Do Big Things. Paccione Angela V.

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      As all of us drop deeper toward our own Grand Canyon, we recognize and agonize over the wisdom inside of us: We are better than this. Our leadership, talent, culture – in other words, who we are as people – all merge at a space called team. It is here that we discover our darkness and our brilliance. It is only here that we get serious work done.

      WTF (Want the Facts)

      In case you have a teammate who's been out of town for a while and missed what's going on, and they want the facts to better understand the reality of the situation faced by all, share this data with them:

      • 84 percent of employees are “matrixed” to some extent, meaning they serve on multiple teams.8

      • 21 percent of executives are confident in their ability to develop cross-functional teams.9

      • 92 percent of companies are going through reorganization.10

      • 70 percent of transformation efforts fail.11

      • When team members were asked to describe their team, fewer than 10 percent agreed about who was on it.12

How Legendary Teams Succeed in Doing Big Things

      Take this quiz. Consider these now-classic tales of glory and identify what they all have in common. What exactly enabled these teams to succeed?

      • The Apollo 13 space mission team, including those at mission control in Houston, Texas. After an explosion on board, the astronauts had to scrap their plans for exploring the surface of the moon and divert all their resources to getting a hunk of malfunctioning metal – and the lives it carried – safely home. In what some consider a miracle, they prevailed.13

      • The 2016 Chicago Cubs. They faced a history book full of 108 years of failure that said they were losers. But in this magical season they made it to the championship of baseball, the World Series. After four games in the best-of-seven series, they found themselves down three games to one. With perseverance, they overcame long odds and fought their way back, forcing a final and deciding game. In what became an instant classic, the game required extra innings to determine the winner. The Chicago Cubs dug deep and found the strength to win. Legions of fans around the world could finally say: Our team is the best.14

      • The team called the “brain trust” at Pixar, the computer animation film studio known for producing smash hits like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., and many others. Pixar founder Ed Catmull says, “Early on, all of our movies suck.”15 Yet, the brain trust and other teams within the company have the remarkable ability to produce and deliver feature films to the market that regularly win Academy Awards and almost always make the list of top 50 worldwide highest grossing animated movies.

      For more than two decades, we've been obsessed with answering one question: How do you equip a team to deliver big things? We've studied teams like those just mentioned and observed and worked with thousands more – with a singular lens: What is the how? Specifically, the human how? In other words, how did they create the behavioral dynamics that make the team seemingly superhuman?

      When teams are enthralled with an idea, they are relentless in their learning, experimentation, and practice. We certainly are, which is why we've insisted on going far beyond team basics in our work. For example, nearly everyone knows that for a team to succeed they need a purpose, agreed-upon goals and objectives, a strategy, customer, charter, resources, role clarity, clear responsibilities, processes, and all the other fundamentals.

      Here is the key question, though: If each of us knows these basics, and many teams fulfill those requirements, why do so many teams still fail to do anything significant at all? The truth is that a lot of organizations are in peril for one striking reason: Dynamics exist that stop employees from being who they really want to be: great people, particularly in relationship to the other members of their team.

      Good teams can repeat back a strategy they've read on paper. They can watch the slides and listen to leaders at the town hall gatherings. But if the team's plan isn't reflected in their hearts, they're likely doomed to be overwhelmed by an avalanche of priorities and mixed messages about how they should do their work. In addition, the seemingly ever-changing direction of the company creates a dizzying swirl of confusion. A pressure to reinvent oneself while still delivering what the team was told to do yesterday overwhelms capacity and crushes confidence.

      Under such circumstances, even though executives can see the strategy clearly on the whiteboard, without the ability to be better together, employees with glazed eyes ask with increasing frequency: Where are we going? Who are we becoming?

Going Deeper Than Behavior Basics

      It's painfully clear that it's far more than revising the team charter or redesigning the reporting structure that's going to get any of us through this. As well, the solution requires going further than platitudes about needing to model organizational values.

      The answer to what's necessary for teams to do big things today lies in going deeper than the behavior basics. A first step is examining how the members of extraordinary teams behave together. For example, let's go back to the quiz of legendary teams. What did you see as the common thread in the success stories cited earlier? Most people come up with a list that includes these behaviors:

      • Trust

      • Collaboration

      • Respect

      • Vision

      • Strategy

      • Accountability

      • Empowerment

      • Communication

      These characteristics or behaviors indeed are demonstrated in nearly every story of team success. (Come on, though, admit it: Did you have a sense of déjà vu when you read the list? We did because it's a list distributed nearly word for word in countless books and within organizations around the world.) There's no surprise here: These qualities are necessary for a team to succeed.

      But there's more. (And once you see and apply it, everything changes.) These values and behaviors are inherently intangible. What's necessary are reliable methods to create tangible behaviors. In nearly every success story, there's a pattern – a way the team approaches their objectives and team members interact with each other – that serves as a mechanism by which the behaviors on the list above become a reality. Those who can see this pattern and these dynamics and replicate them dramatically improve the arc of the team's destiny.

      The key to seeing the pattern requires understanding that the values and behaviors we've all been conditioned to believe are the Holy Grail (in other words, if you have them, the world is yours) aren't the end-all resolution. The values and behaviors successful teams demonstrate, while important, are in reality just one of two steps toward the solution. To illustrate, consider pi.

      • The values and behaviors we listed for successful teams are not wrong; they're merely incomplete. For example, if you ask someone, “What's pi?” and she answers, “3.14,” you wouldn't jump up and down and claim she lied or was incorrect. СКАЧАТЬ