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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dyer, Gibb, Jr., 1954- author. | Dyer, Jeff, author.
Title: Beyond team building : how to build high performing teams and the culture to support them / W. Gibb Dyer and Jeffrey H. Dyer.
Description: First Edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, [2020] | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019005900 (print) | LCCN 2019007093 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119551386 (ePub) | ISBN 9781119551393 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781119551409 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Teams in the workplace. | Teams in the workplace—Management. | Leadership.
Classification: LCC HD66 (ebook) | LCC HD66 .D943 2020 (print) | DDC 658.4/022—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005900
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Artistdesign29/Shutterstock
To our father, Bill Dyer, the father of Team Building.
We would like to thank Natalia Smith, Emily Powers, and the staff at Wiley for their help in gathering data and editing this book. Their work has made this book immeasurably better. The secretaries in the management department, Sophie S. Poulsen, Kesley B. Powell, and Katy Milagro Nottingham, went the extra mile to ensure that the tables and figures in the book are accurate.
Gibb Dyer (Ph.D MIT) is the O. Leslie Stone Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management in the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University. He has been a visiting faculty member at the University of New Hampshire and IESE in Barcelona, Spain, and a visiting scholar at the University of Bath in the U.K. He has published nine books and over 50 articles and his research has been featured in publications such as Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. His most recent book, titled The Family Edge, focuses on how families and family teams support business growth. He has been ranked as one of the top-ten scholars in the world in the field of family business. His consulting practice focuses on team building, organization development, and management succession.
Jeff Dyer (Ph.D UCLA) is the Horace Beesley Distinguished Professor of Strategy at BYU and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He worked previously as a management consultant at Bain & Company and cofounded the Innovator's DNA consultancy. He is the author of two bestsellers, The Innovator's DNA and The Innovator's Method. Among those receiving Ph.Ds after 1990 he was ranked #1 Most Influential Scholar with over 35,000 citations and over 500,000 Google searches to his name.
To me, teamwork is the beauty of our sport, where you have five acting as one. You become selfless.
—Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski
Teamwork is the hallmark of success in sports and in business. As Ken Blanchard once wrote: “None of us is as smart as all of us.” Many books on teams and teamwork (including our own) focus on how to repair broken teams in which team members are not “acting as one.” But this book has a different purpose. We go beyond focusing on how to repair broken teams, and focus on how to create a “team building organization” that will foster an environment which will create and maintain great teams from the outset. (Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski's success is based on creating a set of processes and an environment that produces great teams from the outset, not just on fixing his teams when they aren't performing well.) And while we cover many topics from our previous books on team building, this book will give to you, the reader, a more succinct and clear description of how to create an effective team. You will also learn how to develop a “team building organization” that has systems and processes in place to regularly assess team performance for all teams in the organization and to help them improve. To do so, we take a broader view about what team building is and should mean for managers, team leaders, and team members.
This book is for anyone interested in improving team performance. While most of our examples are from teams in businesses, the team building techniques we describe can be used to help families, teams in nonprofit organizations, civic or governmental teams, sports teams, or almost any type of team that you can imagine. The book is especially designed to help organizational leaders and managers understand their roles in helping teams succeed. Team leaders and team members will find our diagnostic models and interventions particularly helpful as they try to make their teams more effective. Human resource managers, who are often assigned to help teams improve, will be aided by this book, as will team consultants and team facilitators whose roles are to improve and strengthen teams.
The theories behind what makes an effective team came out of the T-group movement (the T stood for “training”), which in the 1960s was largely sponsored by National Training Laboratories. The assumption underlying the T-group was that individuals—and particularly organizational leaders—were impaired by the assumptions and authoritarian, top-down style that management held about their subordinates and coworkers. The T-group was designed to help change those assumptions and to make managers more trusting, open, and participative as they worked with others. In the 1960s, many organizations that wanted to use the T-group to improve the performance of their leaders and those within the “T-group movement” really believed in the T-group as the vehicle to change the world of work by changing the values of organization leaders. By changing top management's values, these new values would eventually filter down throughout the organization to effect organization-wide change and transform the organization into having more humane and creative systems.
