Creating the High-Performance Organization

I recall a conversation I had with a friend some years ago. He told me how important a good team was in successfully implementing a vision. I remember his advice. He said, “When you find the people that you want to work with you or who can bring value to what you are doing, go after them and get them. Don’t be bashful in going after good people.” I always remember that and have found it to be so true. You only have a small window to be able to get the right people to work with you, towards the goal that you have. It’s important to get people who are like-minded, people who know enough about what they are doing and where you are headed and also people who are loyal to you and to the cause.
Someone else also told me, “Never be afraid to hire intelligent people, those who are smarter than you in the areas that you are working on. That will add value to the work that you are doing.” Very often we are intimidated by that. To have somebody who knows more about something than we do! Yet, to have a successful team, you need to have people on that team who do know more; otherwise you will put the cap on every innovative idea because it’s beyond you.

As I was thinking about that, I looked at a ‘classic’ book written by John R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith – ‘The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization’. It was published in 2002 and sold over 350,000 copies. In talking about teams, they highlight one particular model that comes out of the US, the Burlington Northern Intermodal Team. This is interesting because even the thought of intermodal was new in the 80’s, but the deregulation of the Railway industry in 1981 gave opportunity for railroads like Burlington Northern to build a new business in intermodal transport.

I recognize that intermodal is not new to many of you on this call. That’s what you do day in and day out. But for those of you who don’t, intermodal means combining different modes of transportation. In the case of Burlington Northern, it was combining trucks and trains to speed the delivery and minimize the cost of complex shipments that couldn’t be handled by one mode alone. At that time everything was brought to the railroad and put on a box car, traveled to another place and given to truckers. There were several different contracts that were used at that time. But this new team that was headed by Bill Greenwood, who was Operations Manager at that time, was given the task of building this intermodal concept. He talks about how they worked with people who didn’t believe in what they were doing, sabotaged their work and tried to stop what was happening because railroad and trucking were well established as separate businesses. This whole idea of piggy-backing came in at that time (in fact, the word was coined then) – many of these consignments could be placed on truck bodies or containers and then transferred to flat bed railway cars and moved seamlessly across different modes of transport to the final destination.

But they talked about how difficult it was at that time. But once the team got together knew that this was something that would work, they went hell-bent for leather and against great opposition and revolutionized what happened to Burlington Northern during the 80’s. By the end of the 80’s, they brought in such a tremendous change in the way goods were handled.

I wonder whether they have some kind of definition for what a team is; because there are so many definitions out there that talk about teamwork and how a team should be composed and these 2 authors put together a definition that says, “A team is a small number of people with complimentary skills”. That’s the key: ‘complimentary skills’ not analogal skills, not people who think like you or do the things that you do but compliment each other. “who are committed to a common purpose, performance goal and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable”. I would really encourage you to pick up this book for your collection.

I would like to give you a little bit of motivation about being part of a good team. As we look at history, I found that Jeff Palfini wrote in a bnet.com article in 2008 about four great teams in business history that revolutionized how people did things before. Being great is a relative term, but he is not saying that they are the best; just that they are great teams.

1.    The Java Development Team at Sun Microsystems
·    Key members:  here were just Naughton, Gosling, Sheridan, Joy and Van Hoff, programmer. 5 people got together
·    Accomplishment: the platform-independent Java programming language which added interactivity to the then-static Web
·    Background story: Naughton laid the groundwork with a 12-page criticism of Sun that became a wake-up call for the company to step up innovation and focus on the consumer.
·    Guiding principle: Independence. They retreated, got a team together, worked away from the Sun campus and they were initially known as Stealth Project because nobody understood what they were doing. But when they finally came together, they brought out something that has revolutionized the Web.

2.    Ford Motor Company
·    Key Members: Henry Ford, Clarence Avery, Peter Martin and Charles Sorensen.
·    Accomplishment: Ford used the cost savings from mass production to make the automobile affordable.
·    Their background story: Ford and his team believed that cars should be reliable and reasonably priced. Everything they did was focused on cutting costs and passing those savings on to the buyer. So they had a clear goal as to what they wanted to accomplish and then they went about trying to accomplish it through efficiency.
·    Guiding principle: efficiency. Ford and his team of engineers applied the lens of efficiency to all aspects of production, eventually devising the assembly line. Ford also recognized that by paying his workers twice the industry standard and reducing the length of the workday and week helped them because he got excellent workers to come and work for him because of the innovations that he used at that time.

