Creating World-Class Teams

Instead of managing employees’ activities or behavior, manage their commitments.

Chris Majer | March 2011 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Chris Majer Markets, technology, the workforce and the very nature of work itself have all evolved dramatically in the past few decades, yet most companies continue to manage with practices and processes that were developed nearly 100 years ago. Most of the basics of what we call modern management—workflow design, project management, budgeting, financial analysis, performance appraisals and branding—were designed in the early stages of the industrial era to be effective with factory workers.

For 21st-century companies, the new world of business revolves around coordination workers, not factory workers. In this setting, teamwork is everything and those who wish to build their careers and their enterprises will develop a new style of management. There is no time in today’s net-speed world to send problems up the hierarchy and wait for a solution to work its way down. Leading businesses rely on their ability to be flexible and agile.

Today, most companies use teams for everything from new product development to sales initiatives. A team can be as small as two or as large as hundreds. There are three types of teams: operating teams, high-performing teams and world-class teams.

In my work, I strive to create world-class teams: nimble and collaborative, with a flexible organizational structure. What separates the three types of teams is the horizon of time during which they tolerate nonperformance and nonconformance. As you move out on the scale from operating to world class, the horizon gets increasingly shorter.

Coordination workers generate value by their effective collaboration with others on their team to produce customer satisfaction. In my experience, too many teams waste precious time and energy by focusing on having meetings to build consensus and not on designing and managing the network of commitments that it takes to get things done. It is easy to say you are going to increase sales by 25 percent in the next six months, but an entirely different matter to design the set of commitments (who will do what by when) that enable that larger commitment to be met.

Low-performing teams often lack trust, accountability, a mood for success and a shared vision. High-performing teams have learned how to nurture these qualities, how to manage commitments instead of activities and how to successfully navigate the inevitable breakdowns that occur in every team.

All this focus on commitments is the heart of what I call “commitment-based management.” In this case, what holds a team together and drives performance is a shared set of commitments.

Once a team shares a distinct set of commitments, everything changes. This approach is in contrast to the current norm that can be called “activity-based management,” centered around managing—often unsuccessfully—people’s behavior and activities.

The core commitments are:

• Commit to own (not just understand, agree with or like) the shared values, vision, mission, strategy of the team.

• Commit to fulfill a role in the team’s division of accountability.

• Commit to produce and evoke trust—the foundation of any team.

• Commit to generate a mood for success. Cynicism, resentment, arrogance and complacency are not moods for success.

• Commit to the future of the people, team and company. Don’t burn out people to attain some short-term objective; have an eye on the bigger game.

The key to developing this competence is structured practice. Much as a sports team progresses over time, a team of coordination workers can learn and master the skills of managing commitments by developing a new set of practices for listening and speaking. A world-class team leader learns to listen for the presence or absence of commitments by the team.

Thinking strategically about the project, consistently generating innovation and honoring your commitments does not happen by handing down orders. These outcomes require a new culture in which people live the values of accountability, trust and a deep commitment to a new way of working. An organization’s ability to develop this type of culture will be the true competitive advantage in the 21st-century knowledge economy.

Chris Majer is the CEO of the Human Potential Project (HP2), a business training and consulting firm in Spokane. He is the author of The Power to Transform: 90 Days to a New You.