Working With Others

Author Caroline W. Casey tells a story of a New York street person who was arbitrarily pointing at people while saying, “you’re in, and you’re out. Needless to say this practice was a little disconcerting to those involved.

When a new work team forms, or a new member joins the team, the questions running through the minds of the team members center on inclusion. “Am I really a member of this team? “Do I feel like I belong? “What is my role on the team?

One of the popular business books I see in use in a number of organizations is Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. In that book, Collins talks about getting “the right people on the bus. In other words, he stresses that great companies make certain that they have the “right people working on making the organization’s vision a reality. Unfortunately, there are organizations that define the “right people in a way that can exclude some very talented ones from the mix because those people did not fit the company’s “image of the right person , whatever that means. And that exclusionary behavior can be overt or very subtle. The net result is that individuals who could add value at an organization leave because they don’t fit in.

So what is the turnover like in your company? Are many leaving because they don’t “fit in. Maybe it’s time to look at how your company helps to promote inclusion.

I’ve been in the organization and management development field for more years than I care to admit and I’m still amazed by what I see.  For example, you would think that teams that have been together for a long time would know each other pretty well.  Not necessarily! I was facilitating a team meeting awhile back when one of the members went on about how much he enjoyed seeing live theatre only to have another member who offices right next to this person say, “I didn’t know you liked the theatre; I had an extra ticket to Hamlet the other night and you could have gone with us!

So how well do you know the people that you work with – other than their area of expertise?  At a team building session I facilitated last week, the team leader began the meeting by asking everyone to share the first live concert they attended.  The responses ranged from Tom Jones with one’s parents to a first (and last) date at a Barry Manilow concert to the Rolling Stones to the Philadelphia Orchestra.  It was a delightful icebreaker and it helped everyone to see each other as humans who had a life outside of work.

I like using exercises that help others get to know each other better.  I’ll often ask people to provide a fun fact about themselves they are willing to share , with an emphasis on the willing to share part.  Invariably someone in the group takes a risk to share something that really gives others an insight into who that person really is.  What is amazing is that most of the time that person’s sharing will just open the door to others really being “real.

In writing about teams, William Schutz often said that a characteristic of high performing teams is that its members simply don’t want to let each other down , especially when members really know and care about each other.

As I prepare to facilitate a team building session later this week, I’m amused when I think of some of the inquiries I have received through the years to help with team issues. Often someone will call me and say that they have a team that requires some team building and ask if I would put together a few fun exercises for them. My usual question of the caller is “and I will do these exercises with the team so that what will result? And most often the answer is, “Oh, I don’t know.

Two of the most important questions any team can ask at the beginning of its work are “what results are we trying to accomplish as a team and how will we define success? Answers to these questions help the team determine if it has the right membership and what its focus will be. More importantly, it gives the members of the team the opportunity to make a commitment to achieving those results. In the absence of asking the “results question as well as defining what success will look like, a team will be missing the direction that all high-performing teams require.

Included under the heading of working and playing well with others is the necessity of learning from each other. However, for years our educational system has focused on rewarding individual learning and performance. Only when I was working on my MBA degree did I experience the “team project , with very little guidance, I might add on, how to work in a team.

Back in 1990, Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline-The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization hit the bookstores. Among the five core disciplines that he introduced was something called “team learning along with the premise that teams – not individuals – are the fundamental learning unit in an organization.

In a post a couple of days ago, I talked about the record snowfall that hit New Mexico and the Albuquerque area last week. On this, the fifth day after the snowfall the Albuquerque public schools remain closed because most of the school parking lots remain unplowed. Certainly, the sheer amount of snow and the fact that the city lacks the equipment that many snow-belt metropolitan areas have to handle storms of this magnitude is contributing to the slow return to normal life around here. Mayor Martin Chavez of Albuquerque acknowledged that while the city has done a pretty good job of responding, it could probably improve its performance next time and so he has formed a task force to look at how the city could be better able to handle such events in the future. In the spirit of team learning, I would offer the possibility that the first action of this task force should be to contact officials in snow-belt cities such as Minneapolis, MN, Chicago, IL, etc., to find out what these cities have learned about dealing with major snowfalls so that Albuquerque does not have to reinvent solutions that might already exist.