Published: 12 September 2013

Earlier this week, the world watched as Rafael Nadal beat Novak Djokovic in the Men's Final of the US Tennis Open, claiming his 13th Grand Slam title. While it is easy to understand the appeal of rising through the ranks as a solo sportsman, Business remains a team sport. This week's newsletter looks at the demise of the business team and how to resurrect it.

Coaching a supercharged team
"Two heads are better than one," "many hands make light work," or the cheesy old favourite, "there is no I in team" " since time immemorial, we have known the value of teamwork. It is ironic then, that despite this fact, it is in few areas as relevant as in the business world that this essential truth has been all but forgotten by countless professionals.

This is probably because, thanks to unprecedented technological advances, we are now exponentially more efficient as individuals than was thought possible even 20 years ago. There seems to be an imbalance of power when a lone individual is able to determine the course of events of (often) global significance. Somewhere underneath all of this, however, remains the undeniable reality that Business is a team sport. The belief that a single person can flick a metaphorical switch to effect change is a mere illusion. All that this switch really does is set events in motion " events that require the participation and cooperation of a team of countless other individuals.

And what kind of team is not held together by close-knit relationships between its members? The aforementioned advanced technology of this Age of the Individual is, as it turns out, a double-sided coin " making individuals more effective at the same time as diluting the potency of our teams.

While, at first glance, technology seems to enhance team efficacy by allowing geographically dispersed members to stay in touch, it has also created the perception that such teams are no different to the traditional, close-proximity team, and so the former have become even more common. In this paradigm, the closest that people tend to get to an actual team experience is the occasional conference call, and no one questions whether or not this is sufficient. The reality is that no team can be truly effective if it is devoid of certain, time-honoured features (discussed later) and the more dispersed the members of a team, the more work is required to hold it together.

As long as a team is psychologically disconnected, its vision will remain shattered, as myriad indecipherable shards, each of which is useless on its own. If, however, we take the time to observe the clout of a supercharged team working together towards a common goal, the fact that we can move mountains when we put our heads together will re-emerge. We may even discover that, if we share our loads and spread our creativity around, there is far more time and many more opportunities for us to have a bit of fun.

The complexity of team management in the Age of the (technology-fuelled) Individual

Unsurprisingly, team management has grown increasingly complex as people juggle meetings with emails and text messages " the expectation being that, since technology has enabled anytime, instant communication, there is no excuse for delayed responses. This does little to improve our attention spans and we find it ever more challenging to take the time to understand larger, more composite issues.

So we rely on project managers, consultants and advisors to put the pieces together for us. But all they really do is tell us little bits of what we already know or suspect about the big picture. We waste time reinventing ideas when we could be getting input from one another, leveraging our collective wisdom and experience. Our jargon has become our comfort zone and we hide behind it in self-congratulatory and hopelessly counterproductive complacency.

Email, cell phone messages and instant messaging (IM) politics rule the day. Who gets included and excluded strongly determines focus areas, as each of us separately focuses on the ultimate individual goal " the KPA. As we obsess over our own rise to the top, the weekly meeting degenerates into a high-conflict rehashing of what has been left undone, ultimately depressing rather than inspiring us.

We get caught up in the abstraction of spreadsheets and forget all about that which those same spreadsheets are meant to remind us, all hope of a real solution steadily falling by the wayside. The price that we pay for excessively data-driven decision-making is the relinquishment of feelings and intuition, the value of which cannot be overemphasised.

Have we forgotten how to really think " relying, instead, on technology to do the thinking for us? How else could something as obviously powerful as effective teamwork have fallen into obscurity? What are we doing to connect team ideals to those of the organisation? How are we inspiring the creation of team magic?

Employing the best talent, ensuring that its values are congruent with our corporate culture, and then waiting at the finish line is obviously insufficient. We must remember that people, however talented, still need to have a sense of what they can do to contribute to the bottom line if they are to be truly successful. Simply putting ‘self-starter' in the job-advert is an abdication of responsibility that will come back to haunt us in the end.

Most managers have forgotten to be coaches and leaders. And so, as multiple studies have shown, there is a lack of congruence between what leaders view as essential behaviours in organisations and what is actually practised by both those leaders and their organisations. This contributes to high staff turnover and poor general performance.

