Rediscovering the sense of 'WE' in an age of 'ME' - Part 2

By François de Boissezon, Mannaz

In the previous edition of Mannaz’ newsletter, we explored a few solid trends impacting most organisations today. In particular, the increasing complexity of projects, the need to innovate in a knowledge based ‘creative economy’, as well as the expectations of the younger and smarter workforce of today and tomorrow seem to increase the relevance and appeal of harnessing the power of teams. > Read part one of the article

When reviewing the methods and approaches available, we found a few well proven tools, but not so much research and even less innovation in that area. The adrenaline pumping “pop tools” of the 90’s, with their bungee jumps and white water rafting, seem to be on the decline, and replaced by more relevant and meaningful alternatives.

Mannaz has always been concerned with the quality and pedagogical soundness of its approaches when designing learning solutions, and therefore measurement and assessment tools have always had a place of choice. This is the background for our review of two solid methodologies that have been developed and/or adopted by Mannaz for use in teams.

TMI and TDD: two powerful approaches to teams

1. TMI the Team Maturity Inventory
TMI, the Team Maturity Inventory, was a first attempt by Mannaz to create a fast web based anonymous survey among team members to generate a team diagnostic report

We know that teams will easily blame their leader or the organisation for every dysfunction or unsatisfactory aspect of its performance. But, as a social construction, a team has an identity of its own, different from the sum of its components, and the TMI was a first attempt to give reality to this identity, and push the responsibility on the team itself for its own good or bad performance (and give some relief to the leader!).

The organic approach in TMI consists in equipping the team leader with solid processes to ‘facilitate’ the emergence of the team’s identity, and a guided dialogue whereby the team takes full ownership of its own strengths and limitations to generate an action plan and take a time 2 measurement to gauge its progress.

Some team leaders have a hard time resisting the temptation to play the ‘heroic’ leadership role, and steal again the ownership from the team. But those who make the qualitative transition to a more facilitating and enabling style of leadership discover a huge hidden potential of team resourcefulness and performance.

How is TMI typically used?

• in coaching a leader to orchestrate and facilitate the progression of his/her own team
  
• in training programs or development centres (usually associated with outdoor or indoor exercises) to equip participants with the skills and processes to develop their own teams upon return to the job. The largest project included over 400 participants in a large development Centre for the Belgacom group in Belgium
  
• in organisational change interventions, for example Mannaz created a 1,5 day module to help 120 project managers across 3 different R&D sites at Alcatel to reinforce a culture of teams and teamwork by getting the TMI report for their own project team.

The 9 components of the TMI grid: goal clarity and commitment, team roles/rules and team spirit, organisational resources and support, coaching from the leader, customer awareness, and culture of performance.

TMI as an instrument has been statistically checked for validity and reliability, and found to measure quite well against other instruments, and is available in French, English, Dutch

2. TDD the Team Dynamics Diagnostic
TDD the Team Dynamics Diagnostic is a more ambitious step towards developing the full organic approach to Team effectiveness and a true web based team 360.

It builds on the trivial observation that a team does not exist in a vacuum, but that it lives within an ecosystem of customers, vendors and organisational sponsors which it needs to keep in balance to operate and thrive. So the TDD adds to the TMI the dimension of being a true 360 feedback tool for teams involving key players in the team’s ecosystem.

The simplified TDD Dashboard

The TDD also offers a simpler yet more comprehensive (84 questions) web based survey and uses a robust team grid that participants find easy to adopt and memorise. It provides them with a dashboard based on a 4 planet model of team performance tested with over 200 managers and executives in the top leadership programme of a leading Business School.

The TDD software has been qualified as an ‘IBM partner application’, and it is both trademarked and in full compliance with the European Directive on data privacy. It is available in English and French, and further translations are planned.

The 4 planets: Performance, People, Process and Leadership

The Performance planet is first, because performance against set goals is the defining characteristic of a team. It includes goals, success criteria, time and speed, high quality, action, experimentation, fighting spirit, competition, etc. Excessive focus on it will lead to burnout and destruction of value.

The People planet is second, because a team is built on the soft fabrics of relationships and communication. It is the home of trust, care, appreciation, respect, values, but it also rooms conflict, demands, risks, and includes fun, energy, pain and celebration. Overdo the focus on people, and you get a social club, or you get dependency, political games and manipulation.

The Process planet is third, and it makes the difference. It is the House of solid plans, sound processes, efficient meetings, smart methods, learning from experience, resource optimisation, innovation, and more. Overdo it, and you get endless days full of frustrating meetings that produce nothing but frustration and paperwork.

The Leadership planet is yet to be fully discovered, and its role is to keep the proper balance between the other 3 planets. It is the home of ‘level 5 leadership’, defining and facing reality, responsibility and accountability, systemic integration of the team in its ecosystem, role modelling, integrity and ethics, fairness and justice, story telling, coaching, facilitating, enabling and empowering. The unique characteristics of leaders in high performance teams are not yet fully explored but what we know to date is very different from the ‘heroic model’.

The 3 planets of performance, people and processes are actually not so distant from the Belbin team roles which subdivide into 3 action oriented roles (performance), 3 people oriented roles, and 3 cerebral roles (processes).

