Issue 11 (emailed version), Thursday 26 October, 2000
Made in New Zealand - twice winners of the America's Cup


"To create a high-performance team, we must replace typical management activities like supervising, checking, monitoring, and controlling with new behaviours like coaching and communicating."

Ray Smith, CEO Bell-Atlantic


Welcome to issue 11 of EDGE FIRST, an email magazine dedicated to making you a better leader, by providing:
- provocative thinking about what it means to be a leader
- the tools, techniques and best-practices that drive leadership improvement

In this issue
STARTre-purposing to Total Quality You
Ten minute MasterClassmaking teams work - where leaders fit
Quick case study'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom'
ListomaniaFedEx's nine faces of leadership

To access Portable Document Format (.pdf) files you'll need Adobe's® free Acrobat® Reader.
Start
Re-purpose is a word that's appeared a lot in the Baldrigeplus office recently. We're 'talking' to a guy in Delaware about collaboratively re-purposing the web site. The two-yearly re-write of the Baldrige criteria are due out December 5, and the need to update our criteria-related material will also provide an opportunity to re-visit our assumptions about what works on-line.

Increasingly, we'll lean towards the personal, and away from the corporate – delivering on our promise of big ideas in a small package, but with a clearer (re-purposed) focus on total quality you.
Ten minute MasterClass® - Making teams work
In the new economy, all work is teamwork - that much is given. And a key leadership skill (some say THE leadership skill) is running teams.

What does it take to make a team work? Fast Company issue 40 went to some experts in the art of teamwork for the answers:
  • Ray Oglethorpe, president, AOL Technologies says “Think small. Ideally, your team should have 7 to 9 people. If you have more than 15 or 20, you're dead: The connections between team members are too hard to make.” Two and a half years ago, said Oglethorpe, AOL was feeling hamstrung at the technologies level. There was a bottleneck at the top. “We decided to make that division team based, and created core teams that were empowered to make decisions about products.

    “It was the best thing that we could have done. The core teams spun off satellite teams ( also made up of small groups of people ) that focused on specific projects, with specific goals and expectations.” Size is the key – as small as possible. And no delegates. You don't want people who have to take the team's ideas back to someone else to get authorization.

  • Jon Katzenbach, senior partner Katzenbach Partners - the critical decision for any manager or leader looking for high performance from a small group of people is: Should the group try to work as a team, or should they operate as single-leader units - intrinsically faster and more efficient than teams. Tasks are more clearly defined by one leader, and members work on their own much of the time.

    Lots of groups call themselves teams but aren't, Katzenbach says. And too many managers and leaders assume that being a team is what group effort is all about. If a group tries to become a team when the performance challenge requires a single-leader approach, performance and morale suffer. The opposite is equally true.

  • Michael Leinbach, shuttle-launch director, John F Kennedy Space Center – leads a 'team' of about 500 people. A team? You decide – here's some of what he says:
    - The most critical element of a successful shuttle-launch team is an open channel of communication from each member to the team leader
    - I make sure that everyone knows to inform me immediately if there's a glitch in his or her work -- any glitch -- even if it's just something that's marginally off, but still within normal specs.
    - People tend to be intimidated by those who hold leadership positions. And often people don't want to stand out.
    - I try to get to know everyone on the team in an attempt to do away with that intimidation factor. I make it a point to spend at least half of my time in my office in the processing area, rather than in my office in the corporate area. It's good for me and it's good for the team, both personally and professionally. A team works better when people are at ease with the leader. Members are more likely to say what's on their minds. I suspect that's true of any team.

    A team? Thank God I'm not a (Kennedy) astronaught!

  • Martha Rogers, Peppers and Rogers Group - if you're looking for one quality that most good teams share, I'd have to say that it's the culture of the company in which the team exists. It's also important that the leaders and the members of good teams have realistic expectations of motive. Sometimes I work with teams that are made up of people from all different areas of a company, with leaders who expect that each team member is going to put aside his or her own personal goals and work selflessly for the common good. Not realistic.

  • Tony DiCicco, former head coach US women's world cup champion soccer team - to have a successful team, you must have a shared culture. My team's culture is largely built on fitness, intensity in training, individual respect, and respect for the group.

    A long-term team must have a way for new people to join. To survive, new players have to buy into the team's culture. However, your current team members can't be afraid of new talent or new ideas. The natural inclination is to protect what you have and not allow a new star to rise to the top. Team members have to fight against that. The bottom line is that new talent can force everyone to play at a higher level.

  • Janine Bay, Director of vehicle personalization for automotive consumer-services, Ford Motor Company - teams should be made up of people who have different opinions about things, people who approach their work in different ways. Diversity is one of the keys to a successful team.