A coach is someone who intensively guides and instructs his/her team in the best direction for the organisation. S/he keeps the organisation on course by making the most of its vast store of talent. The coach achieves results " not by playing in the game, but by standing outside of it and making sure that all the players understand how to respond to various situations and opportunities.

And no game plan is static, because the outcome of a game can never be predicted " right up to the final minutes of the match. Periodic timeouts to ensure that everyone is still following the same game plan are essential.

Some practical steps that can be used to connect with and inspire others

1. Connect with yourself. Understand what you want to achieve.

Rather than multi-tasking, hopping between calls or writing one document after another, sit down and really think about what you are achieving and what you want to achieve. Where are the gaps? What do you know and what don't you know? What is working and what still needs to get done? Discuss your ideas with others to gain perspective. Give yourself enough time to establish a clear idea of where you want to end up.

2. Connect with your teammates. Understand who is on the playing field.

The best way to inspire someone is to take time to understand who s/he is. Have you really thought about the people who work with you? What are their abilities? Where are they going? Are you moving in the same direction? Have you had meaningful conversations with them about who you are, who they are and where things need to go? By putting yourself in their shoes, you can understand where they are going and set common goals.

3. Connect your teammates with yourself. Get in the game.

By linking with others, sharing ideas and support, you build strong relationships and inspire one another. If you do this with your vision in mind, then everyone starts, slowly but surely, to work towards the same goals. It is important to connect with people ‘above', on the same level as, and ‘below' you. By moving from just doing your job to being a contributor to other people's jobs, you start turning yourself into a shaper with the power to work with people to achieve team ideals.

4. Connect your teammates to the vision. Be the champion of the vision.

People do not connect with ideas in which they do not believe. This is important to understand. If your vision is not aligned with that of your teammates, you may have to explain it to them and try to identify commonalities between your and their goals. This shared vision needs to be reinforced at every opportunity and different aspects of it may have to be discussed in more depth from time to time. Do not simply assume that your perspective is the only one that exists.

5. Connect your teammates to each other. Set the vision free.

When a vision is shared, it has more than one champion. If everyone in the whole organisation shares in a vision, it becomes a very powerful force for change. Consider creating a space in a regular meeting in which one or more team members share something about themselves. You will be amazed at how positively this will influence team dynamics. Also discuss what connects each of you to the organisation's vision and how you can contribute to making this a reality. The activity will take on its own momentum and individuals may ultimately become leaders in their various environments.

Nevertheless, while this describes the ‘big process' that needs to happen, it is also important that we use a simple coaching model in our daily conversations to ensure that we keep moving forward. The GROW model is one such coaching approach that may be beneficial in structuring conversations around goals.

It's time to grow
GROW stands for Goal, Current Reality, Options and Way Forward and is a step-by-step approach to coaching conversations:

1. Establish the goal
GROW conversations begin with us remembering what we want to achieve. Some people are clear about their goals, some are not; so the first step is to establish the goal.

2. Examine the current reality
The next step is to find out where we are. Sometimes it is important to challenge what is being said and to get a clear picture of reality.

3. Explore the options
This brainstorming phase creates a range of options, innovations and strategies for getting to the goal. We must move beyond what we think and consider the implications of pursuing different options. This is often the most critical phase in a coaching conversation.

4. Establish the way forward
If the first few steps have gone well, we should be in a position to know what can be done and the next step is to commit to the actions that will achieve those results. Any barriers need to be investigated and may lead to more goals, more exploration " until the solution is clear.

Conclusion
So, the task of super-charging a team is not to set bigger KPAs, have more consultants or measure more aggressively. Rather, it is to get everyone to fully understand and agree on what needs to happen to achieve the vision.

It may be tempting to think that this is solely the task of the top person in an organisation, but it is really the task of everyone to connect with others in a way that builds clarity as to the way forward.

In the next meeting, when everyone sits down expecting the same old depressing monologue, remind them, instead, of their common vision. Inspire them by asserting that you are all in it together and that you are all working towards an ideal that has been imagined and is shared by everyone. The vision will move forward because a team is always so much more than the sum of its parts. 
- Regenesys