Eureka!

by Walker Royce

  • Steer

  Make things happen and break down barriers to progress

  Set, adjust, and reinforce shared objectives

  • Make quality judgments

  Understand viable alternatives

  Judge risks and opportunities objectively

  • Coach people and facilitate teamwork

  Listen, speak, and care

  Set the bar, enforce the bar, and raise the bar for everyone

  • Be trustworthy

  As I facilitated this discussion and organized the words on the white board, I was manipulative and purposeful in ending up with the five top-level categories shown. The first four were intended to align well with each of the four social styles; the fifth was trust. It was eye-opening for most participants to realize that we are asking our leaders to excel in all four social styles. Perhaps some people in the world can do this, but everyone understood that such people are scarce. The key conclusion we reached was the need for shared leadership, diversity, and teamwork, especially among the leaders of any organization.

  Our next discussion produced a description of what good teamwork looks like and what poor teamwork looks like. This discussion is summarized below.

  Evidence of Good Teamwork

  • Open information sharing

  • Honest, objective assessments (including “I don’t know”)

  • Following through on commitments

  • Teammates doing what they say and saying what they cannot do

  • Confronting and resolving issues firsthand

  • Disagreeing without disrespect

  • Minimal fear of error, failure, and mistakes

  • Consensus risk taking

  • Valuing each teammate’s time as much as your time

  • Developing a track record of timely and efficient accomplishments

  Evidence of Poor Teamwork

  • Searching for blame when things go wrong

  • Protracting minor issues by excessive debate

  • Misplaced or out-of-proportion recognition

  • Post-decision sniping and second-guessing

  • Closed doors or just-between-you-and-me discussions

  • Multiple coalitions engaging in competing discussions

  • Disagreement dressed up as “the devil’s advocate”

  • Unresolved issues, missed deadlines, vague agreements, and unfulfilled commitments

  Establishing Trust

  Discussions of teamwork and leadership can easily be brought back to one magic word: trust. Consequently, we concluded this section of the workshop with a deeper discussion of how we can all establish trust in other people. Here is the outcome.

  • Honesty

  The truth: keeping people informed

  The whole truth: including everything relevant

  Nothing but the truth: excluding everything irrelevant

  • Dependability/reliability

  Putting the team’s win in front of your own

  Achieving whatever you commit to do

  Accurately assessing what you cannot achieve

  • Competency

  The capability to achieve results

  • Open and honest communications

  The first three bullets were pretty well understood and unambiguous for the workshop participants. The last and most important item was easy to write down but hard to elaborate, so we structured the next exercise to go deeper into a few critical dimensions of improved communications.

  Exercise: Communicating Better

  The workshop participants were members of a team distributed worldwide. We needed efficient communications among ourselves, with our sales teams, and with customers. The goal of this exercise was to establish more teamwork and trust, so we focused on improving communications among ourselves. Within our organization, we had to live within certain constraints.

  • Most of our communications occurred when we were participating together in client engagements.

  • We held face-to-face meetings for strategic planning and review twice a year.

  • Weekly conference calls were our reliable periodic communications channel.

  • We used Email, phone calls, and so forth for most of our communications.

  Clearly, without much face-to-face contact, our written and verbal communications were the mainstay of team interactions and were vitally important to establishing trust and collaborative leadership. We challenged ourselves to improve in three critical areas. The first was general presentation skills. We all presented frequently, to each other and to our clients, and everyone’s presentation skills can use critique and improvement.

  The second was a challenge for our newly formed mix of distributed organizations and a leadership team full of respected and accomplished managers. How would we achieve consensus on decisions where there were competing views or positions? We had several strong leaders who were accustomed to running their teams with a fair amount of autonomy. They used different measures of performance, different hierarchies of values, and different methods of communicating status and plans. As one organization with a common purpose, we knew we would need to agree on measuring, valuing, and communicating more consistently.

  Finally, there was the logical counterpart of the consensus challenge: How can we disagree without disrespect? There was a fair amount of friction in interactions among these highly accomplished and competent technical people when they had differences of opinion. These usually involved design concepts, planning approaches, or competing technical solutions, often in gray areas. Challenges, critiques, and exploration of alternatives were necessities in our organization. We needed to brainstorm openly around ambiguous and complex situations. There was rarely consensus on what was absolutely right or wrong. More often than not, a proposed solution was probably better or probably worse than the alternatives. Everyone knew that honorable people don’t always agree, but our team was often unsuccessful at disagreeing without being disrespectful.

