Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (29 page)

This is the consolidation phase in one of its most exciting and compressed forms. It cannot be accomplished without a robust infrastructure, clearly established lines of communication, rules of behavior (editorial ethics and standards, deadlines, grammar and editorial style), consideration of precedent and practice (“maturity”), and a lot of experienced team members. That’s one reason young newspaper and television reporters have to pass through a long training process that begins with local media and can take years, even decades, to reach a major-market paper or news station.

Newspapers and TV news may represent extreme cases of consolidation and maturation, but they are far from unique. Established
teams in many fields—those found in emergency rooms, special forces operations, government, police and fire departments, and even fast-food restaurants—find themselves dividing into subteams, working at a furious pace that allows for few mistakes, and then coming together quickly and precisely to deliver the final product or service.

But it can also be said that
every
team, small or large, short-lived or long-lasting, in one way or another must pass through this consolidation and maturation phase along the path toward its resolution. Even pairs divide up their work, and at some point the two must come together, merge their work into the synthesis that will ultimately represent the team, and then perfect and polish that result in preparation for the final presentation.

This consolidation is not always easy. Egos are often involved—and if the assignment’s boundaries haven’t been made precise and explicit from the start, there can be a lot of frustrating overlap. Tempers can get short as subteam leaders realize that hundreds of hours of their group’s work may never see the light of day.

Among the most dangerous and destructive types of teams is one in which one or two members, recognized as the “idea” people, are given too much control—usually by an awed leader. These teams
never
consolidate—rather, as one idea approaches fruition, the “genius” suddenly comes up with an “even better idea” and the entire team shifts direction to pursue it; just when that idea is almost realized, the genius comes up with another one, ad infinitum, until the team runs out of money, energy, or senior management’s patience. In the meantime, the team has wasted immense amounts of time, talent, and capital toward no good end. Teams must be kept on track—even if it means kicking out the top talent in the shift into consolidation. Such a move will be hugely disturbing but necessary. And if the genius really does have a great new idea, you can always start a new team for him or her.

More than at any time since the founding days of the team, the consolidation moment is when the team leader is tested. Final decisions have to be made. The creative work has to be stopped—even when some members beg for just a little more time for an impending breakthrough. Ruffled feathers must be smoothed. And the team must be brought together for the final assault on the goal. If the leader has done his or her job along the way—establishing precise duties, setting subteam milestones and interim goals, and, most of all, keeping all the members feeling that they are part of the larger group and its work—then this reintegration of the team should occur with the minimum of friction.

But friction or not, consolidation and maturation must take place. The team and its members must quickly transform from a band of semi-independent creators to a coordinated and structured group of organizers for the final rush to completion.

F
rom the time we are young we are taught, through both demonstration and aphorisms, the importance of finishing well (“It ain’t over ’til it’s over”; “80 percent of the value comes from the last 20 percent of the work”). And yet, like the value of compound interest, it is a lesson we typically fail to observe. It is human nature to be eager to get something done and to run on to the next new thing when we approach the end of something. It is usually only later in life that we finally learn this lesson, and we are left to regret all of those things in our lives that we didn’t finish well.

Unfortunately, the need for a good finish grows more important by the year. In the mechanical age, a team could usually complete a prototype, show that it operated properly, and walk away, leaving the tasks of disassembling, reverse engineering, adapting for large-scale manufacturing, and writing manuals to others. But today, when product cycle times grow shorter by the day, tackling
these secondary and ancillary duties typically falls to the team itself. Moreover, when a basic microprocessor design can have more feature details than the map of every building, street, and utility line in a full-size city, the need for mountains of documentation becomes particularly acute. This places three historically unprecedented duties on most team leaders:

•
      
To
assume
, while still in the consolidation and maturation phase, many of the tasks heretofore put off until after a project is completed and until now usually done by others. This will almost certainly include heavy documentation and the measurement of performance specs, but may also include creating manuals, training materials, emulators, and even marketing and sales tools.

•
      
To
design
these expanded completion-phase duties into the project from the very beginning. Traditionally, teams didn’t have to worry that much about how they finished until they had reached their goals and were down to the final wrap-up. Now the completion phase—because it is likely to be drawn out and costly, and to require considerable labor—needs to be incorporated into a team’s schedule and milestones. As it is unlikely, given the press of competition, that the team will be allowed extra time to finish the task, the best alternative may be to add more team members either at the beginning, or (here’s yet one more place where quick assimilation comes in) at the start of the consolidation phase.

