Key to these models is the distinction between a “real team” and other small working groups that don’t exhibit complementary skills, commitment to a common purpose, shared performance goals, and mutual accountability for their approach to the work at hand.

Over the years, I’ve come to find that team development as Katenbach, Smith, and Tuckman observed it depends on a stable surrounding environment, which is becoming less and less common.  Today’s work place is fraught with complexity, ambiguity, and overlapping priorities.  Speed and confusion are facts of life, not the result of a poorly run organization.

photo from blog.jaciclark.com

Often teams have a hard time functioning as suggested in The Original Wisdom (choirs sing here) because the demands to perform start immediately, and there’s no time to go through the team development stages.  And I have to admit that many business leaders in my career have argued that the time it takes for team building is unnecessary.

Today’s successful teams seem to skip some of the stages and get right to work, much as people can jump up and start dancing together at a wedding with little planning or communication.  They just know what to do when the music starts. I’ve shared some of the insights about this “new” kind of team in an earlier post on teams, and it was so popular I thought I’d add some more on the topic.

Here’s some of the new wisdom emerging from my observations conducted at IDEO with my research partner Daniel Wilson:

3 Degrees of Team: we’ve noticed performance differences in teams can be correlated to various “degrees” of team complexity.  A “client-embedded, extended team” seems to out perform the other types.

1. A “core team” has 3-5 people with different skills working closely on a project.

2. An “extended team” can have 20 or 30 people who identify themselves as members of the team, but do not participate fully in all team activities.  Sometimes they offer a quick assessment of the work, while other times they make a specialized contribution to the overall work product.

2. A “client embedded” team has representatives of the sponsoring agency actually on the team versus reviewing or supporting the work from afar.

Team fluidity: one commonly held belief of a team is that it forms with an original set of members (like a rock band) and keeps those same members for the life of its work.  We’ve seen that successful teams are more fluid and can easily accommodate the arrival and departure of members over the life of their work.  This is managed with the use of project artifacts, boundary objects, and a continuing project narrative that keeps everyone up-to-date and connected to the current state of the team and work.

Kimberly White / Reuters

I’ve heard very few facts about the iPad.  Instead, I’ve heard this “magical device is a more intimate personal media experience.” Not a computer without a keyboard or an over-sized mobile phone.  These phrases might sound like “spin” if we didn’t believe the story teller to be authentic.  Perhaps many people are skeptical of Steve Jobs, and for them his story will not be compelling.  This is the challenge of incorporating stories into your everyday life.

How do you become more engaging and compelling without overdoing it and winding up as a spin-doctor?

Know your audience: Adjust what you emphasize depending on the needs of the people around you.  Consider the story of the Three Pigs.  When talking to a five year-old, you might point out the concrete details of how each house is constructed and inject humor into the interactions with the wolf.  But for a 10 year-old, you might focus on the symbolism of the big bad wolf and play up how big problems arise from misplaced priorities.  The characters, facts and sequence are the same, but the tone, tenor, and supporting elements are very different.  In either case, a neutral outline of the facts or PowerPoint bullets about what happened will leave an audience underwhelmed.

Understand your venue: Is it live? Email?  A blog?  Are you in a business or family setting?  Friends or colleagues?  Short or long-term relationships?  All of these factors should affect how you tell your story and what you say.  Do you have one chance to make an impression or will there be many days/weeks/months for someone to learn it?  I did not find a press release or message of any sort about the iPad on the Apple website today.  I learned about it weeks ago in a “leak” about what might come (foreshadowing) which created some buzz and speculation.  Then I saw the building on the news this morning and an interview from a national news show where it was mentioned.  Finally, it appeared on the Yahoo! home page as reported by someone who was there to hear the announcement.  This is great storytelling, it gets you curious and pulls you along, and leaves you wanting more.

Get to the point: All of the drama and craft in the world will be for nothing if there’s not a relevant “point” to your story.  In sales it’s called the “WIFM” (what’s in it for me?) statement you provide to answer your listener’s question.  Do you have a question to ask, something to teach, a request?  Your story should engage and inspire someone to act, so you need to be clear about how/what/when you want the action to occur.  Even stories used for entertainment (think movies, books, and songs) have a point.

Unless the point is to not have one, but that’s another story.

