There are no hard and fast rules for developing the cultural values of a team. Or you can look for opportunities to set some shared guidelines for how people will work together. Pull together a group of people to work on any project, and they will develop a culture of their own, and it will be as unique as the people in the group.Īs a leader, you can take a laissez-faire approach and hope the team meshes well over time. There are certain behaviors that are encouraged and discouraged - like rules of the road - for how everyone is going to (try to) get along and spend their time. “I think it’s easy for people at many companies to become cynical, which then leads to politics, which can create a cancer that can topple even the greatest companies.” - Kathy Savitt, managing director at Perch Partners, a consulting firm.Īll families have values, even if they aren’t discussed explicitly. They’re arguing about what game we’re really playing. “They’re arguing about how to keep score. “If you have a company where everyone has their own ways of keeping score, you’ll get incessant fighting and arguments, and they’re not even arguing about what to do,” he said. In the absence of that simple, shared scoreboard, people will make up their own ways to measure their success, Mr. That way, he added, “when they’re on their own and making their own decisions, they can be empowered to make those decisions because they know they’re aligned with the rest of the company.” “Metrics are actually the way that you can harmonize a large number of people, whether it’s dozens or even thousands,” said Adam Nash, the former chief executive of Wealthfront, an online financial management firm, who is now an executive in residence at Greylock Partners, the venture capital firm. But because the goal of the team is clear, and there’s an external scoreboard to track progress, there is a greater sense of “us” on the team than the “us and them” dynamic that can often divide colleagues in companies. There are many “tribes” within a team – offense and defense, linemen and receivers, running backs and defensive backs. Those priorities have to be lined up as carefully as the trajectory of a rocket launch, because even the slightest miscalculation can take a team off-course over time.Īnother benefit of having a simple plan is that it creates a shared goal that will offset the tendency of people to identify themselves as part of smaller groups. As Jim Collins, the author of the best-selling management books “Good to Great” and “Built to Last,” is fond of saying: “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” Determining these priorities and how they’re going to be measured is arguably the most important job of a team leader because most of the work that everybody does will flow from those goals. The trouble often starts when leaders start listing five or seven or 11 priorities. What does success look like? If you were to set up a scoreboard to track success over time, what would it measure? Leaders owe their teams an answer to the same question that young children often ask their parents before setting out on a long drive: “Where are we going and how are we going to get there?” In other words, what is the goal and how are we going to measure progress along the way?Īnd that may sound simple, but it is often one of the greatest challenges that teams, divisions and companies face.
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