3.    The Google Team
·    Key members: just 4, Sergei Brin, founder (Wild Card); Larry Page, founder (Agitator); Eric Schmidt, CEO (Leader); Omid Kordestani, SVP of Business Development (Expert)
·    Accomplishment: they created the most popular site on the Web, powered by search-engine technology that helpfully ranks results based on how many other sites link to a page. But they revolutionized search-engine on the Web.
·    The background story: Couple of guys met together at Stanford University; in fact it is said that Page and Brin really couldn’t get along. Then Page asked Brin to help him on his doctoral thesis and this idea began to come together. From that embryonic stage, they went on to create the Google Team.
·    Guiding principle: Stay lean. The team stayed small as they developed the technology. They first worked out of Page’s dorm room at Stanford, then a garage. Finally they invited Schmidt to run the company as the Chief Executive Officer and then got Omid Kordestani, who I believe was the first guy at Google to wear a suit, to handle sales.

4.    Walt Disney and his ‘Nine Old Men’
·    Accomplishment: Revolutionized children’s films and created some of the most memorable and profitable characters in cartoon history.
·    Guiding principle: Determination. They wouldn’t give up. They knew that they had something that they could work with in terms of new cartooning ideas and the result was tremendous – iconic characters like Mickey Mouse, Snow White and Cinderella.

All of them found a team of people that they could work with, a common goal and then they pushed towards it.

So what would be the elements of a successful team? Very quickly as I close, let me throw this out to you.

1.    Team Goals: team goals must be clearly specified because this provides the focus around which team activities are organized. If team goals are not specified and agreed upon by all team members, the team will tend to wander without direction.
2.    Commitment: All team members must be committed to achieving the goals of the team. Team members who don’t take responsibility for team activities will undermine the commitment of other team members. Also, make sure that personal agendas are kept out of team activities otherwise they will bring down commitment.
3.    Shared Rewards: To get commitment, team members must be involved in identifying team goals and sharing the rewards of the team. If members do not share in team rewards, they have no reason to participate in team activities.
4.    Defined Roles: To successfully carry out the activities of the team, the role of each team member must be defined.
5.    Trust: Successful teams are made up of members who trust each other. Lack of trust among team members will shift the member’s focus away from team goals to protecting their individual positions and you don’t want that to happen.
6.    Mutual Respect: For trust to exist among team members, they must have respect for each other.
7.    Communication: Without communication, little teamwork will occur. Good communication among team members is important to successfully implement the elements that have been discussed just before.

So these are key thoughts in putting together a team. But as you look at a team – it calls for different individuals with different strengths and weaknesses, to come together and work together towards a common goal and to achieve that goal. But all that has one key ingredient that Peter Drucker wrote about on Designing Successful Business Teams: “The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I’. They think ‘we’; they think ‘team’. They understand their job is to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it. But ‘we’ gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.”

How true, isn’t it? The ‘I’ always undermines teamwork because the ‘I’ talks of an egocentric individual. The ‘we’ is shared work. Trust and all the components of mutual respect, commitment, working towards a common goal, all come together when ‘we’ is at the head.

At some point, whether you are working now or in the future, if we are asked to head a team to do a work that has never been done before, how would you pick a team? Who would be the people on the team? What would be specific goals; putting all of that down to be able to work towards that objective?

I trust that what I have spoken has stirred something in you and will help you as you work with teams that are so integral to good functioning in a company. How do we get away from being ‘I’ to ‘we’? I think a good thing is to look to the Almighty God and say: “Would you help me
a) to find key people,
b) to be able to move myself away and allow other people also to get the reward for what’s happening.”

And so I pray that each one of you through this day would be able to move yourself away from the centre and see that the people around you also are getting a share of the glory.

May God Bless You.