Learning together is the source of incredible team energy.

Great teams are a boon to any organization. For individuals who are part of them, superior teams can be life changing. Great groups, though, aren’t an accident. They’re not the result of goofy team building or pushing for a rah-rah team spirit. Team greatness comes from regularly applying the ideas we’ve discussed in this series; it’s only sustained by teams learning to learn together. The 6 practices we developed also act as a template for assessing where a team is, what’s working, what’s not. Learning as a team, though, can be challenging. It requires vulnerability and courage in dynamic balance. Team members must embrace the fact that trying, failing and talking about it are the sources of learning. Once they shift to this mindset, learning together becomes the source of incredible energy. When a group finds its rhythm of learning, the payoff is massive. Work products and team dynamics improve. Relationships deepen. The bar of success is continually raised. A team spirit emerges that’s lasting and meaningful to everyone. That’s good news for the team as a whole, for each team member and for the organization.

Following the conventional wisdom won’t help teams adapt and grow

Team development is essential. Teams that don’t adapt and grow don’t last. As we’ve said, team stages no longer make sense. Yet they remain part of the team development orthodoxy. Orthodoxy means “right opinions.” It’s the conventional wisdom, the generally accepted knowledge applied without question or challenge. Why do people stick with the orthodoxy? Because it’s what they’re used to. Also, because nothing better has come along. Well, now it has. Based on our research and experience, we’ve got a different and more effective approach. We’ve chosen to move away from the orthodoxy and instead move toward orthopraxy or “right practices.” We’ve created a specific set of six proven practices that groups can take on board to create consistently more effective collaboration. No matter how long they’ve worked together or how well they know each other they can enhance their team performance. We’re not saying it’s easy. It takes effort and persistence. But the results speak for themselves. Team after team has told us what a difference the Six Practices have made. What’s more, teams enjoy the journey. They thrive on the clarity and focus the approach is built around. They enjoy growing, learning and winning together. 

Connect relationship building to specific tasks that team members care deeply about

The conventional wisdom is that team effectiveness starts with relationships and trust. So, team building focuses on self-disclosure exercises where our “true selves” are revealed– think Myers Briggs, ropes courses and trust falls. These may be fun, scary, even interesting, but they don’t do much to change the ways people work together. Any benefits they do yield fade quickly in the face of the day-to-day pressures of work. Trust and relationships matter a lot, but don’t start there. Things start to shift when you connect relationship building to specific tasks that team members care deeply about. When a specific project we are doing together could be helped - or hindered - by my personality type or strengths, you naturally want to know more about me. When you learn, for example, about my innate attention to detail that could make our project better, you’re more likely to invest in our relationship and rapport. When relationship building reinforces meaningful, shared work, it strengthens results and creates bonds that endure no matter our differences. When an entire team takes this approach, there’s no limit to the energy and excellence that can be generated.

Use collaboration only where it will add demonstrable value

The key to irresistible collaboration is understanding which work requires collaboration, which doesn’t, and focusing your efforts accordingly. If your group is collaborating on just the right things involving just the right people in just the right ways, you’ll quickly find that your organization is collaborating less and collaborating better. You’re not treating teamwork as something everybody ought to be doing all the time. Now, collaboration is used only where it adds value. You’ll be giving your people the gift of time. Teams won’t need as many meetings. Those meetings they do have will be irresistible, they’ll be targeted at only the work that requires the team to be together. The time and energy you release through irresistible collaboration will be directed to getting more done, more effectively while increasing team member engagement.

Know what sort of collaboration is required and tune your team development efforts to it.

Sloppy thinking about teamwork leads us to treat all collaboration as if it were the same. Like the office supplies sales team described in my earlier post, some groups don’t do much work together because they don’t need much collaboration to succeed.  Others, like the automotive design group I previously discussed, work together most of the time because if they don’t they won’t achieve their goals. Still others fall somewhere in the middle. Some degree of teamwork is needed in all these cases. But would you manage the highly independent sales team the same way you’d manage the highly interdependent car design team? Of course not. Likewise, you wouldn’t apply the same team development approaches to drastically different kinds of work groups. Know what sort of collaboration is required and tune your team development efforts to it. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting effort and fostering cynicism among team members. And, once you’ve figured out what sorts of collaboration are appropriate, you’ll probably discover you need less collaboration than you thought.

Shared goals matter, but not as much as you might think

Experts will tell you shared goals are essential to teamwork and collaboration. Our research showed something else. Instead of fostering teamwork, shared goals drive more individual effort. Think about an office supplies sales team that’s told the business wants them to grow by 10%. What will they do? The paper salesperson is going to do all they can to sell more printer paper. The tech sales person will push those high-margin laptops. The person selling pens and markers will do all they can to make those writing implements fly off the shelves. Each of them will rely on what they know best and are good at to reach that shared goal. Good for them. But where’s the collaboration? There isn’t any.

Maybe there doesn’t need to be, and that’s okay. But calling that teamwork only confuses things. Shared work, by contrast, focuses collaborative effort. Think about a car design team. It’s a group of highly interdependent designers, engineers, marketing people, sales people and even finance folks. They labor together to create a beautiful car that’s mechanically sound, will sell well at a price that makes sense and generate a profit. It’s the clarity about the work they share that drives their collaboration, that makes working together essential, even irresistible. Should they also have shared goals? Sure, that’s how they will know they achieved what they set out to do. But it was the specific work they shared that ignited powerful collaborative behaviors.

Shared work must be as clear and compelling as people’s individual responsibilities

Successful organizations are full of driven individuals. More than anything else, these people want to achieve and be recognized for it. For them, generic, feel-good teamwork, teamwork for teamwork’s sake, is anathema; it’s a burden that obscures accountability and takes them away from their real work. If you want collaboration from these achievement-motivated folks, the pull has got to be irresistible. The teamwork you are proposing must be as clear and compelling as their individual tasks; it must tap into their deep-seated need for accomplishment.

