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…

HR in the Social World

Human Resources.

The term and title conjures up images of payroll, benefits, and interviews.  It almost seems clinical at this point and definitely not the group you look forward to receiving an email from.  Why is that?

If there is any group in the company that should be responsible for getting people to work better with one another, to collaborate, to communicate, to make the most of the most important asset of the company, shouldn’t that group be Human Resources?

HR is the business of people.  And People are social.  The relationship is transitory.  HR is Social.

There is a groundswell change to how business is managed and conducted.  That groundswell is social.  HR has the opportunity to redefine their role in business by championing tools and platforms that enable social business.  HR truly begins to facilitate a higher level of collaboration, efficiency, and by proxy, productivity throughout the entire organization they are tasked with shepherding.  But where to begin…

I recently spoke at Jive Software’s worldwide customer conference, JiveWorld, last week.  Obviously this is a crowd receptive to the idea, having already purchased a social platform, but it’s worth noting that businesses are only starting to scratch the benefits epidermis of moving conversations out of email and into a structured, collaborative, and social environment.  Ideas are running fast and welcome.

The idea is this.  Your social platform provides the collaboration substrate. People operating on that substrate need incentive to collaborate, in essence to get out of their native environment and into this new warmer and more effective medium.  The work they do needs to exist here.  To accomplish what needs to get done, key information needs to exist in the new environment.  Once early adoption occurs it needs to take root via interactivity.  Other people inside and outside the work group need to not only consume the information but also interact with it.

The incentive is positive feedback from the environment and even more importantly from the other people participating in the environment.  And just as Gabe Zichermann describes in his book on Gamification by Design and in his Keynote at JiveWorld11, in order to provide that positive feedback loop it’s extremely important to know how the individuals are wired; what motivates them, what makes them feel satisfied.   A targeted feedback loop is what lifts the entire system off the ground.

Three easy steps:

1) Post your important work into the social environment

2) Comment and collaborate with others in a way that targets their motivational core

3) Reward others in a way that creates a sense of fulfillment

HR is the group that helps managers build incentives and manage to success.  HR can help to build social best practices, foster communication and collaboration, help to embed monitoring and reward systems into social environments, and lead the evolution of business from hierarchical and stultified to social, collaborative, and hyper-performing.

Let’s start working together better.  HR, you can help lead the way.

Communicating Corporate Values

photo by pasukaru76

Harvard Business Review’s latest email tip of the day is around how to communicate your company’s values.  While this isn’t exactly rocket science it’s often easy to fumble identifying, communicating or changing the value system.

Rosanna Fiske’s first two points are vital.

1. Ask employees what is important to them

2. Establish values across the company, not just within management

A company’s value system cannot be mandated top down.  You didn’t mind being told what you valued when you were 6, but you also didn’t know any better.

Each day you contribute to your company’s culture based on what you value, how you get things done and how you behave.

In fact, everyone does.

So while a plush corporate off-site to hammer out new values feels like important work, it’s a boondoggle.  Without assessing the value systems of the employees, not as they experience the existing culture, but what they truly value in the workplace, the initiative is destined to be a very public flop.

Culture initiatives typically suffer the same fate as the boy who cried wolf.  You don’t get many chances to make an impact on the culture so don’t waste that bullet trying to create something without the feedback of everyone who walks through your doors today.

As I said, this isn’t rocket science.  The best way to guess what someone is thinking is to ask them.

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.

—-

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.

RoundPegg Available via Jive Software

photo by Mel B.

[Self-promo alert]

We are excited to announce that RoundPegg is one of first few companies to partner with Jive Software on their new social business platform.

The RoundPegg application is currently available to Jive consumers and allows employees to assess their cultural values, personality and communication style.

This matters because business is social. Now more so than ever.

It’s rare these days that our success is truly our own. We often have to lean on others in order to shine (and vice versa).  The more effectively we can tap into how others operate the more successful the result.

Too often, frustration mounts when we seemingly can’t get through to others. That makes it difficult to get through to people who operate differently.

RoundPegg enables Jive’s 15 million business professionals to share their psychometric results with one another and get specific actions detailing how to improve their professional relationship to get the best out of their reports, peers, managers and vendors.

For a limited time, the RoundPegg app on Jive will improve the inner workings of all Jive customers for free. Over time we will also provide companies with the ability to quantitatively assess their culture to understand what cultural values truly drive the differences in performance as well as the opportunity for customer companies to identify which candidates best exemplify their culture as well. (All of this can already be done via RoundPegg by contacting us at TellMeMore@roundpegg.com.)

Until then, let’s all understand our differences and work better together.