I’ve been thinking about Kevin Pietersen this week – not because I’m a cricket fan particularly, but because his recently-published autobiography is fascinating for anyone interested in teamwork (or perhaps more accurately in the case of KP’s book, for anyone who is interested in what can go wrong within a team).
The England team has gone through its ups and downs in recent years and most cricket fans would agree that collectively, the players have often performed far less promisingly than their individual talent would suggest. The essence of great teamwork is to get a group of individually talented people to work together to produce a collective effort that at least matches and hopefully exceeds the sum of their parts. Some leadership writers – most notably the American management guru James MacGregor Burns – have argued that the only true responsibility of a leader is to persuade a team to produce a performance that is better than they would produce individually. Or as the US saying goes: “None of us is as smart as all of us.”
But it’s far more difficult than it sounds. People have different ways of working – in any business you will find people who have come from different organisations, with different cultures, and that adds another dimension. In our work, if we find a team that is suffering from a diversity of culture, we begin by talking about behaviour, and how we behave affects the people around us.
This is an extremely effective way of beginning to build a strong team. While we’re on the subject of sport, one person who appreciates this approach is Sir Clive Woodward, who coached the England rugby team to their World Cup win in 2003. Sir Clive often talks (and details in his book Winning!) about something he calls ‘teamship rules’, and the impact they had on building his world-beating team.
His argument is that a winning team must behave like a winning team. Discipline and mutual respect is catching, and it breeds an environment in which everyone wants to give their best. One of Sir Clive’s first tasks was to create a set of 10 rules that would govern the behaviour of the team when they were together. This was done with the players’ input, which made sure that they ‘owned’ the rules and were therefore more likely to adhere to them.
The rules were relatively simple: they would dress smartly, they would not swear in public areas, mobile phones were restricted to bedrooms, and no-one would write a book or an article that might offend a colleague. Two of the rules were particularly interesting: ‘Be present’ (don’t just turn up, make a contribution) and ‘Fun’ (work must be enjoyable).
These rules, set and policed by the team itself, were credited by the players as making a huge contribution to their belief in themselves and in the power of their collective effort. Sir Clive calls these details the “critical non-essentials”, and argues that they make a huge difference not only in sport, but in business and in life in general. We agree; at Space2BE we believe strongly that high-performing teams need a shared vision, values and ways of working. That starts with behaviour.
“A successful team is a group of many hands but of one mind.” Bill Bethel