This is how great teams operate. They isolate the work that unquestionably requires collaboration. They talk about why that collaboration is essential, how it will pay off for the team and the people involved. They clarify who should be involved and in what ways. They make collaboration clear, specific, and compelling so if feels like something to be achieved. They make collaboration irresistible.

Great teams don't just react with collaboration. They plan for it.

For most people, teamwork is about being helpful and supportive. The so-called great team player is there for you. He's always ready to lend a hand when asked. She’s got your back when things go south. Those are worthy attributes. But that’s teamwork as a reaction, it’s collaboration as an after-thought.

The most powerful collaboration, on the other hand, is proactive and intentional. Great groups figure out in advance which work they must do together, they plan for and create the space for collaboration. They’re equally clear about which work is better done by individuals. When work needs collaboration, the people involved commit to specific pieces of the task and hold each other accountable for the roles they’ll play. As the work moves along intentional teammates are sticklers about checking in with each other. They’re helpful, they have each other’s backs, but more importantly they’re staying out in front of their work together. 

The words, “team” and “teamwork” have become hollow jargon and overused hashtags.

Our outdated ideas about how teams function lead us to over-simplify and romanticize teamwork, undermining efforts to improve it. We line office walls with hokey inspirational posters and administer personality tests expecting these things to conjure teamwork. (Another trust fall, anyone?) The words, “team” and “teamwork” have become hollow jargon, overused hashtags. As a result, seemingly endless admonitions encouraging more teamwork cause people to roll their eyes. They know that much of the most important work is done by capable individuals. To these people, teamwork can feel like a hindrance, a vague and bothersome expectation that slows progress.

That cynicism is a shame. Teamwork, understood accurately, has genuine promise and power. It’s worth aspiring to. That’s why our focus is on the foundational element of all group work - collaboration. Whether you call yourselves a team, a group, a community or a committee, what matters is knowing which work requires collaboration – and which doesn’t. Then it’s about getting the right people involved in the right ways. It’s simple, it’s practical and it makes genuine collaboration possible.

Organizations and the world they operate in have moved on.

In recent years, the fields of leadership and talent have drawn the lion’s share of organizational attention and research. Teams have been left behind. We still base team development on theories from the 1950s and '60s. Those concepts made sense in their day but organizations and the world they operate in have moved on. Experts have been telling us for decades that teams develop in stages. Stages made sense when teams were grouped together in factories or offices, separated by hallways not continents. What’s more, stage-based models assume that team development is linear. In today’s volatile, uncertain and remote-working world we can’t count on anything being that predictable. It doesn’t matter when a team was formed or how much time they spend physically together: there’s work to be done and people must work together to do it. What’s needed are approaches that focus and energize diverse groups of smart, driven individuals no matter what their history together. Based on 8 years of research, development and practice with one of the world’s premier global companies, we have just such an approach. We’re ready to share it with you and your organization. Visit: www.CorporationCollaboration.com

Forget everything you thought you knew about team building.

In this series of blogs, vlogs and podcasts, I’ve presented the complete high performance collaboration and teamwork Framework I was part of developing at Mars, Inc.  All of that went into my book, Lessons from Mars: How One Global Company Cracked the Code on High Performance Collaboration and Teamwork. 

This is the final entry in the Lessons From Mars series and I want to take a few moments to reflect on what we’ve talked about and let you know what else is possible. I worked at Mars for 17 wonderful years. Mars allowed me, enabled me, and supported me in doing research into team effectiveness which led to very important insights, including insights into what doesn’t work in the field of team effectiveness and team building.

For example, team spirit. Team spirit is lovely but it makes no difference to collaboration effectiveness.I have data to support this assertion. I also learned that the four stages of team development (some now use five stages) don’t help teams get better. They describe what state a team is in but they say nothing about what teams need to do to improve. I learned that team dysfunction is more often a matter of individual performance that it is a team problem. These are some of the common ideas we need to let go of. Why let go of them? So we can embrace new ideas.

The “I” in Team makes all the difference: Individuals

The central insight I had about what works was our discovery of the link between individual motivation and group effectiveness. We learned that if you want people, high achieving, driven people to collaborate, you must appeal to their internal drive for success and achievement. If you don’t speak to this driving instinct, you are not likely to draw them into collaboration. If you want better collaboration you must make collaboration feel irresistible to results-minded people.

The 3 Imperatives of Team Collaboration

Based on this insight, we identified 3 big musts you need to do for teams if they are going to improve collaborative outcomes. We call these, Clarity, Intentionality and Discipline the 3 Imperatives. 

1. Establish clarity, clarity of why collaboration matters to the team, to the organization and the individual. You also must clarify what work will drive the results that are expected through collaboration. This clarity then stimulates more of the next big must-have:

2. Intentional collaboration, or intentionality, occurs when people step into collaboration as a choice, as a way to get the work done because it feels irresistible to them. These requirements, clarity and intentionality are supported by the last of the 3 must-haves.

3. Discipline by a few good habits of team process that are completely aligned to why the team is working together and the collaborative value they are creating.

The 6 Practices that Address the 3 Imperatives

The 3 Imperatives led us to six Practices of High Performance Collaboration. I won’t go into detail about each one here – revisit earlier podcasts for that but. In summary:

• Clarify Context

• Inspire Purpose

• Crystallize Intent

• Cultivate Collaboration

• Activate Ways of Working and

• Sustain & Renew

The six Practices are explained in my books, podcasts and vlog posts along with tools that will help you to do each one, to put these insights to work for your organization and your teams.

Get the book. I highly recommend it. I did a heck of a job if I do say so myself. Also, check out my latest book: Virtual Teams: Holding the Center When You Can’t Meet Face-to-Face. It is now available through your preferred on-line bookseller. 

Click here to contact me with any questions and further discussion. We can arrange to bring me into your organization to speak about what we learned, how we learned it and how you can apply it. 

