Crossing Signals Weblog

The philosopher Nietzsche often accused his fellow Europeans of acting like pitiful herd animals. His rather negatively framed point being that the majority chooses to subordinate individual choice to the collective voice of the group they belong to. Having put his finger on an important trait of human behavior, Nietzsche focused on its bad side effect; the herds following bad leaders without thinking, letting the leaders kill original thinking in the process. Right he is, but we wouldn’t be doing it without an upside. To belong to and be protected by a group of people instead of going it alone, is what helped us survive the first one hundred thousand years of our existence as Homo Sapiens. It is therefore a very natural thing, even a biological imperative, for us to fit in and conform.

In our business, the effective functioning of teams in an innovative and creative context, we need to direct this behavior to let people fit in while retaining original thinking. An important tool to support our efforts is our collaboration scorecard. The scorecard measures what people value in relation to the context they operate in. It allows us to assign roles to the individuals of a team to let them work into their own and each other’s strengths and maximize team effectiveness. The roles capture the individual’s strengths given the context he or she needs to operate in. For example, the role of ‘coordinator’ is assigned to someone who has a natural inclination to maintain the structure and flow of a system. Someone with this role finds it important to be dependable and reliable, to work according to clear and concise processes and agreements. The role of ‘innovator’ is assigned to someone who likes to facilitate adaptation and change. An innovator sees and conceptualizes needed change; he or she makes change tangible for others in inviting ways. Two very different roles that based on different values have to work together in different ways depending on context. In a business development context, the innovator will have the lead in creating new products and business models, with the coordinator ensuring that innovations are absorbed into the standing organization as efficiently as possible. In a business process redesign context, the coordinator is in the lead, with the innovator coming up with ideas for increasing efficiency.

During the last year, we have collected quite a body of evidence and one interesting pattern keeps emerging. Two roles rarely, if ever, surface as an individual’s dominant role. These ‘unpopular’ roles have to do with enforcing team discipline and providing feedback on the behavior of group members. In other words, they are about accountability; confronting people with the consequences of their actions. It appears that very few people have a natural inclination to take these roles within a team. At first we thought this pattern showed a cultural bias. Since most of our clients are Dutch, we assumed that this avoidance of confrontational behavior is a typical aspect of Dutch culture. In the Netherlands, people embrace a conciliatory style of cooperation, where consensus is an important goal and people’s sensitivities are taken very seriously. This behavior is such an integral part of our culture, that we have introduced a special word for it: the verb “polderen”. As it turns out the emerging pattern is more than just a cultural thing.

Patrick Lencioni is an author and entrepreneur with a longstanding interest in teams and team performance, and he has published several books on the subject. Recent research conducted by his company The Table Group seems to corroborate the pattern we have been observing (here). Team members find it very difficult to confront each other with counter-productive or undesirable behavior (68% of participants identify accountability as a problem in their team). The reality is that people would rather not rock the boat, and this behavior is not limited to the Netherlands. Teams that operate higher up in the organizational hierarchy are even more afflicted by this type off ineffective behavior (80%).

Based on our own experience and the findings of The Table Group we have decided to put an even greater emphasis on the part of our services where we create a context that allows difficult and confrontational forms of feedback. To make sure a team and its individuals are empowered enough to hold themselves accountable for their actions and thereby becoming far more effective. Individual sensitivities are real and play an important role in team processes, and at the same time the team needs to works together in order to achieve a common purpose and create results. To make accountability an integral part of a team’s make up, we will continue to reflect on the differing individual perceptions of the value of results and focus on the integration of these values into a common purpose as the essence of collaboration. It is well worth the effort to invest in improving the openness, mutual understanding and focus of a team in this manner. Isn’t teamwork all about communication after all?