Episode 38 – The Mystery of Teamwork

Welcome to the TRSA podcast. Providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform, and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered, reusable linens, uniforms, towels, mats, and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder, and maintain linens and uniforms. And in this podcast, we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

 

On today’s episode, we’re joined by Dan Gonder. Dan is the chief operating officer and co owner of 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. Dan has been consulting for the past 16 years and specializes in strategic advisory services, team and executive training programs, process improvement, and executive coaching. Additionally, Dan is an inaugural member of a new professional network of Patrick Lencioni and the table group, CapaPro, which stands for the consultant and practitioner alliance. As a member, Dan receives ongoing exclusive professional development tools and training directly from Lencioni and his team at the table group about how to best help clients utilize their proven approach to achieve organizational health.

 

Before joining 6 disciplines, Dan was the North American training leader for Microsoft business solutions. He was responsible for 60 plus training centers and 300 plus certified instructors throughout the United States and Canada. Welcome to the show today, Dan. Thanks, Jason. And let’s get right into it.

 

You’ve been consulting for a long time. What are the most common challenges you see in organizations? So my responses to this question are not likely to be a surprise. Lack of focus, inability to prioritize resources, and communication challenges are significant barriers for many organizations. The top of my list, however, is reserved for ineffective teamwork.

 

Ineffective teamwork? Why is that such an issue for organizations? You know, some groups are really good at teamwork, Jason, and it seems to happen almost naturally for them, but it’s elusive, and I’ve observed frustratingly elusive for many others. And for those who can’t quite find the magic ingredient on their own, I offer some hope. You mentioned in my bio that I’m a member of Patrick Lencioni’s professional network.

 

Many of your listeners will know Patrick’s work. He’s written multiple best selling books like the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team and the Ideal Team Player. Patrick’s work reinforces the strategic planning activities I’ve been doing with 6 disciplines and has helped me bring a proven teamwork model to our clients. Patrick describes the challenges and the rewards of teamwork well in the following story as he describes, a former client, the founder of a $1,000,000,000 company, best expressed the power of Teamwork when he once told me, if you could get all the people in the organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry in any market against any competition at any time. Patrick further goes on and says whenever I repeat this adage to a group of leaders, they immediately nod their heads, but in a desperate sort of way.

 

They seem to grasp the truth of it while simultaneously surrendering to the impossibility of actually making it happen. And as I’ve had similar discussions with leaders regarding the challenges of teamwork, many expressed similar exasperation. The good news is that while no team is perfect, organizations can achieve consistent teamwork effectiveness. For those organizations that struggle with teamwork, how should they get started? So it may seem simple and obvious, but the first place I recommend leaders to focus on is setting clear expectations for teamwork.

 

It’s this lack of clarity that’s a challenge for most organizations, and it’s often left to the assumption that everyone knows how to be an effective team member. I see this as the critical reason for teamwork being so elusive, even mysterious, because there are so many different opinions, what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to teamwork. Consider the following examples from outside the business world that demonstrate this inconsistent definition of teamwork. From a professional sports standpoint, are the New England Patriots one of the best examples of a highly effective team in recent history or possibly just a very fortunate team with the best coach and the best quarterback for many years. The recent Super Bowl result for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers adds further intrigue to this debate.

 

For a more common day example, looking to youth sports, one only has to spend a small amount of time listening to exuberant parents sharing their thoughts of what the coach or team should or should not do to identify even more varying opinions on teamwork. The examples go on from group projects during our school years to those committee functions each of us have within our volunteer activities. At work, we then ponder why one iron or area runs so much smoother than another or why routes 15 never seem to have the same teamwork issues as other routes. To demystify teamwork, organizations must ensure a clear expectation for teamwork is in place and regularly overcommunicate this expectation. Now for a brief message from TRSA.

 

Laundries are certified hygienically cleaned through third party inspection and quarterly testing that quantifies an established threshold of pathogens on textiles to levels that pose no threat of illness. Inspectors also verify employee training, safety standard compliance, and operational efficiencies. Certified laundries must maintain a quality assurance or QA manual that indicates their management, housekeeping, and training practices comply with the hygienically clean standard. Now back to the episode. Once a leader commits to setting clear expectations and over communicating those expectations, do you have additional guidance on what the expectations should be?

