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…

Company Culture: Weeding Out Diversity

photo by akean2

A couple posts ago we wrote about a poll RoundPegg had posted (login req.) on LinkedIn asking whether people would be willing to complete a 25-minute assessment to help identify how well they fit the culture of the company to which they were applying.

There were some strong opinions in the comments, both pro and con.  The takeaway is that many people who are against assessing whether they fit a culture have a different understanding of what culture is altogether.

“Homogeneity and lack of diversity are bad.”  That rebuttal may sound compelling but it has nothing to do with company culture (at least not how we define it).

What they mean is that you don’t want a company who thinks alike or, even more cynically, doesn’t hire people of certain races, genders etc.

First, let’s clear a few things up:

• * Culture has nothing to do with the color of your skin, your age or what associations you have
• * Culture is not what or how you think
• * A homogeneous ‘culture’ doesn’t mean that everyone blindly agrees

Culture is about values.

A company rewards what is collectively valued (e.g. being decisive).  And individuals are motivated by what they value.  You WANT those two to be aligned.  Desperately.  A lack of diversity/homogeneity in values is a good thing.

When people are rewarded for doing things that motivate them, they will work a hell of a lot harder and produce far better results.  They find themselves swimming downstream instead of up.

With respect to diversity, nobody should be discriminated against because of race, sex, age, disability – absolutely.  But that doesn’t mean you get better results when you mash people together with wildly different values (see: Congress).  Nor does it mean you get people who think alike.

Everyone comes to the table with different life experiences, different work experiences and different interests.  All of those create the diversity of thought both sides of the conversation desire.

Imagine we both value ‘being decisive.’  Without talking about it beforehand (ground rules are rarely set for our work conversations) we have implicitly agreed that we need to make a decision quickly and move forward.

But because we’re both seeking a quick decision that doesn’t mean we agree on the solution.

Sharing a value system creates a strong foundation upon which to constructively disagree.  We both understand the motivational forces behind the others’ argument.  So when I abruptly deliver my solution you aren’t going to see my curtness as a personal slight.  It’s not that I don’t value your opinion.  But I value our time more.  We can discuss it rationally (but quickly).

All those things we call ‘politics’ are lessened when we share a common set of values and we can now focus more on solving our business’ challenges instead of deciphering what the other meant in our last conversation.

When we talk about company culture let’s put aside the automatic reflex to fall back on diversity and start critically thinking about what culture actually means.

Company culture is what is valued and what is rewarded.  Period.

Culture Matters: Business Is Social

photo by jronaldlee

Company culture matters to your business.  That’s not a terribly bold statement.  But why?

Culture matters because business is social.

These days most of us work interdependently.  Your success is likely predicated upon exchanging ideas with your peers and receiving intellectual inputs from several different departments.  True individual contributors are few and far between in a knowledge-based organization.

A crude example is the evolution from waterfall to agile technology development.   Ideas and new products are created in highly interconnected and iterative processes rather than via assembly lines.  Which gets us back to culture.

We need to know how to exchange information with one another.

Culture sets those norms.  It establishes how we interact, how we make decisions and what’s deemed worthy of reward.

When employees’ value systems are aligned then so too is the company culture.  It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle because everyone interacts and rewards according to their own value system (no matter what the annual performance evaluation sheet says).

A well-aligned culture allows people to communicate freely because the norms are well understood. The ground rules are implicitly agreed upon by everyone who has elected to work there and they are reinforced with every interaction.

When values systems are out of line, cultures ‘go bad.’  Rewards seem arbitrary, nascent ideas are used against their authors or credit is co-opted.

Culture fosters trust (even in cultures that are aggressive and competitive).  In a game of repeated interactions it doesn’t take too many bad experiences to not want to work with a peer again.  Or to withhold your best when dealing with them.  Self-preservation will almost always win out over doing what is best for the business.

The better we all communicate the greater the likelihood of achieving success.  And since we’ve already optimized processes, slashed workforces and off-shored as much as we can there aren’t too many places left to squeeze out more profits.  Optimizing communication and aligning culture isn’t easy, but it’s the next frontier in driving business success.

How To Develop Great Cultures

RoundPegg has created the third webinar in a series on organizational fit. In this edition Dr. Natalie runs through the benefits of aligning a company culture as well as providing some solid how-tos in order to identify and align your own culture. While it’s not easy, it’s worth the energy expenditure.

Please enjoy and, as always, contact us at info@roundpegg.com if you’d like to learn more.