    My advice is this: Bring in a facilitator … someone from the outside - an unbiased third party - may have insights about what's working, what's not, and why you are just too close to the project to see clearly. At Ford, we always have team-effectiveness coaches on hand. It's an unusual skill set for Ford, but … coaches are available and invaluable.

  • Thomas C. Leppert, Chairman and CEO Turner Corporation - a successful team boils down to two things: mutual respect among team members and a common vision about where the team is going.

    At Turner, we are completely dependent on teams -- not only on teams that exist within the organization, but also on teams that are made up of all sorts of people from the outside, such as architects, designers, and suppliers.

    We put teams together to build stadiums and commercial high-rises. Sometimes those teams are easier to manage because there's a clear sense of what the outcome should be. But we also put internal teams together to work on smaller-scale projects, such as figuring out what our new operating system should look like. Those sorts of teams can be more difficult to create and sustain, because the expected results aren't as clear. But in the end, it boils down to those two elements. Respect. A common vision.

  • Michael Schrage, codirector MIT Media Labs eMarkets initiative, executive director Merrill Lynch's innovation grants competition - Teamwork has become a euphemism for organizational politics. Guess what? People sense the dishonesty there. People aren't stupid. They know when they're being used.

    The question isn't, "how do we build better teams?" It's "what kind of conversations and interactions do we want to create?" Innovative managers understand that they must do more than manage people. They need to manage the interactions between people. That's not a subtle distinction. The best managers get their people to interact in creative ways.

    How do they do that? It takes shared space to create shared understandings. Shared space could be a model or a prototype of a proposed new product. It could be the mock-up of a Web site. What gives a conversation weight, dimension, and relevance is having a shared space where people's ideas can play out in front of one another. The Net is the greatest medium for shared space ever invented!

  • David Aycock, Former chairman, CEO, and president Nucor Corporation - there are seven key ingredients to building a successful team:
    (1) the mission must be clearly defined and articulated, and everybody has to understand it. That includes an understanding of the project's purpose, the strategy for getting the work accomplished, the ultimate goal, the benefits people will receive if the goal is met, the measurement system that's going to be used, and how differences of opinion (or other conflicts) are going to be handled.
    (2) all team members have to be positive thinkers.
    (3) selfish people spell doom for a team effort.
    (4) team member must have enough self-confidence and self-respect to respect other team members.
    (5) the team leader must always be on the lookout for distractions, tangents, and unproductive or ancillary issues. If the leader spots the project going astray, it's his or her responsibility to get it back on track - fast.
    (6) each member must trust the motives of the other members.
    (7) the team has to be as small as possible. If you have more people than are absolutely necessary on a team, members will start functioning like a committee.

  • Aaron Cohen, CEO Concrete Inc - this moment in history is about individual collaborative thinking. Not an oxymoron … it means that people need to be fiercely independent and intensely collaborative at the same time.

    Today's companies need lots of aspiring leaders. That doesn't mean that a company needs to have 15 chief executives, but it does mean that the top manager has to know how to check his or her ego and encourage everyone else to do what he or she does best.

    Great teams operate without their members knowing what's going to happen to them in the future. The key is that each individual has a belief in the others that enables him or her to carry through. Members need to believe that everyone is working toward a common goal.

  • Franklin Jonath, President Jonath & DiMeo Inc - given a group of talented people and a worth while project, it's the leader who makes a team succeed:
    - In theater and in sports, teams practice. It should be the same in the corporate world. A good team leader will create an environment in which people can practice and make mistakes before they're pressured to produce.
    - A skilled leader will focus on managing interactions between people, as opposed to managing individual behavior - individuals should manage their own behavior.
    - A good leader recognizes that people are competitive and should be careful to accentuate strengths, rather than stigmatize people for their weaknesses. Don't try to stop competition – channel it into cooperative competitiveness.
    - the team leader should be at the service of the group – and team members own the outcome. The leader is there to bring intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources, and to show the others how to think about the work that they're doing in the context of their lives. It's a tall order, but the best teams have such leaders.

  • Jeanie Duck Senior vice president Boston Consulting Group - too often teams get right down to work, and then some sort of conflict arises. It gets ugly and personal very fast, because everyone has been blindsided and no one knows what to do. Here's an example: You start working as a team. One person is behaving like a star – wants special treatment. Well, did you all talk about that possibility before you launched into things? Don't shortchange your startup. Take the time to understand what you're going to do and how you're going to deal with the possible bumps along the way. Trying to undo a conflict between two team members when no one is prepared to handle such a situation is at least three times harder than taking the time to set up some ground rules at the beginning of the process.

