For a Teaming Experience, Perhaps a Saturday Scrimmage

VANCOUVER BUSINESS JOURNAL
September, 2000

Essential Management Concepts
JONNIE MARTIN

It is amazing to me that there are still owners that shy away from using the very effective “teaming” model in the management of their companies. There are so many good participatory models available to us, including that of the successful sports team.

A successful football team, for example, has a sense of cohesion. It is the intention of coaches and players to develop a mean machine, one that plays hard and wins the game. A team has a sense of identity. It knows what it is about. Team members feel included. They know their role in assuring team success. Team goals outweigh personal goals. There is a game plan and everyone knows it. There is a coach and everyone is committed to increasing their skills. There are team huddles, post-game analysis, and victory parties.

These same techniques work in business. Just how successful would your company be if you shared goals, practiced skills, and celebrated your wins around a 10 foot bonfire? That same sense of purpose and heightened achievement can be accomplished in your company through teaming.

Many years ago I was fortunate to work for Tuck Brubaker, the owner of a financial planning brokerage firm in Detroit. Tuck was the perfect team leader. He had a passion for the value of financial planning in the lives of middle America. Tuck shared with us his vision and our role in achieving its success. He invested in training drills and monthly huddles. When we left one of his pep rallies, we were all fired up and ready to win.

It isn’t that hard to adopt a teaming model for your company.

This notion begins with owners recognizing that you cannot run a company alone. Regardless of the potency of your personal skills, owners must hire, train and motivate a team of people toward common goals. You cannot go it alone.
Next, the owner has to be willing to share power with others on the team. I am not suggesting that you abdicate power — even in a flat organization using participatory management, there must be people assigned final authority and responsibility for business activities. But others can be actively included in decision processes.
The game rules need to be established so that everyone knows how to play and win at the game. In most companies, it is the customer who ultimately sets the standards — but team members benefit if they are involved in identifying and codifying those standards that move the team toward success.
A variety of skills must be developed on the team, and team members valued for their varying contributions. In addition, the skills for good teaming must be taught. Those fancy end-runs do not happen by magic — a team has to be taught to work together and time has to be set aside to plan, practice, and critique the instant replay.
The value of a participatory teaming approach is self-evident. When your players know the game’s objectives, they are more likely to meet them. When your players have two-a-day scrimmages, their skills are increased. When they are included in the huddles, they buy in to the outcomes of the game.

There is solidarity in a teaming model. With common goals and shared victories, everyone in your organization has a chance to shine. Of course there are always some super stars here and there, but your company culture should be designed to honor all team members. You will have an occasional Joe Montana, who gets into the Hall of Fame, but Joe couldn’t have made it without receivers like Jerry Rice, or those hardy men who blocked and tackled for him.

There is energy and excitement in a teaming model. When a coach sends his team onto the field, he gives them a pep talk. He challenges them to “win one for the Gipper.” He gets the team fired up for the win. As owners you have to be the driving spirit behind your team. You have to believe in yourself, your team, and the game. To paraphrase one of my Biz Group participants recently, “When the football coach loses his spirit and doesn’t believe in moving the pointy ball down the field anymore, he should just get out of the game. The same thing is true for business owners. We’re the coaches and the cheerleaders.”

There is success in a teaming model. When that football team gets fired up, there is nothing stopping ‘em. With a well-executed play, they head for the goal post, the extra point, the end zone spike, and those silly dances! That same success can occur in business. Just think how powerful your organization would be if everyone in it knew the company goals, embraced their role, and shared the owner’s passion.

There are all sorts of models available to us. Models to avoid. Sports teams and business teams that lack leadership, talent and intention. Who get in slumps and lose the series and complain to Sports Illustrated. And models to emulate. Sports teams and business teams that have focus and direction; who work together to solve problems and achieve goals; who invest time in training and planning; who value team members and celebrate victories. Who take the pennant and break records and pour champagne on the ESPN commentator.

As the owner and coach, I encourage you to pick a winning model. There are many guidebooks available to you for teaching teaming principles in your company. Besides the excellent resource books, such as Peter Senge’s “The Fifth Discipline,” there are workbooks and teaming games that will guide you toward a more participatory form of government. Dial up the website of HRD Quarterly (www.hrdq.com) to get an overview of this market.