Archive for the ‘teamwork’ Category

Female guru alert: Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School appeared on our recent list of Overlooked Female Business Gurus, and she has also published an article in the July/August Harvard Business Review. Titled “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” it’s a blockbuster that will cement her position on the guru list for some time to come.

Edmondson persuasively argues that a focus on efficiency in most companies chokes off resources for innovation and learning and creates an environment of harried, fearful employees rushing from task to task. Sound familiar?

In such an environment, given that the business, market and competitive playing field are changing continuously, the certainty is that the company will lack the learning, vision and insight to adapt itself to new realities. In essence, it will become a highly-efficient producer of last year’s products and services. The market will have moved on.

Edmondson’s work complements that of Dave Snowden and Mary Boone on the Cynefin Framework. Snowden & Boone describe simple and complex business contexts and the challenges these different contexts pose to managerial decisionmaking. In simple contexts, best practices and efficiency are the tools for success. But in complex contexts, learning, experimentation and adaptation are key.

As Edmondson points out, “the influx of knowledge in most fields makes it easy to fall behind.” In other words, the space where competitiveness is created today is the complex space.

Three key inhibitors to learning environments are time, safety and review. Efficiency-based companies don’t allow time to think and reflect–the emphasis is on processing and dispatching tasks quickly. (Gary Hamel discussed this issue nicely in “The Future of Management.”)

And few companies provide the psychological safety required in a learning environment. Learning requires failure, failure is stigmatized, therefore people try to avoid it. Or if it’s unavoidable, it is covered up or played down.

I can tell you based on my work to date on The Mistake Bank that psychological safety is a big issue. I have had numerous dialogues with colleagues, members, mentors, etc., which have involved the ramifications if someone were to discover the mistake the person has contributed to The Mistake Bank.

[My position on that matter is this: people who admit mistakes are more valuable to companies, customers and colleagues than those who don't--because we all know that everyone makes mistakes. No exceptions.]

Finally, Edmondson emphasizes the need for disciplined reflection and review. By evaluating, discussing and communicating the results of new ways of doing things, companies achieve the payoff of experimentation. My experience is that most companies don’t like to look back.

There’s a lot more to the article than I’ve discussed here. Read it when you have some time to think and reflect! (Better yet, talk about it with a colleague.)

Related posts:
Great innovation requires great teams
Leaders need to manage complexity
Toyota excels by revealing hidden problems
Stop studying the problem and just try something!
On Gary Hamel’s “The Future of Management”
For consultants, adopting the “Google 20%” is vital

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Posted in Harvard Business Review, collaboration, complexity, decisionmaking, innovation, learning, teamwork | Comments

"Senior Leadership Teams" is essential reading for executives

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

I recently related a story for the Mistake Bank about my experience as a senior leader with a medium-sized IT company. It involved a particularly difficult senior team meeting and my nasty reaction to a colleague’s questioning a decision I’d made regarding a member of my team.

I recalled the story because I was reading “Senior Leadership Teams” by Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, James Burruss and Richard Hackman, which discusses that peculiar species–the team of leaders. One of the themes of the book is that senior leaders, left to their own devices, will prioritize their individual work and give little to the team. Another is that senior leaders rise to prominence based on their talents to achieve results with teams that work at their direction, meaning their teamwork skills are rusty at best. A third is that CEOs don’t take many of the basic actions required to form a cohesive and productive team–things like explicitly choosing team members, setting explicit standards and norms for behavior, or providing adequate information for teams to act effectively.

My senior team experience bears this out. I focused on my team and my results, and preferred to leave my colleagues to clean up their own sandboxes. And when a colleague got too involved in “my” area, I didn’t take kindly to it. I didn’t know what the senior team was for, nor what was expected of me and how I should behave. In retrospect, I didn’t behave well some of the time–even if I felt I was doing what was best for the company.

