Teams: What You Measure Is What You Get
Today, every organization striving for improved performance is talking about teams as part of its mix of business practices. In his book The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge calls team learning one of the five necessary disciplines of a learning organization (and who wouldn’t want to be a “learning organization”). We are seeing a proliferation of books, articles, and videotapes on the formation and importance of teams. But teams are not new to business and industry: Quality circles, self directed work groups, and process improvement teams have been a part of the Total Quality Management movement for at least the past ten years. Teams will never fulfill their promise, however, unless we give them feedback on their progress and outcomes.
In the workplace parlance of today, two or more people working on the same project, or even in general proximity, are called a team. But this is more wishful thinking than reality. Our notion of work teams comes from sports, but we would not assume that any five people standing on a basketball court are a basketball team. Yet we expect a group of employees to function as a team simply because they work in the same department or on the same project.
Katzenbach and Smith provide a more realistic definition of a team in their book The Wisdom of Teams. They define a team as “...a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” Using this definition, few groups of people in workplaces could be considered real teams. What does it take to become an effective work team and sustain that success over time? One of the keys is continuous measurement and feedback.
Know
the Score
Imagine a group of highly motivated athletes who want to form a basketball
team. Each of them has the fundamental skills and understands the game.
They want to develop the ability to play together and be competitive among
their peers. Now, let’s suppose that this group receives no coaching and
does not practice. During games the players are not told the score or
given any stats about their play. They are not told their standing in
the league or how they compare to other teams. And they are not given
any recognition for their efforts. How likely is it that this group of
players will become a competitive basketball team? How much fun will this
be for them? How long will they want to play together? Under these conditions,
this “team” will become disillusioned and frustrated and disband in a
very short time.
You may be asking why anyone would do this to a group of highly motivated people. But this is what organizations do to work groups all the time. Groups of workers are made teams in name only. They might be given an initial 3-day training program in team building, but after that they are on their own. No regular coaching, no practice and feedback, no score comparing them to expectations or other teams, no stats on individual and team performance, no rewards for taking risks or achieving success. And managers wonder why employees don’t work together!
Even a basketball team that has a coach, practices regularly, and plays a game that has clear goals, specific rules, well defined roles, and an obvious beginning and end often needs a year or more to “gel.” Work groups are usually faced with unspecified goals, vague rules, ambiguous roles, and projects with constantly changing start and end dates. Yet we expect them to become teams nearly overnight and to make a difference in work performance within a few weeks or months.