Resources

There are lots of resources for you out there. My books, my podcasts, my blog posts, my vlogs. I would love to hear from you. A couple of other books on the subjects are Chris Avery’s Teamwork Is An Individual Skill, and Radical Collaboration by James Tamm and Ronald J Luyet  If you'd like help with your organization, feel free to contact me. Helping organizations is what I enjoy most.Not just because organizations need it – and they do – but because it’s better for people. When we can connect with others around meaningful work and produce better results that we can all be proud of, that’s just good for everybody. That’s why I do this work, that’s why we need to start this quiet revolution. The invitation is open. Join me, won’t you?

If you’d like to have Carlos speak to your organization, contact his agent Robin Wolfson at https://robinwolfsonagency.com/

I want to tackle the topic of trust. I wrote a blog post on trust about two years ago. It’s related to the relationship-building podcast I did as part of this series, but it’s also different.

There is a presumption among many folks in my field that you have to build trust before you have a great team. My experience suggests that is not the case, that trust is not a necessary precursor for effective teamwork. Why would I say this?

Certainly, trust is important in teams. The greatest teams have high levels of trust even where some team members don’t like each other. But, I’ve done untold numbers of trust-building exercises that had no lasting impact on team performance.

Trust is an outcome, not a source of collaboration

I have a couple of contrarian thoughts about trust in teams. First, my big lesson has been that trust is an outcome. Trust is the result of people engaged together in meaningful work, learning about each other, coming to see each other's strengths and qualities through what they do together. Trust is an outcome of collaboration rather than a necessary input.

I was wrestling with the idea of trust as I was working on my book, Lessons from Mars. I had the idea of calling my niece’s husband who I thought might know a thing or two about teams. He’s a US Marine. He’s no longer actively serving but he’s a Marine. I asked him about how Marines develop the esprit de corps they’re famous for, that sense that each of them is part of a larger whole and that they have each other’s backs. He asked me why I was asking. I told him I was writing a book about teams and team building. He stopped me. He said, “We don’t do any team building. We become a team by working together, by going through tough stuff together that’s related to our mission. That’s what forms the bonds.”

I reflected on the work I had done with teams and I had to agree with what he said. It’s working together that creates trust. There are some lovely things you can do to try to build trust. But it’s the work together in the trenches that really makes the difference.

The Trust Standoff

There’s another thing I want to talk about and that’s what I call the Trust Standoff. You have probably experienced a case where someone says, “You know, I just can’t trust that Carlos guy. He’s on the team; I know I am supposed to work with him. I just can’t trust him.” What that does is create a barrier, right? If you can’t trust Carlos but you’re not going to talk to him, how is anything between you ever going to get resolved?

Notice this: When you’re saying, “I can’t trust Carlos,” what you are saying is, “My feelings of mistrust are caused by Carlos.” You might have concerns about Carlos’s reliability or his capability. But remember, those feelings are your feelings. No one controls your feelings except you. What’s more those concerns can’t be allowed to stand in the way of your team getting its work done. What you need to do is step in and have that conversation with Carlos. If you stand back and wait for him to change – to somehow “earn your trust” - nothing is going to happen. That’s the Trust Standoff. “I’m not moving until he moves!” It’s unproductive. No, it’s counter-productive.

That’s what led me to this conclusion: The most important person to trust in a team is yourself. In other words, I have enough confidence in my ability to deal with the situation, to step forward to Carlos and tell him what’s not working. “We have important things to do together so let’s address this issue.”

Courage and Responsibility for the Quality of you relationships

There was a great book I read called Teamwork is an Individual Skill by Christopher Avery. I highly recommend it. In his book, Avery suggests that you act as if you are 100% responsible for the quality of your relationships. “As if,” is the operative phrase. Of course, you’re not, right? But, if you stand back and assume that the other person is responsible for your relationship, and they’re in the same place, nothing is going to happen. You are both waiting for the other person to move. Instead, if you both act as if you are 100% responsible what will that lead to? One of the two of you will think, “Something’s not working here, so there must be something I can do about it.” That is when things start to move, when we break through the barriers of mistrust and put an end to the Trust Standoff.

My message is this: It’s really about courage; you can trust yourself. Courage just means “heart.” We all have heart. You can do it, you can step in, you can break those trust standoffs by knowing that you are going to be okay. You might even learn something. On top of that, courage is contagious. When you demonstrate those small acts of courage, your teammates see that. They start thinking, “Wow, that’s good. I bet I could do that.” That’s what I mean when I say that courage is contagious. Working together courageously breeds trust. To me, that is what real trust building is all about.

There you have it. My contrarian view on trust and trust building. In my next blogpost, I’ll be wrapping up the series with a summary of all the key points I’ve covered since the beginning of the series.

We’ve gone through the entire Mars Framework for High Performance Collaboration. We’ve talked about the three Imperatives that sit behind the six Practices. Are you ready to put the HPC Framework to work?

There are three ways that you can do that: You can adopt the Framework as it is, you can adapt it to your organization or you can emulate what we did to develop the Framework. 

Adopt

Let’s talk first about adopting it. You can just take it as it is in the book. Mars, Incorporated has very graciously said, “Carlos, we are happy for you to share this with the world.” Mars believes that the HPC Framework has great value. They think their customers should be learning about it and their consumers, too. So, just take it and use it. The book tells the entire story and is your guide to understanding and using the Framework. 

Keep this in mind: The HPC Framework is tuned to the Mars culture. For example, the names of the Practices. Take Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent. Where did we come up with those words, and why? If you’ve been following these podcasts you’ll know that the Mars culture is extremely action-oriented. We wanted names for the Practices that were about doing and actions. Clarify Context, is a clear example. It’s stating an action beginning with a verb. Inspire Purpose is a little more unusual but follows the same rule - we are asking teams to Inspire themselves through purpose. We also want teams to Crystallize their shared Intent. There are action words throughout the Framework: Cultivate Collaboration, Activate Ways-of-working, and Sustain & Renew round things out. 

Adapt

All these names came from our need to make the Framework fit the action-focused Mars culture. But you can call the Practices whatever you want. That’s adaptation, the second approach to bringing the Framework to your organization. Take the Framework and choose words that fit your organization better, if need be. Or, if the words are fine, you might say, “Six Practices? I think it’s actually five for us.” Or maybe you prefer four Practices. Or a square graphic instead of round. That’s all good. The research is there to support that the underlying ideas are right, and that is what matters. 

