Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (28 page)

THE CULTURAL PHASE

One of the most famous stories in high-tech history is that of Bill Hewlett and the bolt cutter.

A half century ago, William Hewlett, the cofounder of the largest electronics company of them all, Hewlett-Packard, dropped by the then-small company on a Saturday just to check up on things. When he got there, he was appalled to find that scores of company engineers were standing around doing nothing. When he asked why, Hewlett was told that all the equipment needed by the staff to do their work was locked in a storage room, and only one person owned the key: the lab supervisor, who hadn’t arrived yet.

History often turns on one leader—Alexander, Sherman, Ted Roosevelt Jr. on Utah Beach—who encounters an obstacle and, instead of fighting it, just cuts through the problem and resets the rules. That’s what Hewlett did that morning. He searched around until he found a pair of bolt cutters and promptly cut the padlock right off the storage room door. He then announced to the surprised engineers that the new rule at HP was that there would never be a lock on any storage room door in the company ever again—and if anyone tried to install one, they would be fired on the spot.

When one of the engineers demurred, saying that the reason for the lock was to keep employees from taking equipment home for their own use, Hewlett replied that he didn’t give a damn about that, either; they might invent something great on their free time, and, besides, he trusted them to bring the equipment back.

Cutting a padlock off a door may seem like a minor matter, but the resonance of that single act transformed modern business and still affects corporate life today. That’s because the story of Hewlett’s actions quickly spread across HP and underscored what came to be known to insiders and outsiders as the HP Way. It was a corporate
philosophy built on trust in HP employees to find their own best path to achieving the company’s objectives.

The HP Way, of course, is the most famous and esteemed corporate culture ever devised—and its innovations (flextime, stock options, profit sharing, and so forth) have been imitated by companies throughout the world. And it all began with that little bit of theater of Bill Hewlett brandishing the bolt cutters.

The stories we tell ourselves and each other about our work have proved to be incredibly powerful. Great teams invariably have great stories—and not just drunken anecdotes and tales of screwups, but also stories that help define the personality of the team, that underscore its pride and morale, and most of all, stories that help the team explain its own specialness to itself.

Unhealthy teams have stories too, but they are usually about failure and the foibles of others, and most are laced with resentment and contempt. In fact, that’s one of the best ways to gauge the health of a team: listen to the stories the team tells about itself. Healthy teams and healthy companies tend to recount major turning points and dramatic episodes with a sense of pride, good humor, and confidence (even with stories of mistakes). In unhealthy teams and unhealthy companies, even their stories of victories carry an unmistakable reek of pessimism, as if their successes are undeserved or ill gotten.

Stories can also be an insight into the relative health of a company. Here are three types of team “stories” that suggest a poor leader who should be watched and possibly replaced:

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If all the stories are about the boss—it could mean that the CEO is mean or domineering. Or that the team’s communications are almost entirely vertical (that is, the boss does all the talking and decision-making) and insufficiently horizontal across the team.

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If they are all about meeting important people—you may have a process team on your hands. Worst of all,

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If a team has no stories—it may not really be a team at all, but merely an aggregation of individuals suffering from insufficient diversity, personal contact, and a broken communication apparatus.

At first the use of storytelling to engender a culture may seem like an evanescent hope, something you can’t force into creation, but just the opposite is true. Having been in the professional storytelling business all of our professional lives (and in Mike’s case, having even been a novelist), we are, of course, biased. Nevertheless, our experience is that other than a few (tragic) people,
everyone
enjoys a story, and most people also like to tell them. So the manager of a team has three duties in this area:

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Create a setting in which team members not only feel free to tell stories but are encouraged to do so.

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Help the process of selecting and repeating those stories that aid in the health and productivity of the team, and that are reflective of the team’s desired culture.

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Establish occasions and settings in which these stories can be regularly shared, especially with new team members.

Good sales managers—probably because sales departments have long been the domain of storytellers—have known this for a long time. That’s why sales meetings, typically held in exotic locales, are usually less about training and seminars than about creating an environment that cultivates both story creation and story swapping. That explains why a lot more of the positive work usually takes place in the resort bar each night than in the meeting rooms during the day. All team leaders can learn something from those priorities.

THE SUSTAINABLE PHASE

Any team that stays together for any length of time is likely to see some turnover. This is not only inevitable but particularly painful, because the members who leave are often the team’s most valuable contributors; it is precisely their talent that gets them transferred to new and important projects. Other factors can cause members to leave the team midcourse for reasons ranging from dissatisfaction (often a good thing, as it removes a growing threat to team harmony) to life changes (personal health, retirement, even death).

When these departures occur, one thing should happen, and another thing must happen:

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Should happen. Conduct some kind of departure ceremony, even if the member is happy to go and the team is even happier to see that member gone. This ceremony can be as simple as a quick office meeting to make the announcement and wish the member good luck. Or it could be a dinner, and even a going-away gift, for a longtime or beloved member.

The purpose of the departure ceremony is to recognize the member’s contribution to the team—and thus hold out the promise of recognition to other team members who will receive the same recognition someday. It also creates a distinct and sharply defined closure to that member’s tenure with the team; it ends an era. By comparison, allowing a member to simply pack up and silently leave creates a void, an unanswered question about the reasons for the departure, and a sense that things aren’t quite over, that the departing figure (for good or bad) might come back.