1. ) You First! People who ask for feedback by disclosing a concern get better results.  Let your providers know that you know you are not perfect and give them an opening like, “I think I talked way too much in the meeting today, do you think I was effective?”  Disclosure reduces the social risk that others feel when asked to tell you something could be better about your performance.  Without disclosure people will take the safe route and give you very little useful advice.

flickr image by redcrashpad

2.) Ask for Help. It is human nature to help each other, and this natural desire seems present at a very early age.  Framing your request for feedback as a need for assistance makes it easier for others to jump in.  It also signals that you are on an authentic mission of growth, which inspires others to act on your behalf.

3.) Be Persistent. Most opening requests for feedback go unanswered or get a generic response like, “Oh, you were fine.” This could be because the person has not formed a useful opinion, or because they aren’t sure you really want to know what they think (the real truth).  So you have to ask again (and again) and help your providers develop their advice for you in the process.

4.) Be Ready! You know feedback is good for you, but so far as I can tell, nobody really likes hearing the specifics of how they could do better.  So you have to be ready when someone uncovers a blind spot or gives you a critical opinion.  Take deep breaths, respect their perspective, and include it in a larger pattern of input you are receiving from several other people, over time.  It’s just their opinion, don’t over react.

Growth is a process, it takes time, and learning how you could be better at anything isn’t usually the easy way out.  Take a cue from elite athletes who have direct, specific, and repetitive feedback on every move they make.  After awhile, it’s just part of your routine and you realize you’re not going to lose your job, friends, and family just because you got some room to grow.

flickr photo by jose777i

Some people look at us like we’re crazy, and say straight out that we were missing out on “quality time” with our kids in the evenings.  Some people express envy over the “couple time” we have in the evenings while the little ones are asleep.  Most say, “well, they must get up pretty early then, huh?”  Not really.  As we learned early, from Dr. Marc Weissbluth, “sleep begats sleep”.  Hard to imagine with an adult mind.

Did I say my wife is a genius?  It’s very counter-intuitive, and sometimes logistically an incredible challenge, but the discipline of getting our kids to bed at 5:00 PM is the only piece of parenting advice I’ll ever give.  That’s 5:00 until they are in Kindergarten, then up 30 minutes each year.   Our third-grader goes to bed at 6:30 most nights (a bit of a peer to peer issue!).

We are not militant in this approach; there are sleepovers and evening activities mixed into our routine.  But as a normal course of action, our kids go to bed an hour or two before most of their peers.

For me, this is the toughest job as a parent. Bedtime can be such a nightmare!  There’s always something else to do before bed, including such important things as homework and brushing of teeth.  But apparently every 10 minutes count.

Turns out, there’s a growing body of research indicating that serious public health issues and education performance issues are highly correlated with the loss of sleep over the past few decades.  That’s right, ADHD, obesity, and lower academic performance are highly correlated with a significant downward trend in sleep.

There are significant developmental processes that occur in a child’s brain and body that depend on long, uninterrupted sleep.  And this developmental stage lasts through adolescence.

Yet, only 5 percent of high school students get 8 hours of sleep, with the average being 6.5 hours per night, according to studies by Dr. Frederick Danner at the University of Kentucky.  This loss can be traced to higher automobile accident rates and a recent movement to start school later to give kids a chance to sleep longer.

According to leading sleep scholars like Dr. Avi Sadeh of Tel Aviv University loss of one hour of sleep is the equivalent to losing two years of cognitive maturation and development.  That means a slightly sleepy six-grader is performing in class like a fourth grader.

This is not an isolated finding, studies conducted by Brown University, Penn State, the University of Virginia, and the University of Minnesota all point to the same thing: loss of sleep has serious effects on children’s performance and health.

I know you want to see your kids at night, and I know they don’t seem that tired.  But when you are considering the best things you can do to help your kids succeed, or find yourself at school hearing about attention problems, or at the mall watching your fifth-grader behave like a 2 year old, perhaps you should reconsider your bedtimes.

Read more about this and other cool new insights about raising kids in Nurture Shock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.

There are many times when a play breaks all the way down the ice for a dramatic shot on goal.  This is such an exciting aspect of the game, the NHL decided to implement the “shoot out” as a tie breaker strategy.  But the real game takes place in scuffles where the puck is loose and nobody is sure where it’s going to go.  If you want to be in on this action, you have to get in the corners and mix it up.