Emulate

Finally, you can emulate what we did. You could emulate our research process rather than the Framework itself. What would that entail? We had an internal consultant - me - working with teams around the globe at various levels and we got a lot of rich data. Go gather some data. Then ask some questions: ”What’s inhibiting collaboration around here today?” “When it does work, what is driving success?” Then begin to formulate your own approach. It can work. You have to have an organization to back you on it. But, I can confidently say that it’s a lot more effective than just buying something off the shelf because it worked somewhere else. It’s more work, sure. But if you emulate our process you can create something that works for your organization, your culture. 

So, those are my basic guidelines for how to apply the HPC Framework in your organization. If you have more questions about how to use the HPC Framework, take a listen to my other podcasts or buy Lessons from Mars wherever you prefer to buy books. Or contact me.  Let’s talk! 

Discipline’s 2 Practices for High Performance Collaboration

Of the six Practices of High Performance Collaboration referred to in previous blogs, there are two Practices associated with the Discipline Imperative. The first of them is called Activate Ways of Working. At Mars, people talk about team processes like decision making and meetings as ways-of-working, hence the name of this Practice.

When was the last time you went to a meeting and said to yourself, “Why did I say ‘yes’ to this meeting? What am I supposed to be doing here? I don’t feel like this meeting is giving me any value, and I’m not providing any value to this meeting.” This is what happens when a team hasn’t figured out how its processes should align with what matters, when they haven’t been specific about the work they share, and therefore who needs to attend meetings when those topics are discussed.

Activate Ways of working

Activate ways-of-working is as simple as aligning team ways-of-working with the team’s Inspiring Purpose and with the work they have decided to share in Crystallize Intent. This is how you make sure your meetings are built around what matters to everyone on the team.

Meetings are just one of the disciplines in Activate Ways-of-working. We talked a bit about decision making in the podcast dedicated to Discipline.  Just as with meetings, decision-making ought to line up with your team’s Inspiring Purpose and the Radar Screen exercise. For instance, for work at the center of your Radar Screen, you may want to ensure that the total team has a role in making decisions related to that work.

Then there is the matter of connectivity, using technology to keep the team connected between formal meetings. I used to stress that discussing connectivity is important for groups that don’t sit in the same office or plant. Now, given the Pandemic of 2020, the question of how best to use technology to stay connected is important, even pressing, for every team suddenly forced to work remotely.

Ask yourself, “What tools and techniques are most appropriate for the team to use, given our shared work? Should we be using WhatsApp? What about Skype or Zoom?” You pick it. Technologies abound. Also, ask what rules will govern your connectivity. Will you allow yourselves to send emails to each other at 3:00 AM? How will you share documents? Via email or using a shared drive? There are a host of other questions but you get the gist.

Establishing working rules and simple disciplines helps teams, as I like to say, to keep the factory running; the gears of collaboration need to mesh and keep turning as the team does its work.  You don’t want to have to stop and design an agenda every time you have a meeting. Instead, create standing agendas focused on the things you’ve agreed are important. Agree to a few, standardized decision making protocols so that when it comes time to make an important decision, you already know how that will operate. Things like these will help the team manage its time and energy effectively.

sustain and renew - the 2nd practice of the discipline imperative

The second Practice associated with the Discipline Imperative is Sustain & Renew. This Practice is about the team learning together. The key is making learning a team habit, establishing what I refer to as a rhythm of learning. It’s about – no surprise - making learning a team discipline.

Once you’ve done Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent, after you’ve made agreements in Cultivate Collaboration and Activate Ways-of-working, you will need to stop occasionally and ask, “Is this serving us?” “Is our purpose the right purpose a year later?” “Are our ways-of-working still aligned with the stuff we said we had to do together?”  Some of the work you agreed to share when you last worked on your Radar Screen will have ended. You will need to remove those tasks and add other work that’s come up since then and then realign the other Practices to this revised Radar Screen.

If teams don’t pause, reflect and inquire at least occasionally, they get out of step; their agreements about working together no longer match the work they are currently doing. Addressing those inevitable misalignments is what Sustain & Renew is about.

Pause - reflect - inquire - plan - act

By the way, in Lessons from Mars I recommend a simple process for doing this. Pause-Reflect-Inquire-Plan-Act. These steps are nothing new. At Mars, the big challenge was to get people to Pause and take time to Reflect. If you are a busy person as my colleagues at Mars were, pausing and reflecting feels unproductive. Of course, it’s not but when there’s a lot going on pausing for even 15 minutes can feel like falling behind. The goal of the Practice as we designed it was to provide ways to make pausing to learn feel like a useful, goal-oriented habit of success.

So, what can you do to make Sustain & Renew work for you? Build learning into your standing agendas, the ones I suggested you create as part of Activate Ways-of-working. Every month or every quarter commit to stop, inquire, reflect and improve. Connect your learning sessions to specific areas that you want to enhance, even to specific on-going work that could benefit from the lessons learned. That’s the heart of Sustain & Renew as a discipline.

about renew

One last thought. As we were thinking through and playing with the names for the Practices, the word, “renew” felt important to me. We worked so hard at Mars. We were going flat-out all the time. We loved our work but would become weary, even if we didn’t always admit it. A person working that way needs to pause once in a while to renew themself. It’s an internal, individual renewal as well as a renewal for the team. Sustain & Renew; that last word is so important.

That’s it for these two Practices. Next, I want to step away from the Practices and explore a more general concept – team learning. I’ll do that in the next blogpost.

We are in the middle of a series of blogs about the six Practices of High Performance Collaboration. This blog discusses the Practice Cultivate Collaboration.

Cultivate Collaboration is absolutely essential

To illustrate why this Practice is important, and how it’s different, I want to tell a story. It was around 2012 and my team and I were still developing the Framework. I was boarding a plane for an engagement with a team in China, as I recall. I was settling into my seat when my phone buzzed. It was a text from one of my brothers. I am one of 11 children by the way; I am number six with five older siblings and five younger. This whole group dynamics thing is something I grew up doing and have grown up well suited for based on my central position in my family of origin.

