Building a Successful Team Culture (part 1)

I am turning a bit more serious for this blog, no funny stories this week. In many ways, the first eight blogs I wrote were meant to set this one up, an “op-ed piece” as Esteri Hinman—an ex-colleague at Intel--used to teasingly refer to some of my fierier communications when I was there.

The stress on knowledge worker teams in the workplace has never been greater. In a down economy, the drive for increasing profits is unrelenting. Product development cycles grow shorter, the projects themselves are increasingly more complex with shifting and uncertain requirements, projects are multi-sited around the world and companies find it increasingly more difficult to get enough of the right kind of people. And yet only 10% of knowledge worker teams are high-performance*.

Meanwhile, many good workers--having had enough of the pressure and the demands--are leaving the workplace, taking their experience and wisdom with them. Many more demoralized and unhappy people stay.

To be sure, there are a lot of people trying to help with these problems. There are literally hundreds of management and leadership books on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble. I tried to count them once, and got as high as 300 before stopping. The large increase in the numbers of executive and business coaches is another sign of this.

My business is based on the belief that people need team cultures: (1) that support them and validate them as individuals and members of the team; (2) where they are told the truth and feel comfortable speaking the truth; (3) where everyone knows their role and is held accountable, including project and senior management. As a leader, create this kind of culture and your teams have a much better chance of being in that 10% of high-performance teams.

I use the three words integrity, transparency, and accountability to encapsulate that mental construct. I call this the culture of integrity, and I am going to spell out the basics of that culture in the next few blogs.

Helping people understand how to turn these abstract words into the concrete actions that are required to successfully manage complex teams requires more than a few blogs, so I have created a 45-minute slide set chock full of anecdotes and helpful hints that I am currently scheduling (for free, of course) with organizations around Austin. I will be glad to do so in Phoenix, Folsom, Carolina or the DC area as well in the coming months.

There will likely not be a blog next week, as our son Matt is having rather complex foot surgery on Tuesday June 10. If you are so inclined, please include him in your prayers.

*Contagious Success, Susan Lucia Annunzio, 2004

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