Photo Yahoo! Sports

This lesson is about staying in touch with the basics, getting your fingernails dirty, and never being above the play.  You have to be in the real action, to get the real insights.  Real insights lead to innovation and competitive advantage.

In hockey, gaining control of the puck in a corner can lead to a sudden shift in play, often with dramatic results. In your own end, you play defense in the corners to gain control of the play and shift momentum to the wings for a breakout.  In the offensive end, you play for control of the puck so you can pass to a player in scoring position.  Control comes from great body position, full contact, and great stick handling.

It’s often smelly and sometimes painful.  But that’s the front line and you can’t win the game if you don’t win the corners.

Ways to get in the corners in real life:

• Take a shift on the front line of your business.  Pour coffee, move bags, make sales calls, answer phones.
• Engage in the tough issues during meetings.  Don’t hang back and let others define the outcome in a way you don’t think is right.
• Jump in to help during an unexpected problem.  Often times this is where a new idea emerges that can change the course of your business.
• Change diapers, give baths, play on the floor.  You connect with your kids in ways you’d never imagine!

A little guy in hockey learns to be faster than everybody else or get crushed.  Win the short races in hockey and you don’t have to worry about being bigger or stronger (or smarter for that matter).  This lesson is about quickness, and it builds on the first two lessons, keep your stick on the ice and keep your head up.  When you see an opportunity in hockey, you have to act immediately, and with great speed, or the opportunity is gone.  The game flows right around you, and you end up standing around watching it go back and forth (this would lead to being “benched” but we won’t address that here).

image from USA Hockey

My high school coach used to say, “Guys, it’s a game of short races, and you have to win most of them to win the game.”  You may have heard that every journey is made of thousands of little steps.  That’s essentially the same advice.  Nobody was ever successful in hockey without getting to the open space or getting to the puck before everybody else.  That’s what creates opportunities and provides control of the game.

You win small races by being in extraordinary shape.  Hockey practice is as much about physical conditioning as it is about developing skills and scrimmaging.  Great players spend hours each week sprinting up and down the ice to strengthen their legs, build their lungs and improve their skating technique.  Many of our best practices did not include a single puck.

Ways to win short races in real life:

• Make cold calls.  If you don’t ask, they can’t say yes!
• Get your daily chores done first thing in the morning to create space in your afternoon.
• Experiment with ideas, don’t just think about them.
• Reach out to friends, associates, and colleagues to offer praise or gratitude.
• Be the spark.  Do something that inspires others to join you in a collective effort that pays you back later.

Last thing: sometimes being first puts you in a risky position, so you also have to be quick to move on for the next opening.  It’s a series of short races, not just one!

But keeping your head up is about more than staying safe, it’s the key to great timing and pattern recognition.  When you pay close attention to what’s going on around you in hockey, you find opportunities to take control of the game and score points.  When you aren’t keeping an eye on the whole game, you are relegated to following the play and chasing after the other team.

When you keep your head up in regular life, you notice things that others don’t see, and make stronger connections with others.  Most people I know really appreciate a good listener or someone who understands and empathizes with them.  You have to be outside of yourself and look for signals from those around you to time your interactions well.

Some ways to keep your head up in daily life:

• Make eye contact with people you pass in the hall.
• Pay attention to metrics and indicators of your performance.
• Ask what others think in every conversation you have.
• Don’t text while driving!

Hockey is a fluid, fast paced sport with lots of changes in direction and unexpected breaks emerging from what seems like chaos.  So lesson number one to all young players is to keep your stick on the ice.  This helps make sure you are ready for the unexpected, and can capitalize on it with a will timed pass or shot on goal.

photo from USA Hockey

So simple to say, but it’s really quite hard to skate fast and keep your stick down.  You always want to lift up and rest your back, which gets very sore after an hour or so of practice drills.  I had a coach who used to make us “take a lap” if he found us with our sticks across our knees.

Eventually it sinks in if you keep practicing.  But it really clicks after you get a goal or an assist in a game because your stick was in the right place at the right time.  You get a lot of credit for being smart, but really your stick was “just there.”

So this lesson is about being prepared, and training yourself to be ready BEFORE the situation demands you to respond.  How do I “keep my stick on the ice” now?

