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Chapter One: GROW TEAMS, DON'T BUILD THEM


from

How to Grow Effective Teams
And Run Meetings That Aren't a Waste of Time

© by Ends of the Earth Learning Group 1998

by
Linda Turner and Ron Turner

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six References and Copying Rights


Summary of Chapter One

The growing of a team is like the growing of a flower.

Sometimes, even though we did everything the same way we did with the last seed, the seed doesn't sprout.


Team development occurs along three dimensions.
I. Changing the Rule Structure:moving from dictatorship to consensus.

II. Changing Team Attitudes: moving from being followers to being leaders.

III.Changing Team Value Systems: moving from argue-and-defend to dialoguing.




Teams function better when team members have leader attitudes.





Growth Environments
have six key characteristics

  • Taking initiative.
  • Responsible for team actions.
  • Asking, "Who can I help?"
  • Seeking to improve systems.
  • Thinking long term.
  • Willing to cross-train.Principle centered.
  • Open and honest.
  • Encouraging conflict to surface.
  • Self-reflective about defensiveness.
  • Self-confident but humble.

  1. Trust both of management and peers.
  2. Belief in the future.
  3. Respect and dignity between people.
  4. People must be given the tools and authority to actually change things.
  5. Teamwork which results in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
  6. The reward structure recognizes cooperative efforts

End of Summary


QUICK
READ









"IT'S ALIVE!"
Dr. Frankenstein













"IT WORKED LAST TIME. WHY DIDN'T IT WORK THIS TIME?"



DETAILS

The birth of a team is less momentous than the birth of a human being. No one calls their parents in the middle of the night and says, "It's a team. It's a Quality Circle with brown eyes, and all its parts."

Nonetheless, teams are birthed and come into existence with a certain amount of joy and optimism. Their purpose is steeped with hope that someone will finally deal with whatever kinds of problems the teams have been assigned.

Teams struggle to learn how to stand, then walk, and eventually run. Teams go through periods of growing pains. They mature sometimes into healthy functioning groups, but also sometimes they dissolve into dysfunctional unhealthy individuals at war with one another.

Teams die. Their deaths may be natural and timely due to their triumphal successes. Or their deaths may be due to despair, misery and failure. Some teams die with farewell celebrations and balloons. But sometimes teams die, forgotten, a sliver of memory for someone who one day remembers, "Whatever happened to the team? We never seemed to meet again."

The growing of a team is like the growing of a flower. We start a seed, water it, nurture it, watch it sprout and start to bloom, and ultimately benefit from it. Sometimes, though, even though we did everything the same way we did with the last seed, it doesn't sprout. Or it gets attacked by insects or weeds. Or it just doesn't grow as well. As gardeners, we learn how to deal with some of the more common pitfalls. We also learn that life is full of surprises that none of us can predict.

Are gardeners creators? Kind of, but not really. Those of us who work with teams don't create them. We tend them. We nurture them. We guard them. Their ultimate success is partially due to our efforts, but mostly due to the people on the teams and their openness to working with one another.

In this book's title, we purposefully chose the word "grow" instead of "build" because "grow" has very different connotations than does "build."



TEAM-BUILDERS MISTAKENLY THINK THEY CAN STAMP OUT TEAMS ON AN ASSEMBLY LINE.















LIVING THINGS ARE NEVER IDENTICAL.

Team-building implies there is a construction plan. Team-building suggests that once the team is built, the team-builder's job is completed until something breaks, at which time the team-builder will be called back to make a quick fix. Team-building implies that further team development can't occur without a team-builderadding pieces to the original structure.

Growing-Teams implies development that is never completed since growth is a lifelong process that only stops with death. A growth process is intrinsic to living beings and will occur even without outside intervention as long as a nurturing environment exists which facilitates growth.

The concept of growing recognizes that people develop at different rates and that different people bring varying skills and levels of maturity to the table. Teams therefore can't be stamped out like cars on an assembly line, but rather will grow and develop uniquely.

