When I ask business leaders and IT professionals about their experience of teamwork effectiveness — and I’ve asked thousands in 20+ years as a consultant and speaker — I get a consistent “so-so” response.

So what will it take to create consistently more effective teamwork across the board?

First, it requires a hard look at what doesn’t work.

Then it requires everyone to take greater ownership for their own teamwork.

This can happen only when we equip business leaders and team members with the often neglected basic skills to lead or work on a team.

Professionals – be aware that teamwork is an individual skill

What doesn’t work: Waiting for someone else to make your team experience a good one

Though this is changing in some sectors, we don’t yet expect individuals in the workforce to take ownership for the quality and productivity of their relationships at work. Yet we expect them to work successfully in teams — pods of shared responsibility, where each member’s accomplishment and paycheck depend on how the whole group performs.

We expect to hold individuals accountable for a work product within their area of expertise, yet we buy into their blame and justification when their excuse for poor performance is that they were assigned to a bad team over which they had no direct control.

What doesn’t work: Focusing on the parts and expecting a whole to emerge

We manage organizations by taking big jobs, breaking them up, assigning the pieces to people, and then — hopefully — integrating the pieces into wholes. But in our educational system and career paths, we create highly educated specialists and we micro-focus them on bounded pieces of work rather than on end-user value. This creates huge gaps between these well-bounded roles. Thus the need for integration.

Problems between the gaps hold the greatest opportunity to add value

As a society and as managers, we have low expectations of smart people’s abilities to work well together. As reasons we cite

• specialization
• ego
• competitiveness
• sensitivity
• aggressiveness
• conflict avoidance and
• (choose your favorite instrument) personality style differences.

What else doesn’t work: Low expectations (faith in people) by leaders

When we adopt humane beliefs and expectations about people’s abilities to build responsible and productive relationships at work, they do build those relationships.

We need to develop faith in smart people’s abilities to learn a new way of relating at work, and recognize teamwork as an individual skill — with identifiable principles and communication skills that anyone with an elementary school education can learn and master. This also means that smart, highly educated professionals are no longer let off the hook because of the advanced nature of their specializations and personal accomplishments.

Education and self-awareness supports successful teamwork

Along with raising our expectations, professionals can practice some basic principles and skills that support effective teamwork. As a society, we have thousands of years of experience with working in hierarchies, yet we have just a few decades’ worth of models, metaphors, and language about working in teams.

In my experience, smart, highly educated professionals don’t understand the basic concepts and skills to work in, lead, or manage teams. And our efforts to teach those principles and skills have fallen way short, often perpetuating a team-building mythology that just doesn’t work.

The critical path to creating more consistently effective teams starts with leaders taking ownership for perpetuating a society, a workforce, and a workplace where smart, highly educated and highly paid professionals are expected to acquire, practice, and master integrative skills.

To be successful in a shared-responsibility environment, master these concepts

“Tall” versus “flat” relationship structures — successful participation simultaneously in hierarchies and teams.

Shared responsibility — accomplishing tasks with others over whom you hold no direct control yet on whose effort your performance relies.

Simultaneous cooperation and competition — consciously choosing cooperation over petty competitiveness as your default relationship strategy and knowing when and how to choose competitiveness when a truly critical value or belief is at stake.

The principle of the least-invested coworker — motivating peers and dealing effectively with perceived freeloaders and other difficult team members.

We would do well to reexamine our fundamental assumptions about what bright people can and cannot learn. And we must modify our beliefs about leading, managing, and working in team-based environments. Most of all, more consistently effective teams starts with an examination of your own contributions to the problem and your responsibility to learn, correct, and improve.

There is an “I” in “team,” and you are it.

Christopher Avery, PhD, is a recognized authority on how individual and shared responsibility works in the mind and an advisor to leaders worldwide. Master leadership or build a responsible team with The Leadership Gift Program for Leaders.

How do you get a team to develop a clear and elevating goal?

By the way, by “clear” I  mean no measurements are needed to know that the goal is reached, and by “elevating” I mean the goal is bold and inspiring.

