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…
Moneyball for HR
photo by j9sk9s
Three years ago this month I started the research behind RoundPegg. I’m a bit of a baseball nerd and love the assorted flavors of statistics that have brought evidenced-based management to the sport.
My goal was to help business professionals replace some of the subjectivity within talent management with statistical rigor. We are still on step 2 of this process now, but the vision hasn’t changed.
At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I thought it was a good time (given Moneyball’s huge box office opening last weekend) to trot out a soliloquy I wrote to my soon-to-be business partners about the opportunity we had to make an impact.
———RoundPegg: The Beginnings———–
I’ve been thinking a lot more about RoundPegg’s place in the changing the future and why I get so fired up about all this. I tried to elucidate the concept through an incoherent story I told on Friday about the conversation I had with a friend at the Houston Rockets and how they were using statistical measurements to assemble teams to predict the outcome of highly inter-connected interactions. Particularly in a sport where individual success often comes at the expense of team success and the stats reported are selfishly obtained. Like our workplaces.
Coincidentally that same conversation he and I had was recently played out by Michael Lewis (author of MoneyBall) in what makes a tremendously long article to read online, but if you’re into sports or using statistical measurements to build teams, an interesting one.
With that, I hope, a better explanation of why this is so huge and the direction we could take this is such a game-changer.
Ultimately, I see RoundPegg completely changing how people work together by changing how we evaluate, grow and utilize people.
Where we begin to de-emphasize previous experiences (having already done a task) and recognize the inter-connectedness of our work teams and the importance the ‘softer’ skills play on our work outcomes. Where we stop managing and supervising and start coaching and leading. Where we let people put their strengths to use and the current ‘managers’ are only there to herd energy and keep the bus running straight. I wrote a post on why I thought this was important over the weekend.
A couple sentences that illustrated this point for me in the NYT article:
“Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding.”
What we’re trying to do now by making sure we get the right people on the bus is just the beginning. It’s vital and quite lucrative, undoubtedly, but if we succeed in forcing the conversation to acknowledge that our working relationships are as much or more important than the tasks I’ve previously completed then it’s a foot in the door and we can continue that story into the workplace.
After that it comes down to providing the tools for personnel development on an ongoing basis. Eliminating the bullshit, demoralizing annual review and collecting regular data on our performances, like box scores, that will enable organizations to develop and get more out of their employees and allow RoundPegg to collect data about how we all work together and what drives success.
We’ll be able to recognize whether someone is a net positive or negative to a team regardless of what his individual track record may be. We can identify strengths and weaknesses in a far more objective measure than ever available before. We will be able to put them in a position to capitalize on their strengths, figure out the secret sauce behind work teams and cobble them together for organizations in a way that drives the business like we only hope for today.
We’ll also change what we acknowledge as contribution. Our organizations will foster collaboration as a way to move ideas forward instead of internal competition (e.g. boxing out the right guy so your teammate can grab the rebound). And we’ll be able to measure the intangibles. Where it’s not always the guy who speaks loudest or most or with the most conviction who is construed as having the best ideas. It comes down to evaluating people for their unselfish play that often gets overlooked now.
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It’s been fun to re-read this. Our vision remains and we’ve made a lot of progress to the goal. But, obviously, this is something that is going to take time, but we’ll get there…for the good of us all.
Relying on Resumes: Sucker’s Play
photo by skipgo shannon
An amazing article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription req.) today profiled a Frenchman who’d managed to con his way into a tryout for an elite European ‘football’ club.
The brief summary is that he doctored his resume to show the he’d…”been climbing the ranks of European soccer, signing with a top-flight Paris club and training with a team in Argentina. He had an agent and a Web site that showed him scoring a goal for the English club Swindon Town. He’d even been chosen as an ambassador for Lance Armstrong’s charity.”
The problem was that none of it was true.
His reaction? “If I lied a little bit on my CV, I am sorry…I am just like 99% of my friends in France, who say on their résumé they can speak fluent English.”
It’s amazing that we’re surprised when this happens. We put a lot of stock into the resume and the supposed skills and accomplishments one brings.
The stats say that almost half the resumes floating around out there contain false information (actually 42.7% via ResumeDoctor, March 2006).
So why do we keep putting so much faith in resumes?
Because it’s easy.