  The exercise was structured so that three different groups attacked the three different topics.

  Improving presentation effectiveness

  Achieving consensus among competing alternatives

  Challenging someone else’s opinion, position, or proposal without creating discord

  Participants were assigned to groups based on who would contribute the most to each topic and who would benefit the most by applying the results. Each group had a common goal: Come up with the most important ground rules for achieving the most substantial improvement.

  After an hour, the groups presented their results to the whole team for discussion, critique, endorsement, and wordsmithing. The outcomes are listed below.

  Improving Presentations

  • Start by stating a singular purpose.

  • Finish with a list of potential actions. Agree on at least one action, even if it is no action.

  • Finish prepared remarks in two-thirds of the time slot. Reserve one-third for discussion.

  • Table contentious stuff for discussion time and move on.

  • Tolerate no distractions (PCs off, cell phones off). Insist on the audience’s undivided attention.

  Achieving Consensus

  • Explore alternatives. Ensure that each alternative considers:

  The expected, most likely, outcome

  The worst that could happen

  The best that could happen

  • Use the democratic process where consensus is not obvious. For contentious cases that result in a “vote” among team members, defer the vote so that everyone has time to reconsider.

  • Provide a rationale for overruling the consensus. The team leader can overrule a decision for other reasons, but these reasons must be communicated.

  • Team consensus trumps individual preference.

  Always state, “This is what we agreed...”

  Never state, “I don’t agree, but I am abiding...”

  Challenging the Positions of Others

&nbs
p; • Listen to the entire position. Interrupt only for clarification.

  • Don’t say “I agree, but...” This is patronizing; the but means “I don’t agree.”

  • Seek first to understand. Don’t offer a contrary view until you show clearly that you have listened to and understood the position being taken by others. For example, restate the view that is on the table.

  • Disagree with the position or the facts, not the person stating them.

  These outcomes are not earthshaking. But the process of dedicating time to defining a set of principles for improving communications among peers, writing them down, and agreeing on them as a team resulted in some breakthroughs in relationships and insight into the importance that communications play in teamwork, leadership, and trust. These outcomes set standards to which the team members all agreed. They also helped us segue into the final exercise, where the stakes were much higher.

  TEAM PRINCIPLES

  The goal of this workshop was to create a common culture among a new leadership team. This is a mechanism for building an esprit de corps that promotes teamwork and high standards. Our diverse team of high-technology professionals distributed across the world needed a set of shared values and some bonds that would encourage mutual accountability. (This is how effective community watch programs work, for example.) We had just worked through most of the prerequisite building blocks with discussions on leadership, trust, teamwork, and communications. Now it was time to bring these together into a set of rules to live by.

  Exercise: Defining our Rules of Membership

  We organized our rules into four categories of commitments to our constituents:

  Working with our company’s other teams (sales, marketing, development)

  Working with external customers

  Working with ourselves

  Working with each other in the services organization

  Each breakout group’s assignment was to propose five ground rules pertinent to their category stated as behaviors and activities, not attributes. They could come up with as many behaviors as they wanted to consider. The whole team would narrow them down to the three or four most important. Topics to consider ran the gamut of operational behaviors:

  • Interpersonal interactions

  • Decision making

  • Conflict resolution

  • Frequency and format of group meetings

  • Attendance and punctuality

  • Participation in business planning, execution, and assessment

  • Project initiation, status, and completion

  • Customer priorities, escalations, proposals, and results

  • Reuse and knowledge sharing

  • Supervision, training, delegating, performance assessment, and hiring

  • Feedback and performance evaluations

  Each breakout team was told to exclude the obvious stuff:

  • Keeping issues within the team

  • Considering trust, integrity, and ethics as paramount

  • Everyone doing whatever it takes, independent of our charters

  • Doing what you say you will do

  • Communicating openly, honestly, and straightforwardly

  • Giving team goals precedence over individual goals

  • Not abusing power

  • Not being disrespectful, backstabbing, gossiping, rumor-mongering, whining, or complaining

  The creative ideas within the teams and the interactions among the teams were joys to behold. Each team quickly created about a dozen candidate ground rules. Then they spent most of their time culling, prioritizing, combining, and wordsmithing to gain consensus among the breakout team members.

  Each team presented their session’s top five ground rules to the entire group of participants. There was further discussion, further culling, some reprioritizing, and ultimately a vote on the top three or four ground rules in each area. The outcomes were synthesized onto a single sheet of paper, worded as if written by a single author, and circulated among the team for comments. With a few more additions and edits, and after just a week, we had a unanimously agreed-to set of standards that became the seeds of our organizational culture and identity.