At any rate, this text was from child #7, one of my younger brothers. I noticed there was a video embedded in the text so I clicked on it. I saw two rows of six guys – and they were all guys – in polo shirts and khaki pants. They were standing facing each other on a platform in a windowless hotel meeting room, shaking their arms forcefully, pounding their forearms against each other, grimacing and chanting something in a strange language. I had no idea what I was seeing.

We hadn’t taken off yet and the door of the plane was still open so I called my brother. It turns out he was in London. I asked him, “What’s going on?” “You’re never going to believe what they’re making us do!”, he told me.

Some genius in higher management thought this would be good team building

He was there on a business trip. He was part of a sales and marketing organization within a business-to-business industrial software company. The entire sales and marketing function – around 30 folks - including people from North America, Australia and Europe was gathered in London to do some team building.

His company had been acquired about a year earlier by another, larger company. Their smaller company, now a division of the larger one, wasn’t doing well. As my brother put it, some “genius in higher management” decided what they needed to turn things around was a little old fashioned team building. What I was seeing in that video was this group being taught how to do the haka, a ceremonial war dance of the Maori people of New Zealand. The haka is quite stirring to watch when it’s done well. If you’ve ever seen the New Zealand All Blacks, the country’s national rugby team, they open every match with a performance of the haka. It’s impressive, exciting.

Along with those 30 people from around, the company had flown in a couple of Maori tribespeople to act as instructors. They were gathered at a very expensive hotel in the center of London where, in groups of six, the team spent 4 hours learning how to do the haka. They would then perform their hakas for each other and be judged by their peers. The team judged to have out-haka-ed the others received a prize, some small token for their efforts.

9 months later the division was sold off

Remember: this team building was meant to help turn the business around. Think about the odds of its being effective. It didn’t surprise me when 9 months later when my brother called and told me his division had been sold off by the parent company. They never could turn the corner.

This is the sort of thing that passes for team building, trying to build more effective relationships at work and within teams. It doesn’t work. We’ve come to rely on tools and techniques like these that don’t deliver a difference in performance. Cultivate Collaboration is about building relationships in teams but it’s different.

To make collaboration accountable it must be cultivated and contracted

Cultivate Collaboration is about accountability, about building accountable collaborative relationships. It is done in 3 ways, through 3 different sets of conversations.

We begin by creating accountability between the leader and the team. A manager says, “Look, team, here is what I am expecting you to be accountable for in terms of collaboration, the behaviors I will be looking for if we are going to do what we committed to do through our Inspiring Purpose and Crystallized Intent – the previous two Practices.

It goes the other way, too. The team also says to their manager, “Fair enough. Here’s what we’ll need from you in terms of leadership, guidance and coaching to deliver on our collaborative commitments. It’s two-way contracting building mutual accountability.

The 3 Directions of Accountability

The next step is team members talking to each other. Think back to the Radar Screen in Crystallize Intent where subgroups were named to run certain projects. In Cultivate Collaboration those groups get together. They discuss who is going to do what and with whom, who will be accountable for the specific parts of each project or initiative and how they will hold each other accountable. They also discuss how their boss could hold them accountable for the commitments they are making to each other.

Notice that there are three directions of accountability: leader to team, team to leader and team member to team member. We are weaving a fabric of collaborative accountability. You don’t get that by doing the haka, going out on a ropes course or in a paintball battle.

Know who we are and how it will affect our teamwork

There is one other element to this. We want our working relationships to be trusting and rewarding. Once you’ve determined who is doing what with whom, and what the accountabilities are, it’s time to sit down and ask a deeper question: “Who are you, who am I and how will our personalities and preferences affect how we work together?” It’s not necessary, but this is where you can use something like Myers Briggs, DiSC, or Strengths Finder. You could use any instrument that reveals a bit about your personality or preferences or that speaks to your natural inclinations or strengths.  

You use these instruments to understand how your preferences and strengths can support your work together. You might talk about how, given your profile, areas of project you are well suited to, or aspects of the project it might be best for you to avoid. You can also talk about how your attributes would enable you to support others and how they might support you.

make a contract of commitment and accountability for the team’s collaboration

This is different from doing the haka or a ropes course. It’s also different from how personality tests are usually used, as a generic “get-to-know-each-other” exercise. Contracting as I’ve described it builds commitment and accountability. Then you use the information about yourself in constructive and focused ways to help you do the shared work that must be done.

After decades of working with teams, I have never seen relationships get stronger than when people sit down for a Cultivate Collaboration workshop, when they connect to each other around meaningful work, make accountable commitments and figure out how they can add the most value to the collaboration.

To sum it up, Cultivate Collaboration is about contracting, connecting individuals to the work of the team; it’s about how each individual can make their shared work stronger and better. It’s about creating more intentional collaboration. You might recall that this Practice is a part of the Intentionality Imperative. In fact, it’s the only Practice that is directly aligned to Intentionality.

You don’t arrive at Cultivate Collaboration without having created Clarity using the Practices Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent. You come to this third Practice knowing why your collaboration matters, which work requires collaboration, and who should be doing it. Cultivate Collaboration is the payoff for all that work.

The next blog is about developing good team habits, the disciplines of running a team on a regular basis. I look forward to building on what we have covered so far so you can see how the Framework comes together.

We are talking about the Practices related to the Clarity Imperative. If you don’t know what I mean by the Clarity Imperative, if you haven’t read or listened to any previous blogs or podcasts, you may want to do that before listening to this one. Or, to get some background, you can purchase the book, Lessons from Mars, from your favorite bookseller. In any case right now we are going to discuss the second and third of the three Clarity-related Practices: Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent.

A Team Purpose Story

There was a team running the global pet business at Mars. They came up with a powerful statement of their purpose that I want to use as an example of what Inspire Purpose is designed to do. Our Framework didn’t exist when they came up with their purpose. Their statement was one of the things that inspired us as we created the Framework because when we examined it and how they used it, it was clear what a difference a collaborative purpose could make.