 

I do. And as a suggested best practice, I I recommend Patrick Lencioni’s second book on teamwork, the ideal team player, and he details the expectations for teamwork as follows. It begins with, humility or humble. Ideal team players are humble. They lack excessive ego or concerns about their status.

 

Humble people are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to seek attention for their own. They share credit, and they emphasize team over self and define success collectively rather than individually. The next trait is hungry. Ideal team players are hungry. They’re the members of the team that are always looking for more, more things to do, more to learn, more responsibility to take on.

 

Hungry people rarely have to be pushed by a manager to work harder because they are self motivated and diligent. They are constantly thinking about the next step and the next opportunity. And then lastly, smart. And this is really pertaining to people smarts. Ideal team players have a common sense about people.

 

They tend to know what is happening in a group situation and how to deal with others in the most effective way. They have good judgment, intuition around the subtleties of group dynamics and the impact of their words and actions. Alright. So once a team has clear expectations and has embraced these expectations, how do they ensure that a teamwork model will have a lasting impact? Some of our listeners may have concerns with a management by bestseller approach that tends to change every few months?

 

Sure, Jason. Management by bestseller is a very valid and common concern. Concern that what’s the next book or or idea that will come that that will change the way our thinking. But once the team and leaders all understand what it means to be an ideal team player, as I mentioned, humble, hungry, and smart, consistent communication over many months is not enough to create long term teamwork success. The next steps require integrating the importance of teamwork into critical processes, and I suggest beginning with the following functions.

 

Certainly, it begins with management. I often say everything flows back to leadership, and confirming that each of your managers and frontline supervisors regularly demonstrate the expectations for teamwork is vital. Managers who represent a do as I say, not as I do approach to teamwork will greatly diminish long term teamwork success. If you focus on just one area, this is where I would start. The next part is training.

 

Most organizations have formal training processes for safety, customer service, equipment, inventory, and on and on and on. The foundations of teamwork, again, such as humble, hungry, and smart, must also be trained and then developed in the same way as technical skills. Another great area to build teamwork is through the hiring process, Identifying candidates that already believe in and practice effective teamwork will add to your overall hiring success. Hiring is a common challenge as we work with our clients and ensuring that interviewing and selection processes focus on teamwork skills will demonstrate that teamwork is a requirement from the very beginning of an employment relationship. As an organization improves, Teamwork needs to play an essential role within the performance appraisal process and ongoing performance management.

 

These processes should consistently recognize effective teamwork at the same level as achieving sales, efficiency, and customer service requirements. Similarly, a consistent lack of teamwork should also be identified and managed as a performance concern for development and improvement. And lastly, I would say one of the most frequent opportunities to nurture effective teamwork is meetings. Meetings tend to be the most regular opportunity to observe and improve in effective teamwork. Implementing criteria for teamwork in meetings such as how the team will engage in conflict, how they’ll make decisions will increase engagement during meetings, and the quality and efficiency of meetings.

 

Thanks, Dan. Any final thoughts for organizations that are seeking to solve the mystery of teamwork? Yes. You know, teamwork is so essential. The challenge is it isn’t consistently taught in schools, and in many cases, students tend to dread being assigned group projects and being thrown together without great tools or processes for working within a team.

 

We then get into the professional world and is it any surprise that some organizations have difficulty pulling together as a team. And yet that is the best way to ensure we are serving our customers at the highest levels from sales to production to service and all other areas of your organization. It doesn’t have to be a mystery. Setting expectations for individual behaviors that require teamwork and then reinforcing these expectations through systematic processes will go a long way to building effective teams. Remember the opening story I shared from Patrick Lencioni, If you could get all the people in your organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry in any market against any competition at any time.

 

Thanks for joining us today, Dan. You’re welcome. I hope that you take something away from today’s episode that will help improve teamwork at your company. If you’d like more information on building cohesive, engaged teams, make sure you register for TRSA’s upcoming HR Health and Safety Summit, a live virtual event scheduled for April 20th 21st. For more information and to register for the summit, visit www.trsa.org/hrdashhs.

 

Thanks again to our sponsor, 6 Disciplines Consulting Services. And please subscribe, rate and review our show on Apple Itunes, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. Additionally, don’t forget to follow TRSA on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.