Turning data into meaningful projects: working with the reports and the stakeholders
As with TMI, the leader gets a comprehensive yet intuitive report to share with the team, and a detailed process to facilitate the team’s journey towards ownership and action planning.

The new element lies in the way the leader is invited to mobilise customers, sponsors and vendors to help the team get the picture of how well it fits in with both its mission and its ecosystem. This is typically done by inviting the external stakeholders to give straight but constructive feedback to the whole team, either face to face or with a video clip.

The debriefing process is similar to the process used for TMI, and focuses on helping the team take ownership of its own strengths, limitations and ambivalences AND TO DO something about them. This normally requires qualified advice and guidance from a certified consultant to help the team leader and/or the team to capture the full richness of the received messages.

The TDD also brings a more detailed light on the many new roles of the leader and encourages the broadening of the leadership repertoire involved. This can be achieved by supporting the team leader with individual coaching so that he/she can facilitate the whole team improvement process without the presence of an internal/external consultant.

The TDD processes can be transferred by certification workshops to external as well as internal consultants.

Impact tracking
As with TMI, the impact is masured again with a second survey, usually within 3 to 6 months from the first survey. This is one of the main differences compared to the individual 360's, where the time lag from diagnostic to behavioural change can easily take a year or more. When dealing with teams, a complete cycle from diagnostic to action plan with tangible results can reduce to as little as 3 to 4 months.

Why? We observe that teams can ‘choose’ to move from a vicious circle to a virtuous spiral faster because of the collective intelligence present around the table, and because an improvement in one area can easily be contagious in other areas of performance (unfortunately, the same can apply in the downward spiral).

What have we learned to date from the TDD: a few counterintuitive findings

1. What goes on inside the team is much more visible to the outside than people think
When we started the first TDD projects, many people were concerned that most of the behaviours described in the 4 planets could not be observed or registered by customers, sponsors or vendors. What we have now is evidence that the ‘external’ observers easily answer 85% of the questions about the team’s life.

They are invited to give ‘impressionistic’ feedback, i.e. feedback based on clues: for example when a client receives for a meeting two salespeople from the same vendor organisation who either support each other or compete with each other, he/she may make qualified guesses about the kind of culture and teamwork prevalent in the rest of the organisation. The same applies when trying to solve a complaint through a customer service department. Whether it's fair or not, the ecosystem of a team forms legitimate judgements on the team based on the behaviours it displays on the outside, and that judgement is part of reality for the team.

2. Teams are narcissistic animals
It is a matter of constant amazement for us to see how little the majority of teams seem to care for the customer, and even less use the customer as a resource and a compass to improve products and services. Is that due to the fact that many teams like to define themselves as “we vs. them” dichotomy? We observe that several teams have a hard time figuring out who are ‘the valued customers’ that they are supposed to serve.

This can of course be a challenge when your team is embedded in a complex value chain, but even there, it is a very rich exercise for most teams to draw a better map of who is upstream and who is downstream, and to treat them as de facto suppliers and customers.

This is where the leader of a team can earn full legitimacy by being the very active advocate of the customers, and use them as compass, along the line: ‘if you are not directly supporting a customer, then you must be supporting somebody else who is supporting a customer!

The second less flagrant example is that teams often have a hard time identifying and dealing with organisational sponsors. Here again, the leader can earn a strong legitimacy by being a strong ambassador of the team to the rest of the organisation (put his head on the block when appropriate), but also a loyal advocate of the organisational needs towards the team (do we really need new computers more than the team next door?). Many team leaders have discovered through TDD the art to strike the right balance between the two roles, and to involve the sponsors much more and better in the team’s life.

3. Management teams fare no better than the teams they are in charge of!
When measuring the average reports of multiple middle management teams, we have been eager to see how the “team at the top” was scoring on the same surveys, and guess what? The top team performance had exactly the same characteristics as the average teams below, just sometimes a little worse!

4. A few more good questions to explore:
As the TDD database moves quickly towards 200 teams analysed, we are obviously looking forward doing the first in depth statistical validation of the tool (which is still in its prototype stage) when we reach the 300 teams mark. But we realise that there are several research avenues which look promising:

• Is it true that teams tend to overestimate themselves, compared with the view of external stakeholders (we know this is true in 360 instruments, especially for men)?
  
• Is there a fundamental difference between the inner dynamics of management teams and the inner workings of the teams reporting to them?
  
• Is there a significant difference in the mechanics of remote teams?
  
• Which are the behaviours which best differentiate solid performance teams from high performance teams?
  
• Can we identify some clusters or patterns of behaviours which are the hallmark of the leaders of truly high performance teams?

We hope to present our answers and opinions during 2007.

More information
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About the author
François de Boissezon has a long history of working with Mannaz. In the 90’s, he managed Business development at Personnel Decisions International Europe, and established PDI’s first partnership in Scandinavia with Mannaz to use the Profilor 360 feedback tool, and he co-created a Mannaz Profilor customised for project managers.

From 2000 to 2002, he was Managing Director of Mannaz’ first international office in Brussels. Now managing his own consultancy, Imagics, François still works with Mannaz as a Senior Programme architect, coach and creative resource for new developments. Mannaz and Imagics are partners around the team diagnostic instruments TMI and TDD, and these will be covered in our next article about teams.

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