The truth is, no one knows for sure how to get any team to develop a clear and elevating goal. If we did, we’d be mass-producing winning teams. That said, over the years I’ve witnessed countless teams operating well with clear and elevating goals, I’ve studied the conditions under which such goals came about, and I’ve successfully coached many teams to such heights and taught many leaders how to do it as well.

This is what I’ve learned:

1. A team’s clear and elevating goal is never the goal the leader gives the team

The goal you give a team is your goal, not theirs. To the team it is just an assignment and assignments are not inherently motivating. The fact that your goal moves you does not mean it will — or should — move your team.

This is true in virtually all cases, and understanding this will make you better equipped than 95 percent of leaders.

In the literature on high-performance teamwork, and in my 20-year experience, every time a team is inspired by a clear and elevating goal that goal is one the team itself discovered.

Here’s a real example. A Motorola team I coached was tasked with “ironing out all of the inventory, barcode and delivery issues” involved in supplying computer chips to Ford assembling lines. I don’t know about you, but “ironing” is not inherently motivating to me, and the looks on the team member’s faces told me it wasn’t inspirational to them either.

A few weeks later this team requested time on the leader’s agenda to report progress. Their primary item of business was to report that they had turned the leader’s assignment into a team charter that represented the commitment of every member of the team. As the team leader read the twenty-two word charter, everyone in the room could see that she and her team were completely present and engaged. They were jazzed about this. I got goosebumps then and still feel inspired today when I share the story. Here’s what she read:

The Delivery Team will ensure that Motorola will never allow a Ford assembly line to be shut down anywhere in the world.

Do you think if the team owns that goal, they’ll make significant headway on “ironing out the inventory, barcode, and delivery issues”? You bet they will.

More importantly, do you think any leader gets away with assigning that charter to a team and have them own it like that team? No way.

Here’s my shorthand explanation: I tell teams to turn their assignment (what I often call a “task”) into a goal. How do you know the difference?

A task is what must be done
A goal makes it worth doing

2. There is no recipe or formula you can apply to a team that will result in an elevating goal each time

The best thing a leader can accomplish is to support the team in looking for a clear and elevating goal. If I could bottle that skill and develop it in leaders, I’d be running a skill-building production facility (and you’d be in line!). Crafting a successful approach is a design issue rather than a formulaic process — what you are designing is a set of conditions that encourages team members to explore what they want (rather than what their employers want).

3. There is, however, a set of initial conditions that you can design and influence

While most leaders would kill for teams with clear and elevating goals, what they are more often killing are the conditions that support them! Organizations have a way of systematically extinguishing the wants of team members while simultaneously calling for passion and commitment. We tell people what they should want. We tell them our goals and parameters and then we tell them to get busy and have passion. When I ask people on a client’s team what they want out of this project and this team, more frequently than not I hear, “Gee, no one’s ever asked me that before.”

The leader who understands clear and elevating goals will invest in creating a culture of responsible leadership that acknowledges intrinsic motivations and supports personal freedom and choice. Then he or she will make room in projects for team start-up processes that truly engender ownership within the team.

Learn about point 4 through 6 in the second post in this series (Part 2):

4. Ideally, challenge the team to discover such a goal and invest time in that discovery process

5. It’s always a nonlinear process, a lateral-thinking exercise, and a surprising result

6. Breaking through conflict helps the team’s performance

Want to apply this information right away?

Assess your project environments, leaders, and teams according to these six observations and ask yourself how you can alter the leadership equation so that teams are free to discover what they really want as a team. You will find that giving team members the change to take ownership of their involvement will create a better end result because they are motivated from having their individual voices heard and validated.

To learn more about maximizing teamwork results while empowering the individual team members, attend Knowledge Team Leadership or bring it to your work site.

Have you thought this about your team:

• “I can’t be responsible for the quality of my team’s efforts.”
• “Getting on a good team is mostly a matter of luck.”
• “If I’m part of a poorly functioning team, and I’m not in charge, there is little I can do but bear it.”

