Why Team Work Sucks and How to Avoid the Brazil Effect

Last week I had a long overdue natter over coffee with a colleague who is the HR lead in an organisation being hauled back from the brink of extinction.  It’s crazy rescue work to help the business change course to avoid becoming another footnote in the history of organizational evolution.I imagine it’s like trying to turn a super tanker.The tales of a crumbling Personnel function, bizarre people management practices and dysfunctional teams warranted something stronger than coffee.Alas it was only 10am and work beckoned after our coffee catch-up.Our conversation got me thinking…

Team Work Sucks

Team Work as is commonly experienced sucks.Go on, admit it. The emphasis is often more on the ‘work’ than the ‘team’.This much relied on organisation mainstay to achieve machine-like productivity and consistency from individuals bonded together, has become shorthand for talented employees being assimilated into the collective – like The Borg on Star Trek.Glory-hogging runs unchecked in cultures where managers are allowed to take a disproportionate amount of credit for successes by appropriating team member’s ideas without giving due recognition.Let’s not forget ‘we are all in this together’ until the proverbial hits the fan and somebody is selected to be the fall guy/gal.Team Work is a trusty, comfortable, default assessment criteria found in most employee recruitment and selection processes, learning and development programmes, and performance management practises.  How can you go wrong with team work, right?HR this one is for you.Is this default criteria still relevant for today’s businesses where the organisational environment is changing the fastest in centuries?Now this may ruffle some feathers but Team Work as described here just doesn’t cut it anymore in today’s business environment.  Need more convincing?

The Brazil Effect

Consider Brazil’s football team heading into the 2014 World Cup competition.  The clear favourites to win and to win BIG.  With a brilliant heritage of winning at the highest levels and a team jam-packed with extravagantly gifted individuals with superlative footballing skills; winning wasn’t hype it was a foregone conclusion.The visible wobble started when Brazil’s star goal-scorer Neymar, had to pull out of the critical semi-final game with an injured back. Then came Germany’s blistering performance which handed Brazil a humiliating 7-1 defeat in the semi-final. A defeat all the more cruel as it took place in Brazil.How did it all go so wrong?  There are valuable lessons to be learnt.Now I am no football pundit so here are some steal-worthy nuggets from Jeremy Wilson’s article in The Telegraph.“They have looked backwards for solutions too often and tried to use sticking plasters and search for quick fixes.”“They had their heads in the clouds but their feet weren’t on the floor.”“There was a bloody-minded refusal to alter things. The team were operating on blind faith. Too many slaps on the back and no reality checks.”They brought an over confident, even arrogant belief in the power of past glory to the game. The German team brought a more democratic, adaptive and disruptive style of play.A culture where there is an over-reliance on one star performer to achieve team successes puts the team efforts at risk. The absence of a top performer at a critical juncture starts a chain reaction which results in the inability to operate effectively.  In the case of Brazil’s football team, this ended in heart-wrenching team collapse.

Game over Team Work.

The Game Has Changed

Does your business need the specialist skills, creativity, intelligence and personality of your employees to build relationships with your customers, go off-script to solve customers’ problems and/or sell your products and services?If the answer is yes to any part of this question, then this is your reality. For businesses to function and ultimately survive for the next few decades plus, we can no longer rely on commanding and coercing employees to work in rigidly defined system structures. It is time to leave the Industrial Age organisational structures and competency frameworks behind.

New Opportunity for HR

Don't put your faith in the phrase, 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'.  Just because something is not broken, doesn't mean that it is fit for purpose now.

Carry out an audit of the values, behaviours and skills currently embedded in your organisation’s employee recruitment and selection processes, learning and development programmes, and performance management practises.

Are they still relevant to the business or are they a useless relic from the Personnel era?Now this exercise comes with a stress warning.  Once you start honestly reviewing existing material, separating the good from crap, determining what is relevant and what is obsolete, dumping the old wrecks and designing new frameworks; it will increase your workload.This is not really work. Bear with me. It will feel like it at first and painful too – like starting to exercise again after years of neglect. But persevere, there are rewards to be gained.For HR this reality gifts us a huge opportunity to ensure our activities are relevant and contribute to the success of the business.Align competency frameworks with the organisations purpose and culture. When employees with the right behaviours, skills and mind-set are correctly hired, developed and incentivised, they directly contribute to the survival of the organisation, the successful development of new products and services, increased sales and profitability, enhanced brand reputation in the eyes of your customers – take your pick!Oh, and with what should we replace industrial era Team Work?Collaboration is the current popular choice.  We will dive into how it differs from Team Work in the next blog post.So until we meet again next week down The HR Rabbit Hole…