Creating Cohesive Teams

photo by jczart

I never would have imagined that my beloved Boston Red Sox would ever cross paths with my day-to-day work; presenting company and team culture analyses at RoundPegg.

Then, over the weekend, The New York Times published an article by Neil Paine in Keeping Score: Collapse of Red Sox Offers Stark Lesson in Team Chemistry that tied these two worlds together.

“If you could quantify Boston’s chemistry for the 2011 season, it probably would be revealed as the worst in baseball. But therein lies a major problem for objective baseball analysts: team chemistry, as perhaps baseball’s most beloved intangible, defies all measurement.”

The reality is that you can quantify team chemistry – that is, you can assess the cultural preference, personality traits, and communication style of individuals and aggregate those results into a quantifiable profile of the team.

That is the analysis we at RoundPegg are doing for our clients via our automated TeamPegg software. The output is a development guide that summarizes strengths and misalignments of individuals in comparison to the team, and recommended actions to improve team cohesion.

Would the Red Sox have won another Championship had they been aware of team misalignments – probably not, bad pitching is bad pitching. But much of the “historic late-season collapse” may have been avoided had Terry Francona been aware of his player’s attributes and worked to develop a well-aligned squad.

One of the reasons RoundPegg came about was because of this very reason.  Quantifying people isn’t easy, but it’s a data point.

Maybe next year the Red Sox will take my advice and even start scouting for players that are well aligned with their clubhouse culture – call me John Henry…

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