Here’s their statement:

“Together we are courageous architects of the future of petcare”.

That might sound like just so many business buzzwords: courageous architects, the future of petcare, etc. In fact, it was a precise articulation of what they were about and the value their collaboration would create. Let me take it apart for you so you can better see how it served them and the power an inspiring purpose can have.

The elements of powerful purpose

This team of global leaders headed up a massive business that represented 40 or 45% of the overall Mars business. They were and still are responsible for a lot, running massive regions like Asia Pacific or heading up global functions of thousands of people. Being spread around the world, and with so much to do, they could only get together physically four times a year. What value could there be in their relatively limited collaboration?

A compelling challenge and a meaningful role

For a start, they didn’t see the day-to-day running of the business and the factories as their collective responsibility; they would focus exclusively on the future of petcare. And not just Mars Petcare. This group of senior leaders would create the future of the entire petcare segment and marketplace. They set this as their collaborative challenge.

They took on a big and inspiring challenge, and that’s not all. They committed to “courageously architect,” the future. First, the word architect: they intended to do more work towards the future. They aimed to design it. And they weren’t going to be average designers or architects. They committed to be courageous, to be bold, to take risks in order to create an innovative new future for the entire petcare marketplace.

Finally, the first word of the statement is “together.” This simple word bound them to do this as a group, as a team. It would be their working together that would make it all possible.

An aspirational and practical team purpose

This statement is not only inspirational and aspirational, it’s also practical. For example, if a topic didn’t deal with the future of the entire petcare segment, if it wouldn’t make a difference to what the segment might look like 5 or 10 years ahead, that topic wouldn’t make it onto their agenda.

They also used their statement in the room during meetings. When they got into discussions and debates, if they were not thinking and acting courageously about architecting the future, they would course-correct. For example, if they were debating what went wrong when a pet food retort machine exploded in Australia, that wasn’t architecting the future; that was micro-managing. When this sort of thing happened – and it did - one of the team pointed to their inspiring purpose statement to bring them back to their shared commitment to courageously architect the future. These are examples of what I mean when I say their purpose statement was not only aspirational, it was practical.

By the way, we have tools in Appendix A of the book designed to help teams develop strong purpose statements. When you get a chance, take a look at them.

Crystallize intent: the What

As strong as the example I provided is, a purpose statement by itself is not enough. You still need to know what the work is. I alluded a moment ago to “what goes on the agenda;” teams use the next Practice, Crystallize Intent, to determine the specific work that will deliver on the promise of their purpose.

They use a tool called the Radar Screen, and it’s the only tool I am going to go over in these Blog posts. It’s simple – three concentric circles. We invite teams to use the Radar Screen to differentiate among all the work they have. At the center of the Radar (which some call the “Bullseye” because the graphic looks like a target) we ask you to put the work that you must collaborate on as a total team. Typically not more than two or three pieces of work that end up in the center circle. What’s more, the bigger the group, the fewer items get placed there.

purposeful work

For a team like the pet care management team we’ve been talking about, their shared work would include things like developing strategy, business planning to implement the strategy, and senior-level talent planning. Everything else will be dealt with by others, elsewhere in the organization.

So, at the center of the Radar is the work that requires all of us to actively participate, and that brings our purpose to life. The next ring out is for work that will be done by sub-groups, committees, task forces - choose your term – small groups doing important work that doesn’t involve everyone on the team. The outer ring is where you would place projects or initiatives that can be done by capable individuals on the team.

Even though they didn’t have the Radar Screen, this is how the pet care management team thought about their work. They differentiated among levels of collaboration – work they owned as a total team, work to be done by subsets of the team and work that individuals on the team would do.

Work NOT to do

There is one other category to consider, one that lies outside the three rings of the Radar Screen: Not now/not us. When teams do the Radar Screen exercise they use sticky notes, with each sticky note having one task or project on it. They discuss and debate where each task/project belongs on the Radar Screen, what’s the right level of collaboration – if any – that will deliver the most value. Sometimes, a team will find itself with a piece of work that, when scrutinized, is either not needed now or not theirs to do. These go off to the side in the “Not now/not us” category.

Collaborative Clarity

We talked in a previous episode about Clarify Context which provides clarity around the organizational reason a team exists. Today we’ve talked about Inspire Purpose, determining the team’s own why; why is it important for them to act as a team, how will this create value and help them fulfill their commitment to business?  Then, we covered Crystallize Intent which is about the “what,” the specific work that requires collaboration.  

Now we have set the table, we have the level of clarity we need for this team to be as intentional as possible, to create collaboration that is really on purpose.

I’ll talk about the next Practice, Cultivate Collaboration, which is associated with the Intentionality Imperative, in my next blog post.

This post is one of a series of posts on High Performance Collaboration. In this post I’ll discuss how the Three Imperatives of Collaboration, covered in my last 4 blog posts, translate into what we call the Six Practices of High Performance Collaboration.

As I was doing the research that led to HPC, I was gaining insights and sketching out models based on those insights. The most important insight-cum-model I developed was the Three Imperatives: Clarity, Intentionality and Discipline. You may recall in my previous blog that Intentionality was the point, and what Mars teams needed more of. Clarity enabled Intentionality and Discipline supported Intentionality.

I had hoped, at that time, that the Three Imperatives would be the answer, that I could create techniques and tools around them that would enable teams to deliver on their collaborative potential. I realized, though, they weren’t enough.

Putting the 3 Imperatives into Action

Mars, like a lot of other companies, is full of achievement-driven people; they are innately motivated to get stuff done. The Three Imperatives are descriptions of what teams need if they hope to foster better collaboration in the face of strong preferences for individual working. For instance, they need to have more clarity about why collaboration matters so that can become more intentional about their collaboration, and so forth.

As accurate as it was, those descriptions of team needs weren’t going help people who just wanted to know what work had to get done, and how they ought to go about it. So I wondered, “How could I augment Three Imperatives so we would have something teams could use to generate collaboration and teamwork?”