•
      
To
prepare
the team for the added work that will be required at the end of the project. Completing the actual subject of a project greatly reduces the motivation of a team: employees (and leaders) naturally see it as the end of the hard work and the beginning of the hard celebrations of what they’ve achieved. There is a no more depressed group of people than a successful team that returns on Monday morning to discover that instead of merely
tying up some loose ends, they are now expected to take on a whole new phase of supplemental work. The answer—and admittedly it is a limited one—is to prepare the team for this bad news from the beginning. That is, from the start, in all calendars, targets, and milestones, incorporate these “after” duties—and regularly remind the team of their existence—such that they subconsciously reset their notion of “end” to the completion of this work. Finally, sad to say, you may also want to consider postponing any celebrations until all the work is done (and look the other way when team members still choose to celebrate early—just don’t let it be official).

As a leader, beware of mission creep, especially considering these additional responsibilities. It’s pretty easy to know when the core mission of a team—a fully tested new product or service—has been completed. It is not so easy when the work expands to intrude into other company departments. The creation of documentation, publications, development tools, and so forth has a tendency to be an open-ended process, and other corporate departments are sometimes quite happy to let you do their work for them. So it is incumbent on you as leader to establish boundaries on this work at a project’s beginning.

When you do reach that end, formally announce that fact—and then
celebrate
. This is not a time for reserve, or weary acceptance, or polite acknowledgment of a job well done. Even if you’ve failed to achieve all of your goals, your team deserves a full-blown recognition of its loyalty and hard work if it is healthy and strong. And if the team has succeeded, that’s even more reason for a party. Make it an event that every team member will always remember: if they stay all night because they don’t want to leave, if they get drunk, weep, make fools out of themselves, let them. Just remember to cover the following in the course of the celebration:

•
      
Recount their achievements.

•
      
Remind them of the team’s beginnings, how they didn’t know each other and how close they’ve become since.

•
      
Reminisce about the high points (and the low points overcome) in the team’s history.

•
      
Most of all, recognize the work of every team member individually, both before the rest of the team and one-on-one.

•
      
Retreat at the right moment. Every leader plans the beginning of these events; smart ones plan the ending—especially the part about exiting quickly and on a high note.

THE AFTERMATH PHASE

The future of a team’s members, and how you deal with the legacy of the team, depends on which of the following four categories the team falls into:

Unhealthy, Unsuccessful Teams

Unhealthy, unsuccessful teams are either intentionally forgotten or indelibly scar their members. Not only have they failed—damaging both their parent company and the résumés of their members—but the miserable experience will likely make those members less effective in the future, and almost impossible to put together as another viable grouping. In most cases, the members aren’t even around anymore but have moved on to happier work environments. These teams can be considered failures in every way: the wrong members, the wrong leader, the wrong task or direction, poor oversight by the organization, and a failure to shut the team down early.

It is usually the best strategy to admit that failure, let the
members leave the organization, and conduct a postmortem to determine what went wrong and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

That said, some of these teams may have a member or two who may appear to be worth keeping. Whether they really are revolves around the word “worth.” Because of his or her recent history with a dysfunctional, failed team, the worth of this team member must be measured differently from someone with a clean slate. With such a person you need to look past the standard résumé highlights and dig down into her behavior with the team. That means interviews, at least with that employee, in order to determine how she dealt with the team during its existence, how bitter she is from the experience, and how much she holds (perhaps rightly) senior management responsible for what happened.

Unhealthy, Successful Teams

Unhealthy, successful teams are in many ways the most dangerous of all teams. You can easily, and with justification, get rid of an entire unhealthy, unsuccessful team and minimize your risk. But success camouflages a lot of bad things. Moreover, remove a successful team and all the other teams in the organization will suffer a serious drop in morale (“If they got punished, are we next?”).

The challenge, then, is to look past the success and see the truth of the team in stark relief. And since you can’t know if a successful team is also unhealthy, you will have to scrutinize all successful teams in this way, even the ones that, on the surface, look happy and functional.

During his career as a newspaperman, Mike was once warned by an editor, “Don’t ever hire a Pulitzer Prize winner.” Only with time did he understand what the veteran journalist had meant: too many people who won top prizes did so because they happened to be in the right place at the right time, or because they were put in a team with others of superior talent, or because they were rewarded
for the wrong reasons—a fan on the selection committee, their organization’s “turn” for an award, larger national or global events that make their story timely, and so on. Whatever the real reason, the fact that they had received the award cast a penumbra of achievement around them that demanded a higher salary, bigger stories, and greater independence whether they deserved it or not.