However, a 1968 study conducted by two academics, John Campbell and Marvin Dunnette, changed most of that thinking.1 Campbell and Dunnette reviewed the major studies that had looked at the impact of T-group training on individuals and on organizations and concluded that:
[Our] examination of the research literature leads to the conclusion that while T-group training seems to produce observable changes in behavior, the utility of these changes for the performance of individuals in their organizational roles remains to be demonstrated.2
Campbell and Dunnette reported that the T-group did in fact help individuals become more comfortable with themselves and their ability to manage interpersonal relationships. However, their review also showed that T-group training had virtually no impact (and sometimes a negative effect) on team and organizational performance. The T-group experience often helped people become more open and honest, but this sometimes also led to dysfunctional confrontations and didn't actually solve the team's specific performance problems.
Given these findings, T-group trainers, such as our father, Bill Dyer, made a decision regarding their work. Bill and others decided to create a new paradigm for working with groups—the team building paradigm. Bill wrote about this change from T-groups to team building as follows:
As practitioners developed more experience in applying the T-group methods to work units, the T-group mode shifted to take into account the differences of the new setting. It became clear that the need was not just to let people get feedback, but to help the work unit develop into a more effective, collaborative, problem-solving unit with work to get out and goals to achieve. Slowly, the methodology shifted from the unstructured T-group to a more focused, defined process of training a group of interdependent people in collaborative work and problem-solving procedures.3
Bill worked as consultant to many teams facing problems, and in 1977, he published the first book on team building that captured the essence of his consulting experience and his model for helping teams become more effective. The book was an instant success because the theories, methods, and exercises he described in the book were built on real-world experience and they worked. These proved invaluable to managers, team leaders, and consultants. Over the years, Bill added new material to keep up with the changing times and the evolution of the field. After he passed away in 1997, we continued this tradition of helping teams to be more effective.
In Beyond Team Building we explain our 4C model of team performance and expand it to add an additional C—collaborative leadership. Team leadership has been somewhat neglected in our previous writings, so we will emphasize it here. Furthermore, we show how to apply the new “5C” model to a variety of different teams—entrepreneurial, family, alliance, temporary, cross-cultural, and virtual teams—teams that are becoming increasingly important. Some cases, such virtual teams, were unheard of when Bill developed his team building approach in the 1970s. Today, teams are more diverse, are more agile, and are more geographically separated. This is largely due to the new demands of a global economy, and reflects the need for today's teams to respond more quickly to changes in the marketplace. Furthermore, we've discovered that for most companies to become successful, they will need to become “team building organizations” where team development becomes ingrained in the day-to-day activities of the organization. While some people tend to think of team building as simply a fun team activity, such as river rafting or having the team go together through a “ropes course” to conquer certain physical and mental challenges, we view these activities as only part of team development. By themselves these activities are unlikely to make a difference in team performance in the workplace.
The book is structured as follows, the first six chapters present our 5C model of team performance and share various diagnostic surveys to help you assess how a team is doing along these dimensions. Each chapter provides guidance on what a team needs in order to perform well on that particular dimension. Chapter 7 will help you see how to bring the 5Cs together to create an effective team building program, while Chapter 8 describes the key team building interventions that we use to initiate change in a team. Chapters 9 and 10 are devoted to explaining how the 5C model can be applied to temporary teams, cross-cultural teams, virtual teams, alliance teams, entrepreneurial teams, and family teams. These teams are quite different from each other and require different approaches to applying the 5C model. Chapter 11 demonstrates how to create a “team building organization” by using Cisco Systems as an example of an organization that has attempted to make its teams and team development a priority. With this overview in mind, let's begin our journey to help our teams be more effective.
Albert Einstein once said: “What a person does on his own, without being stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of others, is even in the best of cases rather paltry and monotonous.” Einstein was simply recognizing that producing great things—whether it be new products, services, internal processes—requires the collective efforts of a team. Leaders of highly successful companies understand that business is a team sport—and they work to build an organization comprised of effective work teams.
As we begin our study of teams and team performance, you might start by thinking about your previous team experiences. Think about each team: How did that team perform and how did that team affect you as a member of the team? While we might not think of it as a team, the first “team” that we were a part of is our family. In a family we learn whether we can trust other people, how to work (or not work) together, how to help one another, how to communicate, and how to solve problems. Our family team is not one that we can typically choose—it's a function of fate—but nevertheless it has a significant impact on how we think about working together in a group setting and how to function effectively in a team. As we age and go to school we begin to function in other types of teams: sports teams, debate teams, study-groups, musical groups, and so forth. From our experience in these teams, we also develop our attitudes about whether we like being on a team and whether we feel that being a part of a team will help us achieve our goals.