  Working with Yourself

  Bend, but don’t break. Your professional development and your work/life balance are your responsibility. Manage your time and commitments to fit within your professional and personal boundaries.

  Increase your value over time. Your “supply” for our “demand” must be differentiated. We must each continually expand and exploit our skills by becoming more of an expert (depth) and/or expert in more (breadth).

  Practice what you preach. Expertise and credibility grow primarily by performing directly with and for customers. 80% of what we learn is driven by first-hand participation on the front lines. The other 20% is synthesis: reflection, re-factoring, and reinforcement.

  Working as an Extended Team with Sales and Development Teams

  Be influential by being a trusted advisor. Live vicariously through your team members’ goals. Keep their best interests at heart. Be smart in ways they are not. Be trustworthy and constructive at all times.

  Leverage shared objectives. Bring best practices to sales teams and customers. Learn from sales teams and customers, and package lessons learned for reuse.

  Practice leadership (doing it) trumps thought leadership (expounding on it). Build your reputation on results, then leverage that reputation. Best thoughts (plans, models, and ideas) are easy and speculative; best practices (execution proven through results) are more powerful and tangible.

  Working with Customers

  Understand our role in the customer’s context. Seek first to understand each important dimension of the customer’s world: pains, improvements, priorities, and constraints. Then determine how you can add value.

  Manage scope to drive results incrementally. Simplify and prioritize continuously. Attack important things first.

  Expand and exploit results. Harvest and share reusable patterns of success, learn from customers, and increase the breadth of our product/services leverage by increasing customer capability incrementally.

  Customer success is persistent; customer satisfaction is transient. Customer satisfaction is necessary, but not sufficient. A sequence of incremental results builds anchor points and enables continuous feedback.

  Working with Others in the Services Organization

  Accept that commitments are binding. Set expectations, checkpoint them en route and meet expectations.

  Accept that honorable people can disagree. Diversity in exploring alternatives is crucial to consensus. Debate alternatives without disrespect and act on the decisions as though they were yours. Feel free to challenge the status quo.

  Communicate honestly. Communicate straightforwardly, including what is relevant and excluding what is not. Celebrate successes and openly support learning from mistakes.

  Raise the bar. We are mutually accountable for our culture, our performance, and our execution. Push yourself, your teammates, and your customers toward quality, growth, and business excellence. Expect change.

  Workshop Summary

  This case study has described a relatively broad set of topics and results from getting together some competent professionals who have a long track record of success together. This experience produced many highlights. These were the most important ones for me: Diversity can be channeled into team strength. Teamwork is impossible without trust. Trust demands effective communications among individuals with diverse styles. If everyone is willing to give generously, and to compromise their competitive tendencies, for the benefit of others, it is possible to communicate more effectively, establish more trust, and accomplish more as a team with higher levels of comfort and lower levels of tension. The result is the magic of teamwork.

  APPENDIX B.

  Vision Document for Working-Out-Values Camp

  In 2005, I attended a year-end retreat in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada with my
wife and close friends. The four-day retreat, which was packaged as a New Year’s alternative, included yoga sessions and spiritual discussions. During a multi-day workshop, each of us reflected on the previous year and set goals for the coming year.

  This experience proved to be a much healthier alternative to other forms of New Year’s celebration, and it was a great forum for communicating with myself. I realized that, having spent 30 years in the high-pressure, high-travel, high-tech consulting field, I was ready to look at teaching others what I had learned. What came out of that workshop for me was the initial concept of an adolescent leadership camp where kids could learn some of the things that just can’t be taught in school. My main idea was to provide a month-long experience where malleable adolescents could explore a pragmatic balance of values, exercise those values, and learn some of the benefits of value-based reasoning.

  The idea of an adolescent leadership camp has stayed with me; it was the primary source of inspiration for this book. I think of this book as the homework I’ve done to prepare for the camp

  GOALS

  Today’s youth are confronted with increasingly more complex situations and diverse sets of values. Our education systems, parenting trends, and information sources provide many diverse styles but our youth have fewer outlets in which they can apply their outdoor skills, stretch their minds, and solidify their value frameworks. Their one-month camp experience would include elements of military boot camp, leadership workshops, classroom exercises, and field exercises. Through a set of fun, challenging, and intense elements, this camp would have three distinct goals: