La etapa fundacional y la Real Cédula de 13 de enero de 1824

The seven kinds of teamicide we described in Chapter 20 seemed to us at the time to stretch all the way from the alpha to the omega of the subject. But there were two important kinds of teamicide that we missed. Like the original seven, these two additions are practiced widely in our field. One of them has become so ubiquitous that a small growth industry has sprung up to support it....

Those Damn Posters

Pick up the airline magazine or on-board shoppers' catalog on your next flight and flip through the full-page advertisements.

Somewhere in there you will come upon a colorful selection of inspirational posters and framed messages for display on corpo-rate walls (lest someone use up the wall space with work prod-ucts). Don't just glance at them, but force yourself to read through them all, turning over their texts in your mind and savor-ing their syrupy prose. If you're not angry by the time you're done, you may have been serving under lousy managers for much too much of your career.

Most forms of teamicide do their damage by effectively demeaning the work, or demeaning the people who do it. Teams are catalyzed by a common sense that the work is important and that doing it well is worthwhile. The word well in this last sen-tence is essential: The team assigns itself the task of setting and

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upholding a standard of prideful workmanship. All team mem-bers understand that the quality of the work is important to the organization, but the team adopts fr still higher standard to distin-guish itself. Without this distindistin-guishing factor, the group is just a group, never a real team.

Into this complicated mix, now imagine dropping a $150 framed poster to advise people that "Quality Is Job One." Oh.

Gee, we never would have thought that. No sir, we sort of assumed—until this wonderful poster came along—that Quality was Job Twenty-Nine, or maybe Eleventy-Seven, or maybe even lower than that on the corporate value scale, maybe someplace after reducing ear wax or sorting the trash. But now we know.

Thanks.

These motivational accessories, as they are called (includ-ing slogan coffee mugs, plaques, pins, key chains, and awards), are a triumph of form over substance. They seem to extol the importance of Quality, Leadership, Creativity, Teamwork, Loyalty, and a host of other organizational virtues. But they do so in such simplistic terms as to send an entirely different message:

Management here believes that these virtues can be improved with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent.

Everyone quickly understands that the presence of the posters is a sure sign of the absence of hard work and talent.

That important matters like these should be the subject of motivational posters is already an insult. But the implementation makes it even worse. Consider an example marketed by one company: It shows a soft-focus image of sweating oarsmen, row-ing in perfect unison through the misty mornrow-ing. Underneath it reads, in part:

T«E»A«M»W«O«R«K

. . . The Fuel That Allows Common People To Attain Uncommon Results

The "common people" they're talking about here are you and your workmates. Common people. (Don't take it too hard.) At least they're consistent in attitude: The same company's Leadership poster tells us that "the speed of the leader determines the rate of the pack." The pack. Yep, that's you again.

Motivational accessories are phony enough to make most people's skin crawl. They do harm in healthy organizations. The only place where they do no harm is where they are ignored—as

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in companies where the harm was done long, long ago and people have ceased to register any further decline.

Overtime: An Unanticipated Side Effect

You may already have picked up a certain bias in the book's origi-nal chapters against the use of overtime. It has been our experi-ence that the positive potential of working extra hours is far exag-gerated, and that its negative impact is almost never considered.

That negative impact can be substantial: error, burnout, accelerat-ed turnover, and compensatory "undertime." In this section, we examine yet another negative effect of overtime: its teamicidal repercussions on otherwise healthy work groups.

Imagine a project with a well-jelled team. You and your colleagues are producing good work at a rate that is frankly aston-ishing, even to you and your boss. You all understand this to be the beneficial effect of team jell, that the whole of your team duction capacity is greater than the sum of your individual pro-ductivities. But it's still not enough. The powers that be have promised the product for June, and it's just not going to get done at the current rate.

Sounds like a case for a little overtime, right? You move the team into high gear, add a few hours to the workweek (still at the same high production rate), maybe work a few Saturdays. There is only one problem: One of your teammates—let's call him Allen—just doesn't have the flexibility that the rest of you enjoy.

He is a widower and thus the primary care-giver for his little boy.

Allen has to show up at the day-care facility at 5:15 each after-noon to pick the child up. As you might imagine, his Saturdays and Sundays, the only real quality time with his son, are invio-lable.

Hey, that's okay, you think, we'll cover for Allen. We all understand. And you all do . . . in the beginning.

A few months later, however, the rest of you are starting to show the strain. All your Saturdays have been gobbled up, as have most of your Sundays. You've been working sixty-plus-hour weeks for longer than you thought possible, and your spous-es and kids are grumbling. Your laundry is piling up, your bills are unpaid, your vacation plans have been scrapped. Allen, through all this, is still working a forty-hour week. Finally, some-body says what you are all thinking: "I'm getting pretty sick of carrying Allen."

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What's happened here? A team that was positively hum-ming with the good effects of jell has been pried apart by an over-time policy that could not be applied uniformly to the team mem-bers. But the members of good teams are never uniform in any respect, certainly not in their abilities to "borrow" time from their personal lives. In almost any team of four or five or six people, there are bound to be a few who can't be expected to put in the kind of overtime that might fit pretty well into some of the others' lives. All that can be shrugged off as unimportant if the overtime is only a matter of a few long evenings and maybe one extra weekend day. But if the overtime drags on over months and starts to exact a real toll on even the most willing team members, there is bound to be damage to team cohesion. The people who aren't sharing the pain will become, little by little, estranged from the others. And the team magic will be gone.