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Must happen. Create some kind of event to welcome the new team member replacing the departing one. As we’ve shown, it
is crucial to assimilate new members into the team, acculturate them into the team’s culture, and equip them with all the necessary communications tools as quickly as possible.

Most of us have had the miserable experience of joining a new group or team, being left on our own, and feeling like we’ve walked into someone else’s family, or arrived at a cocktail party two hours late. The more pronounced this alienation, the more difficult it becomes to ever feel part of the team. Conversely, the team misses out on increased productivity, diversity, and a new source of intellectual capital as long as a newcomer remains an outsider.

The goal should always be to assimilate a new member into the team as quickly as possible. There are a lot of proven ways to do this: a group announcement of the newcomer’s arrival; a team gathering to make the introduction in person, including telling personal anecdotes that humanize the newcomer; making one-on-one introductions with every team member; assigning a team member to act as temporary host, mentor, and teller of the team’s stories; and providing personalized training for the new member in using the team’s communications apparatus.

In other words: welcome the new team member, embed him or her into the culture and operations of the team as quickly as possible, and then get back to work.

THE CONSOLIDATION AND MATURATION PHASE

“Maturing” is a dreaded fate for most companies because it’s associated with losing the innovative edge and entrepreneurial fervor and, worst of all, becoming a corporate dinosaur waiting to be made extinct by some fast-moving furry little start-up.

But maturity is a good thing for teams, because this is the era in their history when they bring together and consolidate their disparate
operations and work in harmony toward a final goal. Whether a team can navigate through this phase usually determines whether it will be ultimately successful or not.

There are very few teams whose members all work together doing the same thing at the same time throughout the life span of that team. Rather, most teams, at the very beginning, divide the assigned task into subtasks based on differences in the work, in the skills required, completion dates, and sometimes just size. Think of the army patrol moving through the jungle: it isn’t just a dozen undifferentiated soldiers, but an officer in charge setting course and strategy, a sergeant managing the soldiers, a radio operator, a point man out front, and a two-man heavy weapons team. Each member of that platoon has a different job to do.

Most teams are like that. An even better analogy might be the newsroom of a newspaper or television station. Say that there are 150 people working in that newsroom putting out a daily newspaper or an evening newscast. Of that cohort, about one-third is actually reporting—each taking on a different story, gathering data, interviewing subjects, writing the article under deadline. A second third is working in support of those reporters—everything from the newsroom phone operators to the art department to clerks to layout experts, secretaries, interns, and assistants. Largely unrecognized, they are the glue that holds the whole operation together, helping the reporters or running the newsroom’s infrastructure. The remaining third are editors: at newspapers these include copy editors, department editors (sports, business, living, and so forth), news editors, assignment editors, city or metro editors, national editors, international editors, managing editor, executive editor, and editor in chief. At television stations, the editors carry many of the same titles, though their actual duties may differ.

The reporters typically operate alone, or in pairs, but they are also part of teams that make up the different departments and report to their respective editor and assistant editor. The support
group is composed almost entirely of teams. And the editors (which also includes the department heads) form essentially one large team filled with multiple overlapping teams, the largest being the group of copy editors (in newspapers they sit together at the circular table called “the slot” and piece together the paper to fit the editorial “hole” defined at the last minute by whatever advertising has been sold.

From a distance, this newsroom may look like a single large team, a hive of individuals, busy at work. But in truth this one big team is made up of dozens of subteams, each with assignments and each racing in a different direction over the course of a shift, most of them slightly out of phase with each other.

Thus, the reporters arrive early and start chasing stories. So do the senior editors, who will determine the contents of that day’s edition. The department heads arrive early too, to decide which stories their reporters will follow, and to look at the first version of the day’s layout. But others—the art people, most of the support staffers, and the copy editors—arrive later; they aren’t needed until the stories are under way and the first completed ones are delivered.

By afternoon, the newsroom is crowded and humming. Almost every desk is filled—and those that are empty belong to reporters who are still out chasing their stories. Streams of editorial copy are now being created, converging first in the departments; and from those departments larger streams emerge, to converge again at the slot, where the copy editors are now cutting and mixing stories produced in the newsroom with those coming from outside bureaus and wire services.

By late afternoon, a decision has been made on the final layout of the paper—what stories will make it and where. Now the copy editors use their unique skill and rush to write compelling and succinct headlines (or prepare the copy and titles at the TV station). Meanwhile, many of the reporters, especially those covering
breaking news, are cleaning off their desks and preparing to go home. The newsroom now looks half-empty, but in the slot, in the art department, and in some of the special sections, the staff is busier than ever.

At the newspaper, this second phase of activity will continue into the evening, with a skeleton crew still working at midnight in case of a sudden news break. Should that happen, they will stay until the morning edition can be recomposed. At the TV station, the on-air talent, which has arrived in the afternoon, prepares for the evening broadcast, as does the studio crew. Some will stay on for the late-night news broadcast, or hand their duties off to their late-shift counterparts. By the time of the late-night broadcast, the studio and control room will be busy, but the newsroom will be mostly darkened and empty.

Keep in mind that this complex choreography of multiple subteams working largely independently, with their results then consolidated in a sophisticated finished product, takes place in these newsrooms
every day
. The finished product, in the case of the newspaper, is the equivalent of a small book, filled with all-new material, published every twenty-four hours; in the case of the evening news, it is the equivalent of a multisubject half-hour documentary created in the same brief cycle.