And now, the question this book will equip you to answer in the affirmative: Is your team equipped to deliver big things?
A word of caution: Many who have gone before you into uncharted territory have mistakenly thought that the key to their team's success (survival!) was a matter of equipping themselves with a new structure, software, process, (quick, make another Gantt chart), or rearranging where people sit or dine. Most of those teams have not been heard from again. Their work was at best marginal, and therefore, forgotten.
That's because it is not merely how your team is structured or the equipment and resources in your hands that you'll need for success today. It's something more – much more.
Well-intentioned organizations everywhere are sending their teams into the great unknown future riding inflatable floaties – the same type you give to children in the backyard pool. Companies spend an inordinate amount of time determining what they must accomplish, then slap acronyms on those goals, like S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely) and WIGs (wildly important goals).6 Knowing your team must conquer its Grand Canyon, without being equipped with how to do so, however, is reckless (if not madness). Teams are increasingly desperate for knowing how as humans they'll achieve the what. We're functioning in what the U.S. military coined a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous)7 world. The disconnect is obvious: Employers are pulling employees together, calling them a team, giving them a directive, and expecting them to deliver results quickly.
But such teams can't. This isn't an inflatable backyard pool your team must get across. Your objective today is its own Grand Canyon. The way teams came together before won't work in today's intense, fast-changing world. When organizations fail to grasp the wisdom that the method for teaming successfully has changed, their approach can look like the antiquated change model depicted below:
• Step 1: Announce the new initiative the company needs to meet lightning-quick changes in the market.
• Step 2: Form teams and assign people to roles.
• Step 3: Tell people what to do and give them half the resources needed to do it.
• Step 4: Remind everyone of the company values (optional).
• Step 5: Apply external motivations in the form of rewards or penalties.
• Step 6: Try to overcome the resistance or confusion created in Steps 1 through 5.
• Step 7: Identify who is to blame for missed deliverables, milestones, and budgets.
• Step 8: Disband the teams or change personnel and repeat Steps 1 through 7.
This common approach never gives teams a chance to do something significant. In moments of fatigue, as people are shuffled from project to project while enduring new demands, it's easy to think the bosses have gone mad, while the bosses get mad. They can see what needs to get done, yet can't find a way to get the team to operationalize the new vision.
Is it any wonder why so many people avoid eye contact and hurry back to the isolation of their workspace feeling despondent?
Who are we kidding? Nearly all of us lose a bit of ourselves each time we're forced through the eight dysfunctional steps of the antiquated change model. It's an unsustainable formula: We diminish ourselves while the magnitude of our work increases in volume, complexity, and speed. We used to finish the work we started; we used to celebrate jobs well done; we used to have meaningful relationships with those with whom we worked. But now? What used to make us feel alive is too often absent for too many. We are sapped of a certain sort of energy necessary to do big things.
inbIt's clear that there's a new requirement to succeed as a team today. The solution is refined and raw, sophisticated and practical, genius and basic, elegant and simple: It's heart. The ability for teammates to be at their human best and become bigger than anything they face. This is what many teams are starved for.
Is your team's whole heart in it? It's not enough for one or two individuals to have heart on a team of 10 people, as an example. In fact, that's tormenting as emotions usually erupt or apathy sets in. Teams rise above this and significantly increase their odds of achieving big things when their whole heart is in it. Defined, this is the point at which the members of the team fully commit to bringing their full self to the team and its efforts to ensure successful outcomes – unconditionally. Now, with the personal integrity of each team member in action, the purpose of the team transcends personal position, ambition, and recognition.
Whether your team has been together for years, you're a newly formed team, or every team member only knows each other virtually, can you quickly develop this whole heart, where the best of each person on the team is amplified? Teams we've observed functioning at this level describe it this way:
• Whole heart occurs the moment we act on the wisdom that we are stronger together.
• It's the valor and collective grit that shows up even when times are tough.
• It's the juice we experience when we're up against severe odds, yet somehow summon the strength to win.
This whole heart is what collapses the idealistic into the realistic. Teams that possess it passionately own their plan to deliver on the big thing in front of them. They get off the fence and refuse to allow the circumstances to determine their thinking and actions. They say no to whatever tempts them away from their goal. These are the teams where people speak straight, and remain optimistic when the data say they shouldn't – because they know what they are capable of and what's possible.
This ability for any group of people to quickly unite and operate with a shared, energized focus that brings out the best in all of us is the defining need of our time. If we all tell ourselves the truth, this need transcends business. In too many arenas and communities, people are experiencing self-inflicted wounds through persistent attacks on each other. The tolerance for divisive actions in humanity is reaching a breaking point.
As all of us drop deeper toward our own Grand Canyon, we recognize and agonize over the wisdom inside of us: We are better than this. Our leadership, talent, culture – in other words, who we are as people – all merge at a space called team. It is here that we discover our darkness and our brilliance. It is only here that we get serious work done.
WTF (Want the Facts)
In case you have a teammate who's been out of town for a while and missed what's going on, and they want the facts to better understand the reality of the situation faced by all, share this data with them:
• 84 percent of employees are “matrixed” to some extent, meaning they serve on multiple teams.8
• 21 percent of executives are confident in their ability to develop cross-functional teams.9
• 92 percent of companies are going through reorganization.10
• 70 percent of transformation efforts fail.11
• When team members were asked to describe their team, fewer than 10 percent agreed about who was on it.12
Take this quiz. Consider these now-classic tales of glory and identify what they all have in common. What exactly enabled these teams to succeed?
• The Apollo 13 space mission team, including those at mission control in Houston, Texas. After an explosion on board, the astronauts had to scrap their plans for exploring the surface of the moon and divert all their resources to getting a hunk of malfunctioning metal – and the lives it carried – safely home. In what some consider a miracle, they prevailed.13
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