That’s where the six HPC Practices come in. I referred to the Practices in an earlier blog post when I talked about how Mars is a doing-focused organization. Allow me to describe describe the six Practices at a high level and how each aligns with the Imperatives. Let’s begin with Clarity?

Clarity Imperative Practices: Clarify Context; Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent

There are three Practices associated with the Clarity Imperative. First, teams need context for why their collaboration matters. We call this Practice Clarify Context. Clarify Context directs groups, teams, councils, or whatever to understand their organizational reason for being. What customers, internal or external, are they meant to serve? What results are expected of them? If a team has a strategy, a vision or mission they probably have adequate context for their collaboration. Its always worth reviewing, of course, but those things are a good start.  

The other two of the three Clarity-related Practices are Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent. Inspire Purpose describes what HPC users often describe as the Big Why of the team, i.e., why is the team’s collaboration team important? More accurately, what is the value their collaboration will create over and above the sum of their individual efforts? The most important thing teams working on Inspire Purpose do is develop a purpose statement that expresses their Big Why.

Once teams have a clear and compelling purpose statement, they move on to the third Clarity-related Practice, Crystalize Intent which answers another fundamental question: what? Just because we understand the Why of our collaboration it doesn’t mean we know what it’s going to take to deliver on it, the specific tasks and initiatives. We call the Practice Crystallize Intent because it is meant to crystallize the specific work that will deliver the team’s purpose and be aligned with its broader organizational context. With these three Practices, Clarify Context, Inspire Purpose and Crystallize Intent, teams create the clarity needed to make their collaboration most productive.

Intentionality Imperative Practice: Cultivate Collaboration

Next, teams move on to the Intentionality Imperative and its one related Practice, Cultivate Collaboration. Cultivate Collaboration leverages the Clarity that the first three Practices create to help build strong, productive relationships. In Crystallize Intent we identified the specific work that requires collaboration. In Cultivate Collaboration, we focus on the important relationships needed to get that work done, who will do what with whom in service of the team’s purpose. We also have collaborative partners commit to how they will need to behave together.

Discipline Imperative Practices: Activate Ways of Working and Sustain & Renew

Activate Ways of Working is the next Practice and the first of two Practices related to the Discipline Imperative. Activate Ways of Working, as I discussed when I covered the Imperatives previously, involves crafting a few, simple team processes and lining those up with your Purpose and your Crystallized Intent so that your ways of working support what you agreed to focus on.

The second Discipline-related Practice is called Sustain & Renew. This Practice is about continuous improvement and learning. Like Activate Ways of Working, you are likely to find things like Sustain & Renew in other team effectiveness frameworks. The difference with HPC is focus and alignment. Sustain & Renew is grounded in a clear team purpose and focused only on what’s needed to support the specific collaborative work the team has identified.  If a team is not growing, not doing things to sustain its effectiveness and taking time to renew itself, it won’t last. That’s why we call it what we call it Sustain & Renew. It’s about regularly pausing to reflect, to inquire and figure out what needs to be learned to get better and move forward. Teams must develop a rhythm, a habit and cadence of learning for this Practice to deliver value; that’s why it’s a part of the Discipline Imperative.

So, there you have it; Three Imperatives, Clarity, Intentionality, and Discipline that lead to six related Practices. The next several blog posts will go into detail about how to implement each of the six Practices. I recognize I’ve given you a lot of information here. And of course you can always buy the book.

Now that I’ve laid the groundwork, I’m excited to show you how to put the Practices work. I’ll be doing that in the next six blog posts.

So far we’ve talked about two of the three Imperatives, Clarity and Intentionality. Number three is Discipline.

Discipline can mean a few things. Without any other context the word reminds of what I used to hear from the nuns when I attended Catholic school years ago. Fortunately, the version I’m talking about here doesn’t involve knuckles being rapped with a ruler.

This sort of discipline is about rigor. Or, as somebody once said to me, “This is really about good habits;” I couldn’t have said it better. The Discipline Imperative is about developing good team habits, simple, useful routines. Not routines for routines sake, but routines aligned with the clarity you gained through developing your purpose and the conversations you had about accountability for collaboration.  That’s what we mean by Discipline. 

4 Aspects of Good Team Discipline

There are four main aspects of good team Discipline.

• Design your meetings to be fit for purpose, your team’s purpose.

• Decision making is also a discipline; your team will want to develop repeatable, reliable routines for deciding.

• Connectivity, how you use technology to stay connected between meetings, is the third vital discipline. Strong teams make appropriate connectivity into a good habit that everyone is willing to adhere to.

• Learning as a team is a habit of high performing groups and it is an important one. Great teams have a routine around pausing to reflect, inquire and learn at regular intervals as well as during and after important projects.

Good Habits

So, that is the Discipline Imperative. It’s about habits, simple routines that are strongly aligned with the Clarity and Intentionality you have already focused on. Teams create these habits and routines to keep things running as smoothly and predictably as possible. The world’s crazy enough. Whatever we can do within our teams to foster a sense of control, a sense of focus around the things that matter, will go a long way towards helping us meet the commitments we have made to each other and to our organizations.

That does it for the Three Imperatives. In the upcoming blog posts, we go into detail about the six Practices that grew out of the Imperatives, what those are and how they are applied.

Teams that excel foster accountable, collaborative relationships around work that matters

Intentionality. It’s a topic I touched on in previous installments but now we’re going deeper. To review, Intentionality is one of the Three Imperatives that are part of our collaboration framework, the other two being Clarity and Discipline. Recall that the Imperatives represent the three underlying needs that must be addressed to foster high performance collaboration.

on personality types and teams

Several years ago I was working with the Mars Food leadership team in California; they led the business responsible for Uncle Bens. I was doing what I did back then, focusing on relationships. I used not one but two personality instruments to help team members get to know and understand each other better. But I didn’t stop there. I added a step, naively but fortuitously, that made this engagement different from others I had run previously. And what a difference it turned out to be.

As I had done many times before, I had each team member stand in front of the group and review their personality reports with the rest of the team. They shared their types and preferences along with a couple of other facts about themselves. Then I asked them – and this was the twist - to identify the people in the room they needed to work most closely with. I then set up an exercise where they sat with their various collaborative partners to talk about how their personalities and preferences could affect their work together.