Perhaps you see why a book is needed to instruct people in this area. And, thankfully, “Senior Leadership Teams” is an excellent effort. The authors, affiliated with the Hay Group and with Harvard University, studied more than 100 senior teams and tried to understand why many performed poorly, while others–a smaller number–worked well. They found six conditions–three “essentials” and three “enablers”–that excellent teams had in common:

The essentials:

  1. A real team
  2. The right people
  3. A compelling direction

The enablers:

  1. A solid structure
  2. A supportive context
  3. Team coaching

The six conditions might sound simple, but the book is filled with insight as to why these simple things are hard to do, and what’s necessary to make them real. As an example of the commonsense yet counterintuitive advice throughout “Senior Leadership Teams,” read this section regarding selecting the right people to be on the team:


An executive suite is not a schoolyard. Just because someone wants to play on your team, has always been on the team, or was considered the heavy hitter of a past team does not mean that you are obligated to have him on your team. What’s more, just because you have been chosen to lead an established team does not mean you must keep all the players when you take it over. (p.79)


There is wisdom like the above all over the book–on reward systems, team purpose & objectives, and prioritization. And interesting stories of real CEOs and how they made their teams effective.

One minor complaint–the book is addressed to a CEO, and as such gives lots of advice about selecting, coaching and enabling the team, and less advice about being an effective member of the team. Perhaps this is a topic the authors can explore in a future book.

But this is no reason to avoid “Senior Leadership Teams,” no matter what your role. If you are an executive, or want to be an executive, read this book–before your next senior team meeting.

Related posts:
The Mistake Bank Manifesto
“Stay the f— out of my department”:

Find more videos like this on The Mistake Bank

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Posted in leadership, management, reading list, teamwork | Comments

Chef David Chang–in a weird way, a leadership role model

Monday, March 31st, 2008

On vacation, you’re supposed to catch up on your reading. But when you’re chasing five- and seven-year-old boys around all day–beach, fishing, mini-golfing, etc.–till they finally crash at 9pm, you get even further behind. Which is why it took me this long to get around to reading the recent New Yorker profile on wacky restaurateur David Chang (sorry, only abstract available on line).

What interest could he be to Shop Talk readers? For one, the author Larissa
MacFarquhar cannily focuses on Chang’s many eccentricities and (self-described) weaknesses. So much so that you wonder how he could manage to get out of bed in the morning, never mind start two (going on three) highly-successful New York restaurants.

Secondly, through his nearly nonstop chatter, Chang lets us in on his biggest secrets to success. Read this:


[Chang said,] In four years, we’ve gone from this small-ass Noodle Bar to this f-ing big restaurant, when the whole goal in the beginning was, let’s serve better food than that place across the street. I know we’ve won awards, but it’s not because we’re doing something special–I believe it’s really because we care more than the next guy.


And this:

[Chang said,] Recently, over at Ssam Bar, a sous-chef closed improperly, there were a lot of mistakes, and I was livid and I let this guy have it. About a week later, I found out that it wasn’t him, he wasn’t even at the restaurant that night. But what he said was, “I’m sorry, it will never happen again.” And you know what? I felt like an asshole for yelling at him, but, more important, I felt like, Wow, this is what we want to build our company around: guys that have this level of integrity…. If we start being accountable not only for our own actions but for everyone else’s actions, we’re gonna do some awesome s–t.

And this:

Cory Lane began setting up for service: a cork at each place to rest chopsticks on, then a folded napkin, then a menu tucked inside the napkin, then a water glass. He measured to make sure that each napkin was exactly one thumb-length from the edge of the counter. Then he crouched down at the end of the row and squinted to check that everything was lined up.

Managing the details, accountability, teamwork. It works in the restaurant industry. It works most everywhere.

(Photo: the interior of Ko, from the restaurant’s website.)

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Posted in New Yorker, leadership, management, teamwork | Comments

We’re all Doubting Thomases

Monday, October 8th, 2007

Last week I sat on an airplane waiting for it to take off, and as I looked out my window I noticed a couple of maintenance techs staring at a small puddle of fluid beneath the wing. Over the course of time more people came out to look at the puddle and I noticed one guy leaning down and drawing his fingertip through the puddle, then rubbing his fingers together, to check and see what the liquid was.