The building metaphor suggests that when teams are temporarily not needed, they could be stored on a shelf like any tool waiting to be pulled out the next time it is needed.

The growth metaphor suggests that putting anything on a dark shelf with nothing to do will kill it.To keep the team alive, it must continue to meet.

Team development occurs along three dimensions.

I. Changing the Rule Structure: moving from dictatorship to consensus.

II. Changing Team Attitudes: moving from being followers to being leaders.

III. Changing Team Value Systems: moving from argue-and-defend to dialoguing.



TEAMS DON'T WORK WELL WHEN THE SUPERVISOR'S VOTE COUNTS MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE PUT TOGETHER






FORGET ROBERT'S RULES OF ORDER.





FOLLOWERS ARE AFRAID TO TAKE INITIATIVE





FOLLOWERS ARE INTO THE BLAME GAME.

I. CHANGING THE RULE STRUCTURE:
moving from
dictatorship to consensus

Team development will be least for teams in which the supervisor's vote counts more than everyone else put together. Even when supervisors may request input before reaching final decisions, such systems discourage innovation and expression of opinions.

Majority vote systems that use rules similar to Roberts Rules of Order will generate more dialogue and creativity than supervisor-directed teams, but majorities will squelch minorities and tend toward win-lose outcomes with compromises no one really likes.

The most developed teams will be those that are run with consensus rules and use neutral facilitators. Consensus is discussed in Chapter Three The roles of facilitators are described in Chapter Four

II. CHANGING TEAM ATTITUDES: moving from being followers to being leaders.

Team members who have follower mind-sets will be the least productive members of teams. Followers lack initiative and self-confidence in their own judgements.

Even when followers are sure that a team decision will lead to unintended consequences, they don't share their doubts with the team, but instead wait until after-the-fact, and then knowingly tell everyone else something like, "It should have been obvious that wouldn't work."

Followers prefer to follow orders because that removes the risk of making wrong decisions. They have mislearned from life that it is worse to make a mistake, than to try something new.

Followers have difficulty taking responsibility for team performance and prefer blaming others for team failures. They generally are not principle-centered, but rather go along with the crowd even when they believe the crowd is wrong.



FOLLOWERS SUPPRESS CONFLICT.







LEADERS ASK, "WHO CAN I HELP?"

FOLLOWERS COMPLAIN, "WHY ME?"






PEOPLE CAN'T BE ORDERED TO STOP BEING FOLLOWERS.

Rather than being introspective about their own defensiveness, followers run on automatic, striking out when they are questioned or withdrawing into passivity when asked to take a stand.

Lastly, and perhaps most destructively, followers attempt to suppress conflict in meetings because they are afraid of the emotions that might result.

On the opposite extreme are people with "leader" mind-sets. Leaders take initiative. They take responsibility for team actions acknowledging that when they don't speak up, then mistakes by the team are as much their burden as they are any other member of the team.

Leaders ask themselves, "Who can I help?" and pitch in on team efforts without being asked. Followers instead ask, "Why me?" and complain incessantly about other team members not helping enough.

A leader's focus is forward-looking, attempting to prevent problems, rather than backward-looking, seeking to blame problems.

Leaders are open and honest even when that runs the risk of conflict.

Leaders think long term, and not just for the moment. Above all, leaders are self-confident yet humble.

Even poorly organized teams consisting of people with leader mind-sets will operate well. Conversely, the best organized teams will struggle if team members all share a follower mind-set.

People can't be ordered to stop being followers. Instead, as people grow and develop, they will gradually mature from being followers to being leaders.

To promote this growth, a growth environment needs to be created.





IT'S DIFFICULT TO GROW WHEN YOU ARE AFRAID TO TAKE CHANCES.







PEOPLE WHO DON'T BELIEVE IN THE FUTURE WILL ASK, "WHY BOTHER?"





THE KEY TO GROWTH IS BEING GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE MISTAKES.

Growth environments have six key characteristics.

(1) Trust both of management and peers..This means the organization commits its energies to driving out fear about talking about the truth. And it commits to changing behaviors which cause such fear to arise in the first place.

