Team Spirit - 60% proof and much abused

Harmony is important

          People care a lot about team harmony. It might be known as team spirit, morale, or something entirely different, but the concept is the same. A (relatively) new book, ‘Blamestorming’, is about harmony. Harmony is the outcome near the end of the chain of causality, and blamestorming is one way to destroy it.

            The purpose of having team spirit is trust, loyalty, collaboration and communication. For example, the Hubble telescope mirror was flawed because the contractors gave up reporting issues to NASA in order to avoid being told off. NASA was too hostile, and suffered because of it. Team spirit is touted as a miraculous wonder-cure that will boost productivity and make workers work long hours and do a good job. This is dangerous.

            There are many factors that contribute to team spirit, such as blamestorming, and too many people blame low morale on others without understanding the factors involved. No-one factor can be blamed or praised as the basis of team cohesion; there are many necessary factors, any one of which might ruin morale. I have one more under-considered item to add to the list: the focus on team spirit as an outcome or achievement.

Team spirit

Reporting

            A focus on team harmony destroys the reporting of problems or concerns as surely as straightforward hostility. It creates a culture of me-too yes-men with unquestioning enthusiasm. Enthusiasm might be uplifting, but it is the enemy of the rational. I can sympathise with managers who have a high opinion of juniors who always agree with them; the manager thinks he has a good point to make, and therefore thinks that a junior is wise who confirms that it is a good point. Sadly, reinforcement in decision-making is counter-productive. Perhaps this explains the finding that a focus on performance assessment by merit can increase discrimination; managers mistake agreement and co-operation for merit.

discrimination

            A need for team harmony discriminates ignores the existence of other characters, cultures, interests or attitudes. If everyone is expected to conform to certain behaviours, such as exhibiting a ‘can-do’ attitude, people who are not inclined or accustomed to such behaviour lose out. Most obviously, introverts are not enthusiastic or prone to display keenness and need to learn to fake it in many modern workplaces. But the problem goes deeper. It’s harder to engage with people not of one’s own background or interests, whether it’s as apparently innocuous as someone who doesn’t like reality television or football, through more sensitive subjects such as baby-talk, all the way to recognized issues such as religious difference.

The definition of management

            The solution is for managers to manage others, not to expect others to manage themselves. Specifying a need for team spirit passes responsibility from the manager to the manage, which is a symptom of poor management. If a person needs the manager to make an effort to communicate appropriately, this can never be a performance problem unless we accept the corollary: that people of similar character and cultural background to senior staff are better employees.

Hidden issues

            The need for team spirit can also open up criticism of an employee for a hidden, unacknowledged reason apart from race or culture. For example, an employee might work his contracted hours when the manager wants more time. An open, honest discussion about workloads and expectations would be far more appropriate, but harder ground to defend. It’s easier for a manager to conceal the issue with a fuzzy catch-all term.

            Perhaps an employee knows his own limitations and refuses extra work, or doesn’t volunteer for more. This might be good self-management, but a manager with tasks to complete could easily take out that frustration through criticisms of team spirit. Yet if the work won’t be done on time or to the correct standard if it’s squeezed in, it’s best to know early and prioritize properly. Again, that’s the job of managers; if employees had all these responsibilities, they’d be managers themselves, not juniors.

            It might be regarded as a lack of ambition to want to do your job well, and not do more, but that’s another vague term that means little. Objectives should, of course, be SMART; ambition to do whatever a manager throws your way doesn’t fit that description, and opens an employee up to abuse, as well as making him dependent on goodwill and a good relationship, when work should be formalized and defined.

Strong leaders

            In our societies we tend to have faith in strong leaders who know what is best, make decisions fastest and plough ahead, getting things done. Go-getting leaders don’t want to be held up by unenthusiastic underlings who are full of doubt and cynicism. This is understandable when we look at what are considered the opposites of these leadership traits: leaders who are ignorant, indecisive and unable to comprehend options, or who are lazy and incompetent.

            Sadly, though, these things are not binary opposites. Ignorance, incompetence and stupidity can masked by quick decisions and certainty at least as easily as they are disproven by them. In fact, someone demonstrating certainty and ease about a complex issue most likely hasn’t understood it well, given how uncertain complexity usually is, especially with the data often available about the issues.

            Error is far more common than certainty, but we still trust people who display certainty. We can guess that certainty is appealing because of its simplicity, which appeals to lazy minds that don’t want to work too hard; and we can guess that forceful decision-making reminds our subconscious minds of times when leaders needed to be people of instant action, fighting and hunting wild animals or other humans. The myth of the strong leader is a vast subject and a good book, but all that matters here is that good modern leaders are those who are highly aware of and enable the strengths of their teams.

Women and diversity

            This is the underlying reason why people suggest that we need more women on company boards. There is no reason relating to their sex, but because they are socialized to be more likely to display such leadership. Similarly, leaders should embrace diversity, not crush it, for the very reasons already mentioned: disagreement and difference flush out concerns and problems that need to be considered. These don’t necessarily come from people of another race or religion. Race and religion are merely commonly-measured markers of difference, but introversion or plain contrariness are no less important.

            The need for aspiring leaders to show certainty is a triumph of style over substance. Rather than evaluate leadership carefully, our lazy minds have found a marker than stands in for the wisdom and intelligence that we really need. The external sign has become the end in itself, over what was once realized to represent, and now we prize certainty and denigrate flip-flopping, or evidence-based decisions. Our leaders should always be ahead of everyone else, dragging them along behind, rather than getting the best out of everyone else.

            In some arenas, we’ve moved beyond such an approach to leadership. Military leaders must command from far away. Mountain leaders often walk at the back to help stragglers. But where leading is less related to the physical implications, the physical nuances of the word still dominate our approach, with leaders feeling the need to be at the forefront of everything.

            Just as the leadership traits we look for are style over substance, so too is looking for team spirit. Well-run teams are indeed harmonious, but teams without disagreement are not necessarily well-run. Artificial harmony can be created by stifling dissent and difference in a team or a leader’s mind.

            Good team spirit does indeed imply trust, openness, collaboration and possibly harder and longer work. But give managers a target to achieve team spirit, with a view to achieving these things, and they will, as in so many other things, chase the target and not the hard work that it is intended to measure. Harder work will become a means to judge team spirit rather than the other way round, and that is no way to build morale.

            If a company needs team spirit enough to make it a KPI or performance objective, it needs to ensure that the right people are being judged for it. Introducing accountability and defined objectives will always be in conflict with achieving good performance in the round. Team spirit is vague and oblique enough a measure not to be a good target, but defined enough to distract from genuinely good performance. Think long and hard (and don’t be decisive or certain) before making it your objective.