A few minutes later a couple of more guys came out they talked with the other people for a little bit and then each of them separately tested the fluid with a finger again. I imagine that the first guy told them what he had found with his finger tests and nonetheless they had to bend down and try it themselves.

This told me a lot about how people operate. Despite what anyone tells us usually we have to experience things for ourselves in order to trust what the answer is. Similarly, showing my son George how to tie his shoes isn’t very effective. He has to try and fail for a while in order to truly learn it–even if he doesn’t much like the process.

[Postscript: the liquid on the ground was hydraulic fluid, and we had to change to different flights to get where we were going.]

Voice-to-Screen messaging – powered by SpinVox

(Photo by rodnem via stock.xchng)

Posted in experience, learning, spoken post, teamwork, trust | Comments

A look back at this week–value of dissent, getting value from mistakes

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Further to the post about the value of dissent, Max Boisot wrote a riotously funny post on how rows (pronounced the British way, raows, and meaning fights) between him and a collaborator improved the quality of their work together.

And on the idea of publicizing and learning from mistakes, the Wall Street Journal Informed Reader pointed out an article in Wired Magazine by deputy editor Thomas Goetz advocating that data from failed or abandoned studies be made available to researchers. One repository of this type of information, Mr. Goetz points out, is the lusciously named Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine.

(The above also reminded me of the HBR article stating that finding uses for output of terminated R&D projects is one way to improve R&D cost-benefit.)

Posted in learning, mistakes, organizational behavior, product development, teamwork | Comments

Great innovation requires great teams, candor, and acceptance of mistakes

Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007

While preparing yesterday’s post on the business value of dissent, I stumbled upon some research by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson on team learning. The research centered on explaining a paradox–why in her studies did excellent teams make more errors than poor teams?

The answer, as you might expect, was greater candor and its corollary, greater confidence and openness to learning. Better teams simply communicated better, and, in a learning environment, that meant surfacing and talking about mistakes.

In a discussion about the topic with HBS Working Knowledge, professor Edmondson summarized her findings thusly:

In well-led teams, a climate of openness could make it easier to report and discuss errors—compared to teams with poor relationships or with punitive leaders. The good teams, according to this interpretation, don’t make more mistakes, they report more. When I suggested this to physicians involved in the study, they were skeptical. Their response was understandable: With a research grant for the purpose of identifying the error rate, this idea was decidedly unwelcome. My interpretation of the data suggested that we might not be finding the definitive error rate—and further errors might be systematically underreported in certain units but not others. Their skepticism forced me to work hard to develop ways to support my proposition, which ultimately they came to see as reasonable, if not obvious in retrospect.

Once again, we see that learning in adults means supressing instincts for self-protection, defying organizational incentives to conform and be “team players,” and ignoring ingrained concepts like division of labor and roles/responsibilities.

This is from a working paper on the subject, “When Learning and Performance Are At Odds” from Professor Edmondson and her collaborator, Sara Singer:

…Effectively conducting an analysis of a failure requires a spirit of inquiry and openness, patience, and a tolerance for ambiguity. Such an inquiry orientation is characterized by the perception among group members that multiple alternatives exist, frequent dissent, deepening understanding of issues and development of new possibilities, filling gaps in knowledge through combining information sources, and awareness of each others’ reasoning and its implications(Argyris et al., 1978). Such an orientation can counteract common group process failures. Learning about the perspectives, ideas, experiences, and concerns of others when facing uncertainty and high stakes decisions, is critical to making appropriate choices.

Looking at this through the prism of innovation, you can see how using the whole disorderly team, how arguing and soliciting dissenting views is essential. Innovation means confronting the unknown, the complex, the ill-defined. Mistakes are to be expected, not avoided. Confronting, embracing failure, then gathering the entire teams’s viewpoints on what didn’t work and how to fix it, then stepping back and trying a different tack, is essential. Locating dead ends and understanding failure quickly and changing course leads to faster innovation development, lower cost and higher probability of eventual success.

