Arena
The concept of team work, and project teams, is an interesting one, particularly as there can be more combinations of teams than there are people. As this will be a series of posts on the topic I shall start this one with laying the foundation for some of the reasoning later.
I ended my old article, Excellence – Teamwork or flying Solo, with the following statement:
Point being, if you have a well-oiled team, who knows each other and each others skills, and who trust each other, the chance of innovation, of improvising and experimenting on the fly when things you predicted didn’t really materialise, this can take you to (greater) places no plan could have foreseen.
Worst case scenario will be that you did everything in your power with the best talent you could find, which should be a whole lot better than quite a few alternatives.
Now, let us have a look at Project Team composition, how and why it can be so completely “right” one time, but also how and why it can go so completely wrong at other times. When a project team goes not-so-well as well it normally leaves chaos, disaster and/or general unhappiness behind. Please note that I am talking about Project teams here, not departments. I shall touch on the difference later, but for now, let’s have a look at what makes people in great teams to become great, and lets start looking at it from the perspective of a music band, just because I can.
Band Zen
Most music bands that you know of are the result of constant individual searching from each of the bands members. It is very rare indeed that a super group “just forms” at the first attempt, and most bands, even the great ones (Beatles, Rolling Stones, U2 etc), go through several different line ups before it all “clicks”. When it “clicks” it is usually based on three things: the members are skill-wise complementary (it is rare you find bands with 5 bass players only). They are also at approximately the same skill level within each of their instruments. That skill level can actually be low, the important thing is it is approxiamately at the same level as the others. Further to that, they want to go in the same musical direction. Finally, they often find themselves as baffled by their band members skills and ingenuity as the other band members are of your skills. Mutual admiration and respect for the others in the band. Magic happens, and they all do more amazing things than they could have dreamt of being capable of. World conquering thoughts. Happiness. Let’s call that state Band Zen.
“Squeeling Pigs” and “Septic Tank”
However, before they got to Band Zen they made parents ears bleed by honing their skills in their garages/bedrooms, finding like minded people, making feeble attempts at forming bands (with crap names), realising the kid on bass actually is more interested in football and that the so-called drummer has two left feet and couldn’t keep a beat if his life depended on it. Words doesn’t even begin to describe the singer, but that is ok, no one thinks he understands words in any case. They move on, either individually, or as pairs/clusters finding/firing band members and they get a decent one, skill-wise, who unfortunately is acting as a complete dictator prick who just can’t listen, mainly to draw attention away from the fact he is dead scared of performing in front of people. Again, they move on, perhaps as a larger group, or perhaps still as individuals.
Forming a (good) band is really hard work. It is definitely time consuming. Most musicians never find Band Zen, even if their skills border on virtuosos, and I haven’t even started involving “luck of the draw” when it comes to record companies, A&R people etc who weed out those who might have achieved Band Zen but have yet to work on finessing their song-writing skills, from the competition, which is fierce, etc.
Widening the scope
Scope?
If you swap out bands for Project Teams and music skills with work skills, most/all of the above need to happen in any team, at least to a degree. As always there are exceptions to that, much like in music, where two people who really don’t like each other actually can create outstanding work together, but that only highlights that they in fact must have respect for each other based on the others work skills and that in itself might be more important than being able to chit-chat about colours on mugs or what your kids did last weekend, if there is work success, which leads to happy feelings.
There are also examples of teams (and bands for that matter) that, on paper, were looking rather mediocre as a team, but that all of sudden just had “that idea“, and were able to execute it brilliantly and award-winning-ly, possibly because no one told them they couldn’t, and they just went with the flow of things, because they liked what they were doing, and they liked the people they were doing it with.
That is it for now, it should have set up the topic alright though so I can expand on some reasoning from this post in a few follow-up posts. If you have any comments so far, go for it, comment field is where it normally is.