These kinds of thoughts take an enormous toll — they result in lost productivity and low morale of the individual, the team, and the whole organization.

After years of studying team behavior and coaching business leaders, I can tell you that the most successful people demonstrate another set of beliefs and skills about teamwork which in my book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill I call “TeamWisdom.”

People with TeamWisdom:

• understand and act on all of their personal abilities to affect the entire team’s effectiveness
• know that being in a good team isn’t random, it’s a function of one’s relationship behavior and what they and others do
• take personal responsibility for the quality of their relationships. They never wait for those “in charge” to notice and act on a situation that needs attention

Do you want your experience at work to improve? Try this: consider your most recent team experience. Would you give yourself a high rating for your (not anyone else’s) TeamWisdom?

The quality of your participation affects the quality of the team’s results. Instead of expecting a mediocre team experience or just hoping for a better one, raise your own standards for –  and commitment to — great team performance.

Make Teamwork an Individual Skill — Start Being More Responsible For Your Own Team Experience!

1. recognize that you are not a passive recipient in teams — your behavior shapes and affects the team
2. acknowledge that not attending to team performance is a choice and that you are choosing to put yourself at the mercy of change and will most likely be frustrated with the outcome
3. accept that if you are in a situation of shared responsibility and reward, the quality and productivity of the relationships are worthy of your focus — your input matters

If you start with just these three steps, you’ll transform you experience with teamwork!

Want to learn more about how to have a more fulfilling work experience?

Christopher Avery’s book Teamwork Is An Individual Skill will teach you how to work more effectively, how to stand out from the crowd, and how to be more successful in any situation.

By the way, I continue to update my research on the best team leadership, team building, and teamwork skills in the world, and I teach them in Knowledge Team Leadership.

A few minutes later when Wayne Turmel and I reconnected, yes on Skype, which is how Wayne Turmel records his Cranky Middle Manager podcast interviews with authors and other experts, Wayne Turmel told me that the more technological glitches suffered during an interview the better the interview and the greater the number of downloads (The Cranky Middle Manager podcast is averaging 25,000 downloads a month for The Podcast Network). So this ought to be a good one.

If you know Wayne Turmel’s Cranky Middle Manager podcast, you know that Wayne Turmel is witty, fast on the draw, frequently irreverent (wait until you hear what he said after I responded “Free, powerful, and at choice” to his opening “How are you today Christopher?”), and though he jokes about weasels (“Don’t let the weasels get you down” is his trademark close), Wayne Turmel has high regard for his audience and knows they seek real answers about how they can be great in their role at work and in their lives.

Wayne Turmel asked me insightful questions about the connection between my book, Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility, and Responsibility Redefined™. The primary focus on the 30 minute interview was the common complaint about having all the responsibility and none of the authority. As you can imagine, I had much to say about that.

Wayne Turmel told me to look for his Cranky Middle Manager podcast interview with me to air before the end of May. I’ll let you know when it posts.

Read my first post on this topic.

I haven’t read the book cover-to-cover though I’m well aware of it. Why? Mostly because I think I completely get it. And because I generally read for difference (newness) rather than for sameness (confirmation). And I wrote a similar book. So it remains on my backlog.

That doesn’t mean it should remain on your backlog. I would think this book by Roger Martin makes a good companion to mine. And I would welcome the opportunity to share a classroom, podium, or change project with Roger Martin (then I would surely read his book!). I think Roger Martin offers a lot of useful tools and metaphors, and I bet we could spin up some really powerful learning experiences together.

What I am striving to do though is more than link responsibility to performance as so many authors and experts have done. I’m striving to fundamentally alter the very way we think about responsibility. My vision is to see Responsibility Redefined worldwide as an observable, learnable, and teachable mental process, the Responsibility Process™ that works in each of us exactly the same way, and which can be systematically studied and mastered, and which can be successfully developed in teams and cultures.

My readers know this well. Readers of Deborah’s post at InfoQ might check out a recent article by one of the commenters there, Amr Elssamadisy. It’s called Personal Agility for Potent Agile Adoption.