Posted in HBS Working Knowledge, innovation, learning, mistakes, teamwork | Comments

Sports Analogy week, day 5: shape your strategies to your talent

Friday, August 17th, 2007

Here’s a rule of thumb about the difference between coaching college sports and pro sports. Successful college coaches bring players in and ask them to conform to a system. Successful pro coaches adapt their systems to the talents of their teams.

This adage is most true in basketball. To the casual observer, Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke team looks the same from year to year, no matter who’s on the floor. Pat Riley, by contrast, has won with three markedly different approaches: the Showtime Lakers of the 1980’s, the slow, defense-oriented Knicks in the 1990’s and the Dwayne-Wade-led Miami Heat in 2006.

Riley adapted how he coached to the players he had available. Once he had determined an identity for the team, he filled in with complementary players who fit that identity (e.g., Lakers, Mychal Thompson; Knicks, Anthony Mason; Heat, Gary Payton).

In managing a group in business, the temptation is to be like Krzyzewski. After all, it’s easier for a group of ten to adapt to one manager than for a manager to adapt to ten individuals, right? But the truth is, unless you’re working in a process business where tasks are routinized and uniformity and consistency are the main goals, it’s better to be Pat Riley.

Value in the future will be more determined by how well individual projects are done, not the efficiency of ongoing processes. (See this link for some background on that thought.) X-Teams use the strengths of the individual team members to achieve results, and rely on their creativity and engagement.

In other words, they’re more like the Lakers than the Blue Devils.

Posted in basketball, leadership, management, sports, teamwork | Comments

In the future, senior executives will work together harmoniously to achieve shared goals for their company

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

So say Professor Yves Doz of INSEAD and Mikko Kosonen (formerly of Nokia), who write in this month’s Harvard Business Review (”New Deal At the Top” – link $$). Here’s their view in a few words:

Senior executives at new deal companies assume collective – not individual – responsibility for results. They do so by building interdependencies… motivating themselves to engage with one another rather than work in splendid isolation…. Challenges to conventional thinking are encouraged – as are challenges and criticism from outside the ranks of the top team…

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I don’t believe it either. There are so many things in this model that are counter to human nature, never mind management selection and conditioning, that it’s difficult for me to believe that a company could work in this way (perhaps a democratic company, but how many of those are there?). Every glimpse I’ve had into the senior executive conference room (and I spent six years in one) has shown a very different picture of the “deal at the top.”

Let’s take them one at a time.

  1. Collective responsibility for results – flies in the face of the passion companies have for individual accountability (call it accountabalism, like David Weinberger does).
  2. Engaging with one another – senior executives have rivalries over budgets, targets, and the next step in the hierarchy–never mind substantial individual workloads–that make it very difficult to engage deeply with their peers.
  3. Challenges to conventional thinking – I heard the now-discredited Bob Nardelli speak last year, and when referring to Home Depot he said “I this” and “my that”–never “we” or “our.” And read this Business Week article to see how James McNerney slammed in Six Sigma during his tenure at 3M, without debate or reflection. Last time I checked, GE (where both CEOs came from) was considered the premier senior management talent factory, and they don’t sound ready to embrace participative management.

I also thought this quote was telling:

Claus Heinrich, an executive board member of SAP and the director of global human resources, put it like this: “If I see Leo [Apotheker, a fellow board member and head of customer operations] doing a great job, I say, ‘Wow, great!’ I am quite willing to subordinate some of my own priorities to help him achieve the common goal.”

Very warm and fuzzy, but as I read that I wonder how his year-end performance review would go. “Yes I know I didn’t make my objectives this year, but I was subordinating my own priorities to help Leo achieve the common goal!”