Some people identified numerous partners; others had fewer. The key was to have them engage with their important collaborative partners, regardless of number, and to use their personality data to inform those conversations.

In all the years I’ve worked with groups and teams I have never gotten more positive feedback than I got from that team. To a person they said they had never had a more worthwhile team engagement than this one. Why?

Personality types: so what? Here’s what.

Team consultants often ask us to share personality information and it just hangs out there. “I’m this set of letters, you’re that set of letters.” Okay, but so what?  It’s interesting and I may remember some of it for a few days. I could put little carved wooden blocks with my letters on my desk to remind myself and others but before long those fade into the background.

By contrast, these conversations were clear about exactly what team members were to do with this information. For instance, one person was more analytical while their partner was more conceptual. They figured out how to take advantage of these differences to get their shared work done. There was another team member who favored cold logic and thinking, while their colleague was all about feelings. Their discussion focused on how they could divvy up their tasks based on those preferences in ways that would support their collaboration. Some partners were more alike than different and they talked about how to make the most of their similarities.

Through this exercise, the Mars Food team was practicing Intentionality, though back then we didn’t have that label. They were creating accountability for their collaboration, as are teams that use our framework now. Their accountability went beyond what they would do together; it included how they would do it based on who they understood themselves to be.

Commitments and relationship building

Relationship building done this way goes beyond “rah-rah,” feel-good team building. It means making specific commitments to our teammates and collaborative partners based on individual strengths, interests and capabilities we have identified.

My message is this; If you’re going to use personality instruments, connect the data to the work that needs doing and the relationships needed to do it. As I described in the previous blog, it begins by clarifying what that work is. Then you have get clear about specifically who needs to be involved with whom. Those people can then sit down and contract for how they’re going to work together using personality data to enrich those discussions.

Contracting and Specifics

I’ll add one more piece: focus on behaviors. Avoid vague pledges to “support” one another, or to “show respect.” Define what those things look like for each of you so you will know them when you see them. Spell out the specific behaviors that would demonstrate support or respect. Contracting for behaviors as well as for outcomes is at the heart of intentional collaboration.

Let’s take stock: Previously we talked about Clarity, how it creates a powerful Why and clarifies the What, the collaborative work that is required. In this blog post we focused on Intentionality, strengthening relationships and accountability for the work that requires collaboration. But how do you keep all this going? That’s the realm of the third Imperative, Discipline, and it’s the topic of the next blog post.

What’s first in building a team: Trust? Shared goals? Nope - CLARITY.

Earlier in this series I introduced The Three Imperatives of high performance collaboration: Clarity, Intentionality and Discipline. The Imperatives arose out of research I did on over 120 teams at Mars and they describe three indispensable ingredients for team success.

In summary, teams need 

1. Clarity about what requires collaboration and what doesn’t in order to be 

2. More intentional in their collaboration. Their intentionality must then be supported by 

3. Enough discipline to keep things on track. Discipline includes regular meetings structured around the right things and aligned to the Why and What I described in previous blog posts.

In this post I’ll focus on Clarity Imperative; the other two will be covered in subsequent installments. The need for clarity emerged early in my research and is illustrated perfectly by this next story. It’s a story I tell a lot because it is foundational to my work.  

tEAM MEETING SNAPSHOT

I was working with the North America &ms team in the Hackettstown NJ office of what was then called m&m Mars. The team leader, Mike, had asked me to help them with his recently formed cross-functional team’s effectiveness. I was invited to observe them during one of the regular team meetings.  

There were roughly 18 people at the meeting. They were drawn from all the major functions: finance, supply chain, marketing, sales, etc. We were in a small conference room with an oversized oval table and too many chairs to fit at the table. A number of people’s  chairs were pressed up against the walls because there wasn’t enough space.

It was a bright winter day. The lights were off, the Venetian blinds closed though a little light seeped between the narrow metal slats. Adding some light, a projected spreadsheet glowed on one wall and featured about 40 lines on it, the text and numbers so small you could barely make them out.

We were about two hours into a day-long meeting. Three team members were involved in heated debate about one line in the spreadsheet. Everyone else was on their Blackberries or computers doing emails, preparing presentations, doing work they could have been doing at their desks. They weren’t involved in or paying any attention to the debate; it apparently didn’t involve them.

Prior to the recent reorganization that forced them into a team, the m&ms brand was doing fine being managed by independent but coordinated functions. Now they found themselves squeezed into a room together unsure of what was expected. Watching this I thought to myself, “This group of people has no idea why they are all crammed together in this room.” 

team value is not just results

At that moment a little fantasy popped into my head. I imagined the President of the organization walking into that packed room; he was known to randomly walk in on meetings. In this imaginary scene everyone had a number written over their forehead representing what they cost the company on an hourly basis, their salary, wages and benefits. The President does some quick mental math and, shocked at the numbers, blurts out, “Why don’t you go to your desks and do something productive? Watching an argument isn’t productive. Trying to compose emails distracted by a dispute isn’t productive!” It didn’t happen, of course. But if it had, you could not have blamed the President for his outburst.

This team was acting out lack of clarity. They weren’t sure why they were in that room except that they were all connected to the same brand. They thought they understood why they were there - to work on m&ms. But what did that mean, exactly? What work required them to be together? What value should their combined presence create? In truth, they didn’t understand why they were a team. That lack of clarity was the root cause of this wasteful meeting and many others like it.

Back then, I wouldn’t have called it “clarity.” I just knew that team had no sense of its shared purpose. That meeting has become a touchstone for me; it began my awakening to the importance of clarity of collaborative purpose and intent. Without clarity we waste time in meetings we don’t need to be part of, listening to stuff we don’t need to hear. With clarity we understand the things that make being a team valuable, what’s worth meeting about and engaging around. It’s that simple.

That’s the essence of the Clarity Imperative. My next blog post is about the Intentionality which grows out of Clarity and is the heart of the Framework.