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.
Interpersonal Issues: Touchy Feely Meetings
Hiring people who fit your company culture and team personality vastly improves overall performance, but there is still hard work to be done to make sure that the interpersonal dynamics are being actively managed so that the good work sees the light of day.
Even when people are friends, as we are, and have a lot in common, which we do, there will always be bullshit (our fancy internal term) that arises. If left unattended, it will take root and blow up spectacularly.
And those festering issues can manifest themselves in other ways. Someone will shoot down an idea not on merit, but because of who suggested it. Or someone gets caught up thinking about how they’ve been ‘wronged’ rather than focusing on the business.
There are only so many minutes in a day. You can either do your best to clear the mental decks or you can ignore the issue altogether, let things build up and then fire someone.
Unfortunately, most companies select the latter option.
At RoundPegg, we’ve chosen a different approach. We air our concerns and grievances with eachother in a bi-weekly Touchy Feely Meeting (a bit of a misnomer since it’s actually one of the hardest things to do).
We also have the benefit of knowing how each of us are wired and we pull out our ‘Peggs’ at every meeting to remind others of what we value or what our personality is. That makes things more effective…as do the rules we’ve put in place:
- 1. Start by stating how a situation makes you feel (When X happened, I felt Y). Describe the situation and your reaction to it only. No focusing on what you think the other person intended or their motives
- 2. Be vulnerable. Letting your guard down is the best way to prevent the meeting from going south and ensuring that everyone has the same goal of improving the situation
- 3. Think. Don’t react. Being defensive is not helpful. Instead, try to understand why someone felt that way. Needless to say, attacking is prohibited. Nobody is keeping score so it’s pointless
- 4. Take ownership of making someone feel the way they did/do. Likely, that wasn’t your intention, but it happened. Own it
- 5. Don’t let issues linger. It’s okay to agree to think through things as ‘homework’ and revisit in the next session but the person who brought up the issue must agree
- 6. Walk out stronger than you came in. The air should be more clear and will be if people are owning their actions and agreeing to
- 7. Work hard. Put real thought into solutions between meetings. If, like most other meetings, you walk in and wing it then it’s not going to work and you’ll likely violate rule #2.
We’re then posting the output on our internal wiki. This may be going too far, but we want to have a fully transparent workplace and you can’t get more sensitive than these meetings. We’ll continue doing so until we’re badly burned. And then we’ll still probably continue doing so with a tweak or two (like removing names).
As we grow we have every intention of rolling this out for every team. Frankly, it’s a couple hours a month that are very well spent. You waste more times doing less productive things, like status meetings.
While I’d like to tell you these are the elixir that cures all workplace ills, it’s too early. We’ve been at it for a couple of months, but we can definitively say that it doesn’t hurt and that we all believe we’re a stronger team for feeling comfortable bearing our insecurities.
The Dependability Quotient (DQ)
Sometimes the best mentors are your peers.
While cutting my teeth at my first ‘real job,’ I had a friend who constantly dwelled upon his Dependability Quotient (DQ). His take was that he was only as good an employee as his word. He was a freelance consultant so the need for a high DQ was more obvious than for all of us securely employed at Big Co., USA.
But, the need for a high DQ is the same regardless.
Work is all about trust.
Every interaction, even those with people with whom you are (supposedly) on the same team, is about trust.
In his case, the more people trusted him the more work he would get, the more money he would make and the more often he’d be recommended to others.
Even so, it holds true for all of us corporate monkeys as well. The more often we successfully follow through on our word the more access to big opportunities we get. The more we can be leaned upon to help senior executives. And the more we are entrusted to do what’s right for the organization and we don’t waste as much time being mired in office ‘politics.’
While my friend and I never explicitly talked about how to quantify DQ, I’d guess his mental equation went something like this:
DQ = 0.75*(# of completed commitments) – 1,000*(# of failed commitments)
While that’s likely overstating it, you’ve heard the old pearls of wisdom that say it takes 10 happy customers to make up for one pissed off one. Or ten positive remarks to cover the sting on one negative. DQ would follow an amplified form of those.
We work interdependently these days. There are very few things that one person accomplishes solo. So in order for you to look good you need your manager, peers or subordinates to follow through on the items they committed to do for you. And vice versa.
To get ahead, take the long view. Worry less about the petty politics and work on establishing your DQ. Only one of those will follow you for your entire career.
Think about who you’d love to work with again. My guess is that they were the ones you trusted implicitly after hundreds of repeated actions where they followed through and made you look good.
Thanks for reading. I’m off to tackle something I’ve promised to do for our team. Chalk another 3/4 of a point up to my DQ.
Building Great Teams – A How To
Aligning teams and getting everyone engaged and pulling in the same direction is key to your business’ success. Engaged employees are 50% more productive than under or dis-engaged employees according to Gallup.
To pick up a few action items on how to re-engage your team, follow along with Natalie Baumgartner, RoundPegg’s Chief Psychologist as she outlines the most important things you can do.