• Have a well prepared elevator pitch for what I’m working on and why I’m doing it.  This helps me connect with others and get spontaneous “random acts of assistance”.
• Have regular touch base meetings with close colleagues even when we don’t have an urgent agenda item.  This helps us share ideas, intelligence, and feedback that improves our work.
• Mystery shopper or Freaky Friday experiences.  Empathizing with clients or customers by walking in their shoes brings unexpected ideas and opportunities for performance improvements.
• Twitter and Facebook.  Staying connected in social networks brings unexpected ideas, connections, and opportunities that I could never have found without these social exchanges.

It’s troubling to me that “fixing” yourself up according to an ideal set of competencies is a path towards success.   But the really big flaw in this approach is the focus on individual competence.

Bob Sutton echoes this thought in his recent post of Flawed, Suspect, and Incomplete Assumptions about Managing People .  I trust his instincts and value his persistence in defeating these types of assumptions.  I think they are a big problem for businesses today.

I’ve been watching people perform in a wide variety of settings for quite some time and I’ve come to believe that leadership development is a waste of time.  And I’ve wasted lots of time on it, trust me!  Instead, I’ve shifted to relationship development.  Helping people function better together has way more impact than teaching people insights about themselves that they can generalize to better behavior in the future.

Also, consider the idea that leadership is not a competency at all.  It’s really an outcome.  When I behave successfully with others to solve something, start something, finish something, we’ve accomplished leadership.

Most great leaders are actually collaborators in great actions that change the course of events and create big impact.  Consider Abraham Lincoln… (read Team of Rivals) how much time do you suppose he invested in leadership development versus improving his connections with others?   Next time you consider spending training dollars or valuable time on leadership training, spend that money, time, and energy on improving the performance of your relationships with others instead.

Some tips for better (team) interactions:

1. Spend more time together.

2. Improve your dialog, building on ideas instead of “winning” with the best one.

3. Compare the number of questions versus statements you make as a group.

4. Connect with advisers outside of your team.  Invite them in to your team to give their perspective.

5. Ask someone on your team to give you advice on your own participation.

Work successfully with others and leadership will happen!

Naive minds find new possibilities

I’m often inspired by my kids.  They are my innocence goggles. When I’m stuck on a problem, I can put them on to get truly unbiased views of things I take for granted as an adult.  You’ve probably heard the quote from Einstein, “My secret is I remained a child. I always asked the simplest questions. I ask them still.”

The other day I asked my son what air tasted like and he responded by sticking out his tongue to try it.  Certainly such innocence can have a down side, so it must be supported and protected.  But it is essential as a basis for discovery.  So much of what we do as adults leads us to edit or dismiss ideas before they have a chance to be properly “tasted”.

Here, I’m reminded of the great book, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.  In it he describes all kinds of cool research and experiments about how the human brain works.  One thing that stood out for me is that we have to gloss over many details of the world just to function.  That is, there’s so much going on around us, that our brain has filters that automatically fill in some of what’s real with existing assumptions in favor of more efficient sensory processing.

That works great when you are trying to be efficient, but when you are trying to discover something new, you must look with new eyes and uncover not only your assumptions about what is real, but overcome your perceptions of what’s real.

Try this little experiment that demonstrates how your brain fills in things your eyes can’t see:

Place your mouse pointer on the screen to the right of the JFX logo at the top of my blog (right in front of the word “playing”).  Now cover your left eye and look at the JFX logo with your right eye.  Gradually move your head closer to the screen until the pointer disappears.  Move a little forward and back… see the pointer appear and disappear?

The pointer disappears because there is a blind spot in your eye at the point where your optic nerve is attached.   You don’t walk around with empty spots in your field of vision because your brain uses information from around the spot on the retina to construct an appropriate image.  Your brain automatically “assumes” what is there and makes you see it. This happens in your memory too.  Read the book for more fun examples.

So the point is, our brains are constructed to help us fill in missing information because most of the time that’s a great strategy for us to function successfully in the world.  But when you need to solve a difficult problem, it’s better to keep a naive mind.  That way you don’t miss the answers that are sitting right in front of you because you are assuming they’ve already been found.

This is not difficult to do, it just takes practice.

Or just hang around a bunch of toddlers and taste some air!