TEAM FOCUS

A PROCESS FOR UNDERSTANDING FIT AND SETTING DIRECTION

The first step in developing high performance work teams is work team formation. Even though the development of all seven core processes is necessary for the team to be fully formed and functioning, the two primary processes which differentiate this stage are Environmental and Purposing processes.

Leaders of high performance teams assist the team to focus itself through the meaningful development of these two direction-setting processes.

THEORY INPUT

All living things or systems are dependent on something else for their survival and growth. Think for a moment about an acorn falling from the oak tree. For it to survive, it must depend on lots of external help. For example, soil, temperature, sunlight, moisture, etc. If any of these elements is missing or deficient, then the acorn will never survive and grow. It cannot survive long depending only upon its own internal capabilities or resources.

Organizations, teams, and individuals are like th at acorn. We all are interdependent with the larger environment for survival and growth. None of us can survive depending only on our own internal capabilities and satisfying just our needs. That's what understanding the environmental system is all about; finding out how we fit in.

Organizations and teams that have processes helping them stay in touch with their external environment will survive and thrive over the long haul. These processes allow for adaptability and flexibility within your system. Through an understanding of how your organization and team fit into the larger environment, competitive advantage can be gained. By looking at our organization and team as a whole system, we appreciate how internal partners build upon one another's work in an open exchange; how each can take in outside requirements and life-sustaining support and give back products and services that perpetuate the economic value chain for mutual survival and growth.

Back to the acorn. Hidden deep in its genetic coding is its purpose. If it can find the right environment and stay in harmony with that environment, then it can fulfill its purpose... to become a giant oak tree.

Individuals, teams, and organizations are not genetically coded with a purpose... each must discover its own. That's what this core process is all about, purpose, or finding our target.

Purpose includes the business mission of the team, its philosophy of human values, and its willingness to satisfy customer/stakeholder requirements. These requirements come directly from our external environment.

Business teams are first and foremost value adding or transforming entities. A team has to identify the direction in which it is heading as it changes from where it is today to where it will be tomorrow. A business team also acts in an economic environment that produces and needs profit to fund its long term growth.

Developing meaningful environmental and purposing processes by a business team will provide its members with a sense of identity, direction, and common focus. Purpose is the glue of team interdependency, the common target at which all can aim.

TEAM OUTPUTS

ENVIRONMENTAL PROCESS

As a team, it is critical to identify, discuss, understand, and build a strategy for dealing with the external environment. In order to accomplish the requirements of the environmental core process, each of the following tasks must be completed:

•	Understanding and agreement of how our team/sub-system fits into the larger organizational system. Who do we serve in both the external environment and internal environments?

•	What are the major trends that will impact our team's ability to serve the external and internal environment?

•	Understanding clearly who are our team's stakeholders and what are their specific demands and expectations.

•	Boundary identification and agreement. Both for "input" (when and from whom we take responsibility for resources) and "output" (when and to whom we deliver our outputs and what are the outputs).

•	A method for dealing with conflicting stakeholder demands.

•	Measures and measurement system to provide on-going feedback on team performance in relationship to stakeholder demands and expectations.

•	A process for influencing and providing feedback to the environment from our team to continually stay in touch with the world outside our team.

KEY LEARNINGS

When properly completed, team focus should provide team members with the following key learnings :

•	Environments change, so teams must discover ways to stay in touch with the environment.

•	We don't get to choose our stakeholders; we just have to fulfill their requirements.

•	Stakeholder demands can be conflicting.

•	Teams not in harmony with the environment will fail to know, adapt to, and fulfill stakeholder requirements.

•	Purpose builds common vision and understanding.

•	Without purpose there is little meaning to what we do.

•	Purpose guides and directs the team.

•	Building the purpose is what develops ownership and commitment to it.

•	Purpose is a living document, not a static event.

•	Purpose provides the team a "touch stone" for making both short and long term decisions.

ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS

The Team in Harmony with its

Environment Will Thrive

No team is an island, complete unto itself. Like any other living thing, the team exists only in the context of its larger environment. All of the team's needs are drawn from this environment; all of its products are returned to the environment. To recognize this is to see the transparency of all rigid distinctions between "us" and "them."

The boundary that separates inside from outside is permeable and open. It is a door, more than a wall; a bond, more than a barrier; a concept, more than a firm reality. Across the invisible boundary that divides them, transactions between the team and its environment are governed by a set of natural laws.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand these laws. Think of biospheres, ecology, bees, and flowers. Think of organisms, rather than mechanisms. The team and its environment are living entities, united in time and space. They are inseparable, interdependent, and mutually- creating. Like two sides of the same coin, each is required for the other's existence.

The team exists by the "consent" of its environment. The environment, in turn, is defined and changed by the action of the teams in it.

Purpose is the central value that unites inside with outside. The right purpose, rightly understood, radiates vitality in both directions. The team's central purpose, and the way that purpose is pursued, must be wanted and supported by its environment.