After our schooling (and oftentimes during our years in school) we begin to experience what it's like to be on a work team within an organization. Whether it's a team preparing fast-food, managing inventory, developing new products, or even hoping to cure cancer, we bring our experiences from the teams of our youth and they influence us as we become a part of these work teams. Unfortunately, in today's world, many people have not had particularly positive experiences on teams: their “family team” didn't function particularly well, their sports teams had poor coaching leading to low morale and losses, or their study-groups ended up producing a poor product (and a poor grade), making them leery of being part of a team. Indeed, much of the current research on Millennials suggests that they don't particularly enjoy being part of a team, and don't have many of the skills needed for effective teamwork.1 One of the interesting findings from our research is that while many organizations give lip service to the importance of teams, few spend time or resources to ensure the effective performance of their teams.2 The typical excuses we hear are:
The result of these types of attitudes is that little effort is generally made to improve team performance in today's organizations, and the efforts that are made are typically one-time training or other “band-aid” approaches to helping teams perform more effectively. The net result is that we have many dysfunctional teams today, and not much is being done to make them better.
Even though often little is done to improve teams, leaders are generally aware that team performance is important as much of today's work is team based; think of research teams, product development teams, production teams, sales and marketing teams, cross-functional problem-solving teams, and top management teams. One reason work is done more by teams now is that products and services have become increasingly complex, requiring a wide range of skills and technologies. No single person is capable of developing, manufacturing, and selling increasingly complex products, which means that teams of individuals with complementary knowledge must coordinate efficiently and effectively in order to be successful. This requires teamwork skills. A second reason teamwork skills are needed now more than in the past is that in a global economy, individuals must collaborate across cultural, organizational, and geographical boundaries to accomplish their goals. Hence, the need for cross-cultural, virtual, and alliance teams (teams that collaborate across organizational boundaries) has increased in recent years. Thus, high-performing companies in today's competitive landscape essentially require high-performing work teams. The two unavoidably go hand in hand.
High-performing teams are those with members whose skills, attitudes, and competencies enable them to achieve team goals. These team members set goals, make decisions, communicate, manage conflict, and solve problems in a supportive, trusting atmosphere in order to accomplish their objectives. Moreover, they are aware of their own strengths and weaknesses and have the ability to make changes when they need to improve their performance.
Thus, the primary purpose of this book is to give managers, team leaders, team members, and team consultants specific guidance on how to improve team performance. In particular, this book gives you “the essentials” of team building—those activities and actions that can help poorly performing or dysfunctional teams improve their performance. And for those who have adequately functioning teams, this book can help you transform them into great teams.
Over the past several decades, as we have consulted with teams and conducted research on team performance, we have come to the conclusion that five factors—the Five Cs—must be understood and managed for teams to achieve superior performance (Figure 1.1):
Figure 1.1 The Five Cs of Team Performance
We will describe each of these factors only briefly here. Future chapters are devoted to each one of the 5Cs.
Team context refers to the organizational environment in which the team must work. Understanding context, and how it influences team performance, requires an understanding of the answers to the following two categories of questions:
Experience has shown that teamwork skills are more important when the team must complete a complex task characterized by a high degree of interdependence between team members. Understanding the context—the nature of task interdependence required among team members in order to achieve a high level of performance—is a critical first step to building a successful team. For example, it's not enough just to train people on the importance of key team competencies, such as communication and problem solving, if they are not supported and reinforced by the specific context of the team. Low-interdependence teams need to be managed differently than high-interdependence teams.
The composition of the team concerns the skills and attitudes of each team member. You must to have the right people on the team to achieve the desired level of performance. To effectively manage the composition of the team, those staffing the team must answer the following questions:
Teams saddled with members who are not motivated to accomplish the task or lack the skills to achieve team goals are doomed to failure from the outset. Team composition also refers to assembling a group of individuals with complementary skills. Effective teams use the diverse skills and abilities of each team member in a synergistic way to achieve high performance. The members of high-performing teams clearly understand their roles and assignments and carry them out with commitment.