Resumes are shortcuts to get us what we’re looking for. It’s safe to hire the person with fantastic accomplishments. It’s safe to find the person who talks a great game and has the self-proclaimed history to back it up. Pedigrees, experiences and stated feats are cues to us for an individual’s ability to perform in our work environments.
Granted, the resume is likely still the best thing we have going for us. But it’s outdated.
Like stocks, past performance is no indicator of future performance. Especially if that past performance is falsified.
The reason the past doesn’t work is because new variables are added to the mix. Your business is a new environment. There are new politics at play. The dynamics between teams is different. And the way things get done is vastly different.
So what to do?
Look for themes in the resume instead.
Does the individual create new products or modify existing ones? Are they focused on working with teams or working in a silo? Are the accomplishments they focus on team accomplishments or individual? Answers either way are fine, it’s all a matter of what your own culture is. What’s makes your successful people tick? What does the role require?
Chemistry Matters
photo by sflovestory
We’ve written a lot about why we think chemistry matters. RoundPegg, after all, is all about finding people who will fit on your team without creating a cloud of chaos around them. The better people fit into the team, the more energy they can spend driving the team forward instead of playing politics.
Kevin Millar, former Boston Red Sox, was recently signed by the Chicago Cubs. While he plays a position at which the Cubs need a backup, the odds of him making the big league team are incredibly slim. He’s fourth on the depth chart where only two will play with the big club. Plus, he’s advancing in his career and hasn’t hit much in the past few years. He was signed strictly to set the team’s mood in the clubhouse over the six-week stretch of spring training.
Millar’s take: chemistry matters.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Is team chemistry overrated?’ Well, you tell me. You’re with 25 guys more than your family from basically end of February to October. That’s not overrated. You try to bring a team and a group together. When you get everyone pulling on the same rope, it’s exciting.”
Last year, the Cubbies signed notorious clubhouse cancer Milton Bradley and paid the price. He’s the epitome of how companies often hire. An ‘A’ player by all statistical measurements, but little mind was paid to whether he’d fit in with the rest of the guys in the clubhouse. While impossible to attribute Bradley’s antics to the Cubs 14-game decline from 2007 to 2008, it’s obvious the front office has gotten the message and is determined not to repeat that mistake. Clearly, they lay some of the blame on a chemistry experiment gone bad.
Baseball is a unique sport where every play is a series of one on one battles. Between the lines, I’d go so far to argue that chemistry matters less in baseball than in other sports. Or your company. But as Millar points out, you live with these guys. If you don’t like being around them it’s going to be harder to bring your best every day.
The Cubs are willing to spend potentially up to a million dollars to set the right mood in the clubhouse. Meanwhile, your company is probably more dependent upon teamwork than any baseball team. How much time, effort and money are spent aligning your culture, your team and getting the most out of your employees?
Leaders Adjust to Their Followers
photo by annadriel
A recent Towers Perrin post reveals a conversation the author had with former NFL coach Tony Dungy. Football is known for its gruff, abrupt, in-your-face style of ‘leadership,’ but Tony Dungy was far from that. He succinctly states his philosophy to leading and getting the best from his players three points (from the post):
- His parents were both teachers and they believed that it was their responsibility to make every student an “A” student. But not every student learns the same way, so you have to tailor your style to each individual to bring out the best in them.
- You have to make each player on the team understand that the good of the team is greater than that of any individual, and that you can only be successful as a team.
- You have to earn your players’ trust — this is foundational to the first two. They have to trust that your coaching and advice is what is best for them and for the collective team.
I like this for several reasons:
First, if your leadership style is inflexible and you see people as cogs in the wheel then you dramatically limit the field of potential individuals who could excel in the job. Finding good people is hard, why should we further constrain ourselves?
Secondly, you are limited by the boundaries of your own imagination and thought process. If you only know one way to go about things then you won’t be open-minded to new, potentially better approaches.
Further, by acknowledging that people are unique you are connecting with them on a very personal level. In order to motivate you have to know them. That connection is usually a two-way street. By taking the time to understand someone you’re proving you care about them. Reciprocation is then difficult not to grant. You wind up getting a lot more effort in return.
Finally, you don’t want your people to compete with each other too much. That devolves into a race to the bottom. It is far easier to push another down than it is to lift oneself up. Putting the team first means that you won’t reward pushing others down in order to shine.
