Sins against synergy

Teams are in high demand. In the world of sporting and business alike, this is the case. What is so special in a team? What derails a team's success? Today's column sheds light on dealing with the magical factor in a team's synergy.

Overview

Teams and groups are often interchangeably used to describe a set of people working together. In perusing through the literature of Organisational Behaviour, veterans such as Stephen Robbins and Fred Luthans have identified a group as a set of two or more people interacting with and interdependent on each other in achieving a common objective. A team is one step ahead.

I would simplify a team as a group with synergy. The term synergy can be regarded as an abbreviation of synchronised energy. It is all about working together.

A team can easily decay when synergy is absent. How can it happen? What could be such possible contributors? I call them 'sins'. They are the acts of violating the proper way of doing things. Let's discuss seven such sins against synergy. They are associated with seven Cs, confusion, confrontation, contamination, convolution, compartmentalisation, collusion and corruption.

Sin of Confusion

This is all about not knowing the means to the end. Clarity of goals is one key aspect, to avoid confusion. There should not be any 'social loafers' as Stephen Robins call the category of people who are mere 'passengers'. Every team member should do his best to make their team the best.

Sri Lanka's cricket team which won the World Cup in 1996 is one such example. They had a clear goal. They went ahead without any confusion. In the game of business, employees should be clear about why they do what they have to do, and how best they should do it. A creative writer in an advertising team who has a sense of pride in his or her work with freedom to take decisions is an example.

Sin of Confrontation

Conflicts are common feature when people work together. Yet, how they successfully overcome such conflicts indicates the path to progress. When confrontation becomes the norm, the process of working together will not run smoothly to achieve results.

I have seen how egos of different team players clash in search of supremacy and dominance. Some find it difficult to give up for others to take over. The end result is inevitably a losing team. This may be true for corporate managers and public administrators alike.

Sin of Contamination

Teams have to have what I call a T-T match. This is about tasks and talents. The right person handling the right task in the right possible manner. We can anticipate the results if Mahela becomes the opening bowler and Malinga becomes the opening batsman in our cricket team.

That's where contamination can occur. Whether the team members are having a set of specified tasks with autonomy to carry them out is important. For that to happen, tasks have to be well designed with the goals in mind. The team members should identify themselves with the tasks and see the significance of such tasks. In a cricket team, a wicket-keeper should know exactly what his role is to win a game.

Sin of Convolution

This occurs when a healthy mix of diverse role players are not included in the team. As we know, the five fingers of a hand are different, yet they are all part of the same hand.

Diversity is a key factor of team effectiveness. Meredith Belbin did a fair amount of research on team roles and came up with nine different team roles. Ensuring that people with appropriate personalities fit to the tasks is essential in this respect. Flexibility of team members in moving beyond the specialised tasks for the betterment of team is another important aspect. A specialised bowler of a cricket team should be a good fielder and also a satisfactory batsman. This is flexibility. In a business setting, the ability to attend to a colleague's duty in case of need, is handy and a true sense of multi-skilling.

Sin of Compartmentalisation

There has to be a climate of trust for team work to foster. As the olden saying goes, 'Birds of a feather flock together'. Scientists say migrant birds fly as a 'V' shape formation to exert lesser energy, by way of thriving on higher aero-dynamic power. It is simply, trusting one another. When it is missing, people get into their narrow compartments.

Leadership plays a vital role to prevent compartmentalisation. The team leader should rally the team around a common vision, and a common set of goals. Vision has to be shared with the team and supported by the team. In cricket, we have seen the rise and fall of teams under different leaders. The same is true for business.

Sin of Collusion

This is a subtle aspect where team members overtly show support and respect for each other but not in a real sense.

They might have a 'back-stabbing culture' as someone described their corporate setting. You artificially smile while keeping the dagger behind waiting for an opportunity to stab. The key team aspect associated here is team efficacy. It is the belief of the team of its ability to achieve the desired results. In the sporting world, the losing teams lack team efficacy.

The team that has a high degree of self-efficacy can turn a game from the grip of losing it. We saw that happening in many one-day cricket series involving Sri Lanka. There are many instances where sales teams of local organisations with high team efficacy have beaten their multinational counterparts.

Sin of Corruption - This can be the most acute enemy in damaging synergy. The key factor is the use and abuse of resources. Much has been stated about it in the political scene in the East and the West alike. Values are more in the breach than in practice, which is becoming the norm. Volumes have been written on this yet the practices continue to thrive.

True enough, a team cannot have all the resources in the world, or for that matter, all what is nice to have. The optimisation of resources is what should be aimed at. You cannot build great wall without solid bricks and mortar. Waste cutting instead of mere cost cutting is what is pragmatic.

Success sans Sins- As we saw, the seven Sins can result in dire consequences. What we need instead is to sustain synergy in having team effectiveness. It will be a worthwhile exercise to assess your team with regard to its effectiveness. You may identify the bottlenecks in one or more of these elements. Making key decisions and taking appropriate actions is the only way forward in strengthening team effectiveness. The writer is the chairman of PIM