Team size also plays a significant role in team effectiveness. A team that is too large may be unwieldy and cause members to lose interest due to a lack of individual involvement. Amazon employs a “two-pizza team” philosophy, meaning that teams should be small enough (five to ten people) to be adequately fed by two pizzas. Amazon finds that having small teams empowers team members and facilitates more effective coordination. However, having too few team members may place unnecessary burdens on individual team members, and the team may not have the resources needed to accomplish its goals.
High-performing teams manage team composition by (1) establishing processes to select individuals for the team who are both skilled and motivated, (2) establishing processes that develop the technical and interpersonal skills of individual team members as well as their commitment to achieving team goals, (3) removing those from the team who lack skills or motivation, and (4) ensuring that the team is the right size: a team that is neither too large nor too small to accomplish the task.
We have found that successful teams have certain competencies that exist independent of any single member of the team. These competencies are embedded in the team's formal and informal processes—its way of functioning. High-performing teams have developed processes that allow the team to:
While the context and composition of the team set the stage, these competencies propel it to high performance. If the team hopes to be extraordinary, it must develop competencies for goal setting, decision making, communicating, trust building, dispute resolution, and so forth.
Effective teams must change and adapt to new conditions to be successful over time. Team context, composition, and competencies may need to change or be refocused for the team to succeed in reaching a new goal. A team that is able to monitor its performance and understand its strengths and weaknesses can generate insights needed to develop a plan of action to continually improve. Toyota, a company that we've researched extensively, uses the kaizen, or continuous-improvement, philosophy to help its teams identify the bottlenecks they are facing and then develop strategies to eliminate the bottlenecks.3 Toyota's managers are never fully satisfied with their team's performance because once they've fixed one problem, they know that to continuously improve they need to find and fix the next one. We have found that teams in most companies, unlike Toyota, are oblivious to their weaknesses. And even when they do recognize them, they do not have the ability to manage change effectively to overcome those weaknesses. It is possible to view change management skills as just another team competency, but this meta-competency is so important that it deserves special attention. In Chapter 8 we describe the key interventions that are often used by teams to change how they function and by so doing improve their performance.
High-performing teams have developed the ability to change by (1) establishing team-building processes that result in the regular evaluation of team context, composition, competencies, and leadership with the explicit objective of initiating needed changes to better achieve the desired team goals, and (2) establishing a philosophy among team members that regular change is necessary to meet the demands of a constantly changing world.
The final C in our model is “collaborative leadership.” Collaboration is the key to success for teams and team leaders. Team leaders are responsible for managing the other 4Cs of team performance. They must work with senior management and those responsible for creating the context factors, such as the reward system, to ensure that the team has the right environment to succeed. The team leader typically works with human resources or other managers to identify and assign members to his or her team and then provides for each team member's development.
While team leaders might be able to provide all the training needed regarding the competencies in the team, they will typically need support from others to provide this training. This is also true regarding the change management strategies that might be used by the team leader to improve the team. Hence, we see the effective team leader as someone who is a “boundary spanner”—someone who looks at the factors both inside and outside of the team and then garners the resources needed to help the team achieve its goals. In fact, we have created a ranking of the world's most innovative leaders that is published in Forbes (as the “Forbes 100 most innovative leaders list”), and the most important distinguishing feature of effective leaders is that they develop the capacity to bring resources to the team so that it can achieve its goals (see Innovation Capital: How to Compete—and Win—Like the World's Most Innovative Leaders by Jeff Dyer4).
Team leaders also need to recognize what type of leadership style the team needs in order to foster the appropriate type of collaboration with the leader and among team members. When team members are relatively inexperienced and need significant direction, leaders should use a more directive leadership style and follow up more closely with team members to collaborate with them in doing their work. In other instances, team leaders may have a team comprised of highly seasoned, trustworthy, and competent members. In that case, the team leader would likely play the role of a coach and allow the team to use a participative decision-making process. Team members could be given wider latitude in doing their jobs and would likely need much less direction. Leadership style is an important key to the success of the team leader. Thus, the organization needs to choose team leaders who (1) understand that their role is to manage the other 4Cs of team performance and collaboratively secure the resources needed to achieve team goals, and (2) are attuned to the maturity of their team so they can use the appropriate leadership style to get maximum motivation and performance from team members.