    Don't say, "It won't happen to us." Spend the time up front. Please.

Quick case study® – 'You Can't Create a Leader in a Classroom'

If you've wrestled with 'strategy' in any sort of classroom, you'll have come across the work of Henry Mintzberg. Professor of management at McGill, faculty position at INSEAD (the high-profile business school outside Paris), ten books, more than 100 published articles – Mintzberg is a rock star of applied management.

Think back. Did his ideas seem a bit (be honest now) wet? Maybe it's because some of it goes back a long way, and was about … potters, conductors … was that Mintzberg?

Well, he's hot again: More and more companies are realizing that there's a difference between a CEO who's great with numbers – and a great leader. Mintzberg has shown that management itself is as much a Jackson Pollock painting as it is a quantifiable science. The wuss rules, OK.

It would be easy for him to bask in the overdue glory, to become yet another past-his-prime academic celebrity who recycles old ideas into new books and gets paid ridiculous sums of money to regale corporate bigwigs at off-sites, Jennifer Reingold writes in FC 40. but that's never been Mintzberg's style.

These days he's out to change management education. Which sounds strange, given that management education in general, and the MBA in particular, has never been more popular. If it ain't broke, Reingold wondered, why fix it?

'Tis broke, Mintzberg says. "The MBA is a fabulous design for learning about business, but if you're trying to train managers, it's dead wrong. The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons."

We're creating a kind of neo-aristocracy, he complains, a 'business class' that believes it has the right to lead because it spent a couple of years in a classroom. If you really want to learn how to be a leader, you need to be in an environment with, well, other leaders. "You can't create a leader in a classroom."

Mintzberg's solution? An anti-MBA. With Jonathan Gosling of Lancaster University Management School, UK, he's created an International Masters in Practicing Management.

What makes the IMPM different? There's no home campus for a start: Two-week modules are spread over 16 months and five countries: Canada, France, India, Japan, and the UK. After each, students write a reflection paper describing how what they learned relates to their job. They meet regularly with a tutor in their area and work on "ventures," which are program-long projects to create real change in their own work environment.

There are five modules: Managing Self, the reflective mind-set; Managing Relationships, the collaborative mind-set; Managing Organizations, the analytic mind-set; Managing Context, the worldly mind-set; and Managing Change, the action mind-set.

Students stay in their jobs – classroom activity is connected to ongoing work. The IMPM also encourages people who already work in groups, whether those groups are in-person or virtual, to attend the program together. This is both a support network and a better way of ensuring that new ideas will become reality when the participants return to the work world.

The success of the IMPM suggests that after years of MBA bashing from the Canadian wilderness, the world may finally be moving toward Mintzberg's point of view. Traditional MBA programs are now trying to bring out the more emotional, thoughtful side of management. Companies everywhere, desperate for more effective leadership, are working with their executives to develop more robust approaches to managing, rather than simply sending them off to cookie-cutter executive-education programs
Listomania – leadership at Federal Express
This list is from The Nine Faces of Leadership, an issue 13 Fast Company article by by Heath Row (Heathrow! Sorry).

According to FedEx, its best leaders share nine personal attributes - which the company defines with remarkable specificity. FedEx also has a system for rating aspiring leaders on whether they possess these attributes. How do you rate? Judge yourself against these edited descriptions of the nine faces of leadership at FedEx.
  • Charisma
    Instills faith, respect, and trust. Has a special gift of seeing what others need to consider. Conveys a strong sense of mission.
  • Individual consideration
    Coaches, advises, and teaches people who need it. Actively listens and gives indications of listening. Gives newcomers a lot of help.
  • Intellectual stimulation
    Gets others to use reasoning and evidence, rather than unsupported opinion. Enables others to think about old problems in new ways. Communicates in a way that forces others to rethink ideas that they had never questioned before.
  • Courage
    Willing to stand up for ideas even if they are unpopular. Does not give in to pressure or to others' opinions in order to avoid confrontation. Will do what's right for the company and for employees even if it causes personal hardship.
  • Dependability
    Follows through and keeps commitments. Takes responsibility for actions and accepts responsibility for mistakes. Works well independently of the boss.
  • Flexibility
    Functions effectively in changing environments. When a lot of issues hit at once, handles more than one problem at a time. Changes course when the situation warrants it.
  • Integrity
    Does what is morally and ethically right. Does not abuse management privileges. Is a consistent role model.
  • Judgment
    Reaches sound and objective evaluations of alternative courses of action through logic, analysis, and comparison. Puts facts together rationally and realistically. Uses past experience and information to bring perspective to present decisions.
  • Respect for others
    Honors and does not belittle the opinions or work of other people, regardless of their status or position.

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