals], our committee was a success. The president liked the candidate we recommended and appointed him as dean. By the time that happened, however, I had already made my vow. Never again, no matter what, would I do anything that required me to work with the other members of that search committee.20
When we're in this sort of situation, we see that the other members of the group have different values, and this leaves us with the feeling that future collaboration would be horrible to contemplate. Where people don't share the same values, a work group may be the most effective modality of working together in the short run. But if time is available, it may be possible to get everyone to take a step back and examine their underlying values to see whether common values can be discovered or generated, as discussed in Chapter Six.
Narrative Catalyzes High-Performance Teams and Communities
Narrative establishes common meanings and transmits the values characteristic of high-performance teams and communities. It enables the members of high-performance teams or communities to see the world differently, to experience that internal “aha!” that revitalizes them and reframes how they connect with each other and the world.
The leader who has mastered the narrative tool kit helps high-performance teams or communities establish compelling objectives and actively shape the expectations of those who use the group's output. And in turn, members of high-performance teams or communities understand the evolving narrative of the situation in which they find themselves, so that they can adjust the team's performance to the rapidly shifting needs of the actual situation. And because members of a high-performance team or community know each other's stories, they can pre
dict what each of their fellows will do and be on the spot with the next required piece of the project.
Narrative stimulates high-performance teams and communities to participate with passion, creating the pervasive feeling that the failure of any individual member is a failure for all. Narrative gives teams and communities the spark that will help them lift their game to a new level and work together with shared passion.
The rest of this chapter discusses how to use narrative to make this happen.
Working Together
The last few decades have seen a massive shift toward working together, for many reasons:
The work requires it. Working together with others is necessary to achieve increased speed to market, faster product development, better customer service, lower costs, and the opening of new markets. No individual has the expertise necessary to get everything done. Collaboration has become a critical competency for achieving and sustaining high performance.21
People want it. After several hundred years of emphasis on the development of the individual, the pendulum has begun to shift back toward an interest in being together. Growing numbers of people are interested in moving from a world of “me” to a world of “we.”22
Technology has made it possible. Radical changes in the ability to stay in touch with others, by e-mail, the Web, and cell phones, have resulted in a global explosion of connectivity. Technology makes it possible for people to be spatially dispersed and still connected together.23
The rapid growth of the numbers of teams, communities, and networks is likely to continue:
Geographically dispersed teams can now be scattered around the world and communicate fully with each other. As global supply chains proliferate, it's increasingly common to see goods designed on one continent, manufactured on another, and sold on a third. Ever-faster cycle times require closer and more agile collaboration.
Communities of practice are recognized as essential for knowledge sharing in an organization. All organizations eventually discover that sharing knowledge happens systematically only when informal networks or communities of practice are in place.24
Mergers and acquisitions tend to fail as a result of the clash of cultures. Often a merger brings together groups that have been fighting each other as competitors, maybe for generations. The management then expects the members of these groups to work together. These situations make it urgent to figure out how to get people working together rapidly and naturally.25
Supply chain management is moving toward federated planning. The traditional approach in which the organization being supplied is seen as the commander of all the organizations that provide products or services, with the result that communications flow in a single direction and suggestions from suppliers are not put on the table, is giving way to an approach in which supply chain partners collaborate to address the trade-offs and break constraints across the extended enterprise. Suppliers become genuine partners.26
Examples of Four Patterns of Working Together
Work Group
Many so-called teams are not genuine teams but work groups mislabeled as teams. For example, from 1990 to 1994, as director of the Southern Africa Department of the World Bank, I participated in a group called the regional management team. Its members were the vice president of the Africa Region, the five other country directors, a technical director, and several senior advisers. The group was called a team, but it functioned as a work group, not a team. Each director had a defined responsibility and reported to the same vice president. Although the directors maintained amiable relations with each other, they had little need for active collaboration or interdepartmental coordination to get their work done. The main things the directors had in common were that they had similar work tasks and reported to the same supervisor.
Team
By contrast, the unit that I headed up in the World Bank from 1996 to 2000 was called a work group but it was also a genuine team. The unit's task was to spearhead the knowledge management initiative in the World Bank. Its stretch objective—established in early 1997 amid widespread skepticism as to its feasibility—was to have the World Bank benchmarked as a world leader in knowledge management by the year 2000. The unit's five members and its resources were clearly designated by the World Bank management. The unit had practically no decision-making power across the organization, so it worked by using its advice and influence. Although each member had defined responsibilities, the work itself depended on the ebb and flow of a rapidly shifting organizational scene and involved gathering intelligence on opportunities, identifying threats to the accomplishment of our objective, and establishing spheres of influence where that could help. Accomplishing the mission required a high degree of interaction among the unit's members, who got to know each other's strengths and weaknesses extremely well. I left the unit—and the World Bank—in December 2000 when the stretch objective had been accomplished. Since then, the team has continued to have reunions.27
Community
Between July 2001 and 2008, I was a member of a small community of people—located mainly in Washington, D.C., though some came from as far away as Erie, Pennsylvania—who were interested in and practicing the emerging discipline of organizational narrative. The origin of the group was a conference on this subject in April 2001, after which participants felt the need to continue the discussion.28 Over this period, the community met once a month, usually in the same place, and had an annual conference in April each year in collaboration with Smithsonian Associates. Some members had been with the community since the outset. Others joined and became active. Others who used to be active have moved away and were no longer active, although they remained in e-mail contact. The community was self-organizing: its leadership responsibilities were shared by those who volunteer to facilitate meetings, organize events, build the Web site, and contribute know-how and information. Its members are heterogeneous, but they shared common values and interests related to organizational storytelling. They had different views on many issues, but the discussion was healthy and constructive. In 2008, the group lost access to its meeting place. An alternative meeting place was found, but somehow it wasn't the same. Gradually the group lost energy and ceased to meet on a regular basis. There is an annual reunion every spring with a storytelling conference, but the group no longer meets monthly.
Network
Among the huge number of networks now active on the Web is the Workingstories discussion group—a collection of several hundred people around the world who share an interest in organizational storytelling. They use the network to stay informed about events, books, or articles of common interest and occasionally discuss issues. The participants have never met face-to-face as a group, although many subsets of individuals have met. Those who join make no mutual engagement to do anything in particular except stay in touch by way of the list. Although some members of the list would like the group to become a community, it currently lacks the necessary web of interpersonal relationships to attain that status, and so it remains a network.29
Organic Analogies
Hierarchy is still the dominant concept of organizational discourse today, so it's tricky to use analogies aimed at freeing an organization from hierarchical thinking about high-performance teams and communities. The hidden implications of some analogies can unwittingly reintroduce the hierarchy through the back door.
For instance, Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder write movingly about “cultivating communities,”30 and in a sense, this is real progress. The idea of cultivating a garden is certainly more relevant to eliciting high-performance teams and communities than the simple cause-and-effect notions of command-and-control. Cultivation recognizes that high-performance teams and communities are organic entities that flourish or wither based on the conditions for growth they encounter. And it is true that a plant does its own growing: it's not a good idea to pull a plant out of the ground to check whether it has good roots. All these aspects of the cultivation analogy are apt.
But othe
r implications are less appropriate. Those who talk of “cultivating communities” may inadvertently imply that communities are being gardened like vegetables—unthinking, mute, unconscious, operating according to some predetermined genetic program. By contrast, communities and high-performance teams are active, thinking, dynamic, living entities that have views of their own and don't always take well to being cultivated.
The Leader's Guide to Storytelling Page 18