Surviving Y2K was a picnic. Surviving the burst of the dot com bubble won’t threaten human existence. And somehow we’ll survive an energy crisis while we sort through the aftereffects from the sudden end of our long-running bull market. But will we survive each other — in our workplaces — trying to get along together in workteams to get our businesses into growth mode again? It’s not an option: we need collaboration and cooperation in order to get things done. We need to "team up." But how to do this quickly, effectively, and — most importantly — intuitively? In the answer lies a paradox: to build and exercise effective team behaviors for today’s rapid-fire business challenges we must draw upon lessons already known to us.

Working together towards common goals defines the human experience. From our earliest history, people gathered in groups and established relationships to provide for the common good, be it food, shelter, protection, or even a sense of community. Norms of behavior were worked out for cooperation amongst individuals to get work done. We had to collaborate in order to survive.

Not much has changed. We still gather together in the spirit of business survival to get work done. What’s changed is the environment in which we work and the tasks that we apply ourselves to. "Knowledge Work" now defines our activities and the "office" now establishes the landscape where we toil.

We are stressed to succeed in working together in groups as never before. We are asked to work together with people we hardly know, accomplish things that may have never been done before — leveraging our minds as our primary work tool — and do it all within an absurdly short timeline that may spell success or failure if our objectives are achieved or missed. Our much-heralded technology capabilities may in fact delude ourselves into thinking that "busy-ness" is the same as business. Advanced communications, global travel, the Internet, and phenomenal computer power enable us to "do more stuff, together, faster" without truly accomplishing anything. Little wonder that even as more and more teams are deployed in the workplace, their results continually fail to meet expectations.

Getting to a team result means forging effective relationships, organizing responsibilities, tapping or leveraging all available resources, and following through. Easily enough said.

So why does a search at Amazon yield over 650 titles of books about "teams in the workplace"? Must have been easier a few tens of thousands of years ago, because only two titles show up when searching for a guide to "hunting mammoths"!

It is hard to fast-form a workgroup into an effective team. And some great work has gone into those 650 plus texts about how to accomplish this. But the requirement to "fast-form" and "fast-norm" into a workgroup seldom permits us to think for long about the dynamics of working together, let alone read a book, attend a class, or participate in a moderated session on how to work better together.

So, how does a handful of individuals with varied skills, backgrounds, prior experience working together, and characteristics of interpersonal style and communication get together and gain traction as a workgroup within minutes of sitting down at a table?

Let’s Play Along

One answer: a culture or disciplined process for workgroup effectiveness. Create a universal — or at least, universal to the enterprise — discipline for how people interact and conduct themselves and their meetings? A "script" or playbook from which to guide member behavior.

Hmmmm… Intriguing. Might just work — with a workforce that seldom loses people or has to recruit new members, and has limited need to include outside vendors or partners, and has the luxury to address problems that can be governed by the playbook.

Let’s see:

And we’re off and running. The word "team" is first used to describe the collection of individuals in the room. The task and timeline are more or less defined. Roles and responsibilities are perhaps less clear.

Will a strong corporate script or "playbook" of meeting norms facilitate a successful outcome? Maybe, but what about team participants that haven’t read the playbook? Like the new guy, or the outside partner? And do all the team participants understand the rules equally? Or are committed to adhering to them?

This group has a big task in front of it. Lots of people will ultimately be affected; a lot of money and time will be spent. This group has to come together and function collaboratively in a short time, and has no time to develop exceptional skills in team leadership or participate in workshops aimed at forging harmonious relationships. Discipline alone will not be sufficient; nor will a strong leader with a prepared list of action assignments to team members. Buyin from all members is needed and creative solutions to problems not yet envisioned will be demanded of the group.

What to do?

Let’s begin with where the answer isn’t. Teamwork in today’s hurly-burly give-me-your-attention-for-a-minute economy will not benefit from another prescription of "10 steps to team empowerment." We’ve no time to hope that cramming in new skills training will somehow leave us with effective communications behavior for teamwork. Rather, we need a more intuitive, natural foundation to direct our team behaviors that is more deep-rooted — that we bring into the workplace, not imprinted upon us when suddenly in the workplace. We can realize greater effectiveness in teams, sooner, with increased satisfaction by drawing upon learnings from our life experiences. We have only to apply them in the team context with an adult perspective.

Lead To Results, LLC seeks to explore how teams can better achieve their work objectives by leveraging basic lessons from our life experiences into workplace interaction. In the second installment of this essay, we’ll explore a model to address this.