Dysfunction in a successful team takes several forms:

a.
 
A team that, despite its internal strife, just gets lucky.

b.
 
A team that features so much talent that, despite itself, still manages to get across the finish line—though much less successfully than it might have otherwise.

c.
 
A team that is composed of some top-quality members, and others who just played easy riders but took a share of the credit.

d.
 
A team that fakes results to look like it succeeded.

The reason successful, unhealthy teams are so dangerous is not (with the exception of [d]) because of what they’ve accomplished, but what happens to them in the aftermath phase. Unless exposed, every member of these teams will carry the afterglow of the success—and it will reward them with raises, promotions, fame, and recruitment into even more important teams. There, they threaten to poison their new team’s health, or through their lack of ability prevent that team from achieving its potential. Meanwhile, you may have deluded yourself that these players are winners, but—trust us—everybody else in the company, especially their peers, will soon know the truth and grow increasingly resentful. Everybody despises fellow employees who have so obviously fallen upward—as they despise the bosses who allowed it to happen.

By being successful, however, these unhealthy teams do—especially if their damaging influence can be detected and stopped—contribute to the success of the enterprise. On the other hand, (d)-type teams are destructive, unethical, and perhaps even
criminal. That kind of pathology needs to be spotted early and punished quickly.

Healthy, Unsuccessful Teams

Healthy, unsuccessful teams are the trickiest to judge. Silicon Valley likes to pride itself as the place where failure is both understood and rewarded. The cliché is that the Valley’s venture capitalists are clever enough to recognize “good failures,” while downplaying “bad successes.” It sounds good in theory—and indeed, our own experiences with this in the Valley were one of the sources of this section—but answers are a lot more elusive in real life. The heart of the matter is that phrase “good failure.” What exactly does that mean? Can failure actually be good?

The standard answer to that question is “Of course.” You can run a healthy, productive team, hit all of your milestones, do everything right, and deliver on time, and still fail because of forces outside your control: a new technology, a market shift, a quicker or more powerful competitor, an economic downturn, bad senior management, and so on.

But that answer is too facile; and it raises even more questions. After all, if you had done a good job, wouldn’t you have adapted to those challenges? Wouldn’t you have anticipated them and prepared a response? And if your failure was the result of bad decisions by your superiors (budget cuts, wrongheaded interventions, last minute changes), why didn’t you quit? Thus, the meaning of a “good failure” is that you failed, but the mistakes you made would likely have been made by any prudent person in your position at that moment—including the person currently calling your enterprise a “good failure.”

So the most important questions you should be asking in your postmortem of a failed but seemingly healthy team include the following:

•
      
In retrospect, did the team have a viable strategy that would have worked without the interference or incompetence of senior management?

•
      
Did the team function harmoniously throughout its life, including even during the interval when its impending failure was apparent?

•
      
When it encountered the event that would prove fatal to the team’s efforts, did the team recognize it as such, or were the members oblivious?

•
      
How did the team react to this news? Did it try to react? Develop a new strategy? Or just surrender?

•
      
Did the team leader keep the team on point in the aftermath of this shock?

•
      
Did the team search for new and relevant talent in its response? Was that talent quickly incorporated into the team’s work?

•
      
Did the team leader quickly present the changed situation, with alternative responses, to senior management—or did he or she and the rest of the team try to hide it from outsiders?

•
      
Was blame cast and recriminations made among team members for the failed outcome?

•
      
Did the team leader help the team members with recommendations and job placement in the aftermath of the failure, or were the team members jettisoned and forgotten?

•
      
Finally, and this is the question you must ask of yourself:
Not knowing what was to come, would you have done anything differently?

In answering those questions, you will find the truth about whether this team was as healthy as you thought, and whether indeed it suffered a “good failure.” If the answer is that it did, then your response should be to hold the members to as little blame as possible and move them on to the next project. If possible—and this would be best for company morale—keep that team together . . . and give them a “win” for their next project if you can.
On the other hand, if you determine that this team was not as healthy as you first thought, break it up and treat the members as if they were members of the unhealthy, unsuccessful teams described earlier in this chapter.