It’s possible that all six companies I worked for were utterly dysfunctional, but I tend to believe that senior executive rivalry is innate in the people who rise today to those positions. [And when I was a senior manager, I was right in there fighting for my goals, my department, etc., along with the rest of them.] Only the exceptional company, with a different training and career-pathing process, which considers a different kind of person to promote, will be able to overcome it. There may be a day when all great companies are run by X-Teams, but I think that day is a long way off.

(Photo: “Teamwork” by candace.jeanne via flickr)

Posted in collaboration, cooperation, leadership, teamwork | Comments

X-Teams create a safe environment for candid communication

Monday, June 11th, 2007

I’ve been reading this book, “x-teams: how to build teams that lead, innovate and succeed,” by Professors Deborah Ancona of MIT’s Sloan School and Henrik Bresman of INSEAD, and, as I read on, its messages begin to seep in and I begin to realize that this is an excellent book that will earn a long-term place on my office bookshelf.

One message concerns candor in teams (see an earlier post on candid communication here). Great teams build a deep level of communication that is unfettered by fear of reprisal, concern about appearing stupid, or worry that one’s point or question is too obvious to state. And such candor requires a safe environment for communication.

You may be saying, “Yeah, so what? How rare is that?”

In my experience, exceedingly rare. Most teams are very polite to each other. This reflects their organizations, in many of which politeness is raised to an art form. And those who speak up are viewed as poor team players. Wrap-up of a typical team meeting: “Does anyone have any objections to this approach?” Followed by silence.

“Silence equals assent” is perhaps the most incorrect statement in management. For when the meeting ends, small clusters of people gather and discuss what just happened, how dumb some ideas are, how they’ll never work. It’s a recipe for failure, repeated again and again.

One team profiled in the book, by contrast, held occasional meetings at the pub. Breaking down barriers that arise at the office, moving to an environment in which candid discourse is routine, allowed the team to get issues out on the table and create a true consensus for their next actions.

The three areas to encourage to build an environment for candid communication, according to Ancona and Bresman:

  • Psychological safety – acknowledging mistakes is routine, “quiet fixing,” where an employee patches a problem without informing anyone, unthinkable.
  • Team reflection – the team periodically takes a break, looks back at what they’ve done, learns, and makes adjustments going forward.
  • Knowing what others know – the team shares enough so that they each create a database of others’ knowledge, the better to know who to ask when something new comes up.

Posted in candor, communication, teamwork | Comments

Blame it on the I-Team

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Last night I was reading a new book, “X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate and Succeed” and I got this weird lightness in my stomach, a small vacant feeling just beneath the rib cage. The authors, Deborah Ancona of MIT’s Sloan School and Henrik Bresman of INSEAD, were describing a common phenomenon: teams that worked hard to improve their performance had more fun, became happier but often failed miserably at their missions.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach was deja vu. I’ve been on one of those teams. Back in my EDS days, I worked for a sales VP who studied a lot of Peter Senge’s Learning Organization principles and took them to heart. He applied them to our team and to its relationships. We had periodic offsite sessions to create strategy, we “checked in” to meetings, and we built close bonds both inside and outside of work.

Yet we didn’t succeed, ultimately. The team was broken up within a year or so. Many of us left the company soon thereafter (me included). What happened? It’s something I wondered about for years, and until this book lacked an explanation that made sense to me.

The paradox of great teams, according to Ancona and Bresman, is that they frequently focus internally, on their relationships with teammates and on their assignments, and lose perspective and context. They lose sight of other groups in the company and, most dangerously, of customers’ evolving needs. The team begins to work better together, and the problem is compounded–other teams are seen as ineffective, “us vs. them” develops, and at some point external support for the team dissipates. You’re left with a high-powered vehicle that can’t go anywhere. Call it the “I” (for internal) Team.

And that’s what happened to our team. We are still in touch ten years after the breakup. We have good feelings about that year. But in the pit of my stomach, at least, is a twinge of regret about what we could have done.

(Cover photo courtesy of Harvard Business School Press)

Posted in leadership, learning, management, organizational behavior, organizational development, reading list, teamwork | Comments