In the pursuit of its purpose, or "core mission," the team may identify any number of particular objectives. Many, if not all, of these will be imposed by the environment. And all of these objectives must be defined, integrated, and acted upon in ways that are both internally congruent and externally compatible with the environment's own many demands and needs. In short, the team that lives in harmony with its environment will thrive; the team that is unresponsive will wither and die. All of this is so obvious it hardly bears repeating. It's a given. A set of basic assumptions to be taken for granted. In times of relative stability, there is no pressing need to elaborate on the required "fitness" between the team and its environment. Not much is happening out there. So the team's adaptive response capability goes untested.

In times of chaos and turbulence, however, the team's very survival depends on its ability to respond quickly and well to the new environmental demands. These are such times. Consider the massive changes reshaping the face of the whole world today, and the increasing speed, complexity, and unpredictability of all these " megatrends ." Consider the impact of this tidal wave on the particular environments most relevant to your own team and on the technological, economic, social, geographic, and other fields in which you operate. Consider, too, how vastly different are the expectations and demands of your many stakeholders now, compared with those of times past.

Customers, suppliers, lenders, owners, workers, and every other direct participant in the enterprise has shaped and been shaped by those same still-rising rivers of change. Teams that choose to ignore these developments do so at their own risk. The pressures mount. The questions persist. Where are these new trends taking us? What kind of teams must be designed to master these turbulent times? These are the questions that must be asked and answered by every kind of team today—questions of adaptation and survival, transformation or decay. These are big questions, even ultimate questions. But they can be answered. Teams are human inventions, structured and managed for the conditions of the times. They can be re-invented for new times, even for times that demand continuous adaptation.

It's no easy task. All of the team's seemingly inseparable pieces must be taken apart, examined, and put back together again—re-fitted to a new pattern. The process begins with a careful look at the team-environment "set of the past, its features in the present, and the choices available for the future."

CREATING A

PURPOSEFUL SYSTEM

The Team as an Agent of Transformation

What you see is what you get. That's more than just a funny punch line. For team designers, it's the statement of a simple fact.

The way people think about their team is directly related to the kind of team and the kind of results they'll produce. What you see determines what you get. It works like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it works both ways.

Viewing a team from a systems viewpoint offers a dynamic alternative. It presents us with a map of the territory beyond the limits of machine age thinking, where people were seen mainly as cogs in the organizational wheel. In this view, the team is more than a collection of individuals, a specialized mini-society or an economic entity. It is, at heart, an "agent of transformation."

The system is understood as a living organism that draws the inputs it needs from the environment, transforming them into outputs that are needed by the environment. This view helps focus attention on the main work of the team, its function, rather than its particular form. And it puts function first. It recognizes that form, or team structure, should be fitted to the nature of the work and the environmental factors surrounding the work, rather than the other way around. This is quite different from the usual practice of buying a team structure off the rack, as it were, as if one size fits all.

The new model demands an ecological perspective. It puts the team in context with its environment, and with the transformation process required for its own survival. This transformation process occurs between the input and output "boundaries" that separate the system from its larger environment.

These boundaries are defined as the point at which ownership actually changes hands. This clarifies what exactly is within the system and what is beyond the system's sphere of direct influence and control. The delineation of clear boundaries, then, is the starting place for designing a system that fits and functions well, inside and out. Between the input/output boundaries, a technical system and social system must be designed to manage exchanges with the environment and to bring about the wanted transformation of inputs into outputs.

An effective design is fully three-dimensional. A well-structured team will find the proper balance between:

•	The technical system's requirements for order and predictability.

•	The needs of the workforce for meaning, variety, community, and self-expression.

•	The environment's continuing demands for change of many kinds.

The ideal design will transcend the apparently opposing needs of these sub-systems, bringing them together as a unified whole. This is not so unthinkable as it may at first seem.

Charles Atlas might describe it as an exercise in "dynamic tension," rather than a contest to be won or lost. Pushing the system's "muscles" against each other can build up the entire body. But they're not "against" each other. They're pushing together.

This is why the central factor in team design is the system's primary purpose, or core mission. Common purpose unifies. It unites the people inside the system with each other, as colleagues in pursuit of the same larger vision. It can unite the inside system with the larger outside system too.

When the system's purpose is in harmony with the expectations of its stakeholders and with the demands of its larger environment, energy and resources are less likely to be lost in fruitless defensive maneuvers. The system's purpose must be as clearly understood and supported by the "outside" stakeholders as it is by those on the inside.

The system then is united around a central value, a core mission that is shared by all of the participants in the enterprise. But united action is required as well. It's not enough to simply have in mind a common vision.

The system must also be designed to produce results. To create outputs that are clearly in line with the system's mission. And to do so in a way that is responsive to continuing changes in technology, economics, social pressures, and other environmental factors. It must, in other words, be fully integrated and adaptive. It's a tall order, but it can be done.

The process begins when the current system is put under the microscope for study. The team's technical, social, and environmental systems must be analyzed separately and then refitted to a new design. Early in the process, however, the system as a whole must be defined. This systems overview, or "scan," will serve as a primary point of reference for the team design work to come.