This does not mean getting rid of all fear. If business survival is at stake, people need to know that, even if the idea is scary. Similarly, taking on new roles can produce anxiety and fear, but this kind of fear is productive because it is a natural outcome of growth processes.

For managers on teams, there must be a role shift that puts them in a peer relationship in which the managers' opinions are not accepted through fear but rather are accepted only when the rest of the team agrees that the opinions are best.

(2) Belief in the future. People must believe they will have a job beyond next week. If there is no belief in the future, then individuals will be spending their energies looking for other work instead of being focused on team improvement efforts.

(3) Respect and dignity between people. This means that individuals have to learn how to truly listen to one another. No yelling or "running down" others should be permitted by either supervisors or peers. People need to respect the feelings and beliefs of others even when they disagree with those feelings and beliefs.

(4) People must be given the tools and authority to actually change things. There is nothing more demoralizing than to ask people to improve things without giving the means for living up to that responsibility.

The fastest way to kill team efforts is for management to summarily reject the recommendations of its teams. People will correctly wonder, "Why bother?" if all their work is going to eventually be discarded by management.



TEAMS CAN CREATE GENIUSES!







BONUSES FOR THE MOST HOMERUNS WILL GENERATE FEWER HOMERUNS BY THE TEAM AS A WHOLE.





ARGUERS WANT TO "WIN" THE ARGUMENT BY MAKING THE OTHER SIDE "LOSE".

(5) Teamwork which results in the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. For instance, brainstorming in a group will produce more ideas than can be produced when the same set of individuals work alone. This means the product of brainstorming is a team product and is not owned by the individual who actually came up with the idea the group eventually approves.

Teamwork when functioning at its best can do something that no individual working alone can do, and that is "create geniuses." This means that when groups of people work together they can be more creative and solve more problems than the smartest most creative individual in the group.


(6) The reward structure recognizes cooperative efforts. This is counter to most traditional reward systems which focus on individual accomplishments.

A simple example should bring this principle out. If a baseball team gave an award to the player with the most homeruns at the end of the season, that would encourage members to stop helping one another. Instead when a player went into a slump, everyone else would silently applaud because their chance of getting the bonus would have just gone up. Management would be inadvertently rewarding people to hurt one another.

A baseball team is far better off when awards are for total homeruns by the team, or awards are for any player who gets homeruns beyond some threshold. World series bonuses for instance are distributed equally across a team in order to encourage everyone to look out for the best interests of the team.


III. CHANGING TEAM VALUE SYSTEMS: Moving from argue-and-defend to dialoguing.

Most of us have been raised to be arguers. When we listen to competing ideas in meetings, we tend to spend our time not evaluating those ideas with an open mind, but rather by picking them apart so that our counter arguments will "win."





DIALOGUING STARTS WITH THE PREMISE THAT NO ONE HAS A MONOPOLY ON THE TRUTH





THERE IS NO POINT IN DISCUSSING ISSUES IF PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT "CHANGING THEIR MINDS" MEANS THEY "LOST".

Dialoguers approach discussions altogether differently than do arguers. Dialoguers start with the premise that they may be misinterpreting body language or intentions. Dialoguers are skeptical that they themselves might not have all the data needed for a decision. Dialoguers are open to the notion that they might be wrong.

Dialoguing is rarely successful unless teams first examine their underlying value systems in order to uncover those "values" which block good decision making even though "hiding the truth" was not the intention of the values when people first adopted them.

For instance, many people have no difficulty talking about an issue as long as no one's feelings will be hurt. When protecting people's feelings is highest priority, then that will prevent discussions taking place that would address deeper issues. Teams will find the only issues left are the trivial non-controversial ones.

Similarly, if team members perceive "changing their minds" as being a loss, then there is little point in discussing alternative viewpoints.

The switch from argue-and-defend to dialoguing is discussed in Chapter Five

NEWBORN'S LESSONS IN HOW TO KILL TEAMS:

"What happens when the bosses always get their way?"

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six References and Copying Rights

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