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, anyway. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by the negative side effects. This is true even if you don't consider the disruption of the team. When you take into account the way that the team members' differing abilities to work overtime tends to destroy teams, the case against it becomes persuasive.

Most managers have at least a suspicion that overtime doesn't help, that projects that work a lot of overtime are not much of a credit to their managers' skills and talents. But they end up allow-ing or encouragallow-ing overtime, anyway. Why is this? Jerry Weinberg has an answer of sorts: He suggests that we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield our-selves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on tune.

COMPETITION

The issue of competition within a team or work group is a complicated one, something that managers tend to disagree about.

You've surely heard the line that companies exist to compete with each other, so by extension, a little competition within the compa-ny is a healthy way to keep the competitive edge. Other man-agers conclude that something is wrong when team members feel they are being pitted against each other. At the extreme, at least, competition is certain to inhibit team jell. If team members are told, for example, that only the best one of them will be around next year, you can be sure that they will not succeed in working together very well.

Consider an Analogy

Like managers, parents sometimes have to grapple with the issue of internal competition. They may find that their children tend to be competitive with each other. They may also try to reassure themselves that the competitive edge will be useful in the rough and tumble of later life, so perhaps honing that competitive edge within the family is okay.

But competition between siblings is not entirely okay. We know, for example, that highly competitive siblings grow up to be distanced from each other, while those who are less competitive as children have at least a chance of building warm sibling

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ships as adults. Chances are that you know of at least one exam-ple of siblings who "don't speak" as adults, or the saddest extreme, entire families in which no two adjacent siblings have maintained a relationship into adulthood.

There is now a substantial consensus about the ways that parents encourage or discourage sibling competition. Competition is fostered when the children are emotionally undernourished by the parents, when there just isn't enough time, respect, attention, and affection to go around.

Conversely, when adult and young adult siblings are super-supportive of each other, when they obviously care a lot about each other and take evident pleasure in their friendship, you know that their parents have done something right.

Is it possible that internal competition in work teams is fos-tered by a manager's lack of time, respect, attention, and affection for his or her people? Though that may be too simplistic, we believe there is an important kernel of truth to the idea.

Does It Matter? The Importance of Coaching

What is the long-term effect of heightened competition among people who need to work together? One of the first victims is the easy, effective peer-coaching that is ubiquitous in healthy teams.

As a manager, you may have convinced yourself that you ought to be the principal coach to the team or teams that report to you. That certainly was a common model in the past, when high-tech bosses tended to be proven experts in the high-technologies their workers needed to master. Today, however, the typical team of knowledge-workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the team members. What of the others? We are increasingly con-vinced that the team members themselves provide most of the coaching.

When you observe a well-knit team in action, you'll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time.

Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their roles tend to switch back and forth over time with, perhaps, A coaching B about TCP/IP and then B coaching A about imple-mentation of queues. When it works well, the participants are barely even aware of it. They may not even identify it as coach-ing; to them it may just seem like work.

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Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend to look back on significant coaching we've received as a near religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by coaching others.

The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached; it would be a clear indication that you knew less than your coach about some subject matter. You would be similarly crazy to coach someone else, as that person may eventually use your assistance to pass you by.

Teamicide Re-revisited

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching dif-ficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase compe-tition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal. Here are some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:

• annual salary or merit reviews

• management by objectives (MBO)

• praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplish-ment

• awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance

• performance measurement in almost any form

But hold on here, aren't these the very things that managers spend much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet these actions are likely to be teamicidal.

In his 1982 book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming set forth his now widely followed "Fourteen Points." Hidden among them, almost as an afterthought, is point 12B:

Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means [among other things] abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives.

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Even people who think of themselves as Deming-ites have trouble with this one. They are left gasping, What the hell are we supposed to do instead?

Deming's point is that MBO and its ilk are managerial cop-outs. By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad perfor-mance, managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team-forma-tion, staff retenteam-forma-tion, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures.

Our point here is somewhat more limited: Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competi-tion. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.

Mixing Metaphors

We interrupt this message for . . .

A STARTLING CONFESSION FROM THE AUTHORS

Throughout this book, we have used and discussed the sports team as a metaphor for a well-jelled technical work group; we are now obliged to emphasize here our growing disenchantment with this metaphor.

Most troubling to us these days is what the sports team metaphor implies about competition. Football teams and soccer teams and baseball teams compete within their leagues, but they also promote a good deal of internal competition. Those players who "ride the pines," for example, must feel just the littlest bit competitive toward the first string. Oh sure, they are rooting for them to win, of course, but perhaps not to look too great in the process.

In high school, I was the shortest member of our varsi-ty basketball team. I still remember the guy who had to foul out before I would be put in. His name was Doug Timmerman. He was the most damnably gifted player;

he almost never fouled anybody. I loved him like a brother, but still.. .

—TDM

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We have all seen sports teams that succeeded in spite of the failure of one of the individuals. We have also seen individual team members have a great night while their team was losing badly. The success or failure of the individual is thus disconnect-ed from the success or failure of the group as a whole. This is an imperfect situation, one that only exacerbates any incipient ten-dency toward competition.

By contrast, as an example, a choir or glee club makes an almost perfect linkage between the success or failure of the indi-vidual and that of the group. (You'll never have people congratu-late you on singing your part perfectly while the choir as a whole sings off-key.)

So, belatedly, we need to tell you that the musical ensemble would have been a happier metaphor for what we are trying to do in well-jelled work groups. We're not the only ones, of course, to use the term "team" to describe such a group.

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmo-nious work group" is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevo-cably to the success of the whole.

Chapter 29

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT