A635.8.3.RB_LeeDarrell - Transformational Strategies

This entire course has centered around organizational development (OD) which “comprises the long-range efforts and programs aimed at improving an organization’s ability to survive by changing its problem-solving and renewal processes” (Brown, 2011, p. 4). OD is an organization-wide planned approach to intentional change. The goal is, of course, to improve the overall health and effectiveness of the organization. The focus of study this week was on effective strategies for leading an organization through organizational transformation which is a “drastic, abrupt change to total structures, managerial processes, and corporate cultures. It requires a redesign of everything in the organization, including the norms and the culture, the very soul of the organization” (p. 399). As I was reading the assigned material for the week, I noticed a little problem with applying OD – something which we have established will increase the health and effectiveness of the organization – through a time or organizational transformation. Actually, it is a major problem. (Just bear with me here and I have to throw a couple of things together and it may seem like I am jumping around a bit. It all ties together, though.)

One of the many things that we are taught as leaders is to help our subordinates “own” their work. In Army recruiting, we call this buy-in. You see, as recruiters, we are salespeople. In a civilian organization, how do you get a job? You apply for it, right? You prepare a resume and go to an interview and present your best self. It doesn’t work like that in the Army. I am the only one on my team that actually asked to become a recruiter. The rest of my team is comprised of non-volunteers. They are what we call “DA Select” meaning that the Department of the Army sent all of these poor fools an e-mail and said, “Congratulations! We have reviewed your records and your exemplary performance in your career field has earned you a new job that you didn’t ask for. The hours are long and you will be forced to face rejection over and over on a daily basis. You’re going to love it!” Yeah, they hate it. My office is full of disgruntled infantrymen that enlisted to fight. To get them to embrace our mission and accept it as their own requires complete buy-in. They have to believe in what they are selling (and they do, I might add).

Part of what we read this week in our assigned readings had to do with corporate culture. I kept thinking about my team while reading that because a word that is always tossed around along with “buy-in” is “culture”. Just as culture exists within the world at large, it exists within our organizations. When we feel that we are a part of the culture and it is a part of us, we have a high level of buy-in and ownership. We embrace it as ours so we want to make it better! We have a shared vision and a trust and loyalty when there is a strong culture.  

The evidence suggests that strong cultures have more impact on employee behavior and are more directly related to lower turnover. Research evidence also suggests that a strong culture helps workers march to the same drummer, creates high levels of employee loyalty and motivation, and provides the company with structure and controls without the need for an innovation-stifling bureaucracy. (Brown, 2011, p. 405)

Hold that thought on culture for a moment and I will circle right back to it.

In our class discussion for the week, we talked about organizations becoming flatter (meaning that there are fewer managers and leadership is spread through all levels through empowerment). I brought in the research of Nick Obolensky (2014) who is on the forefront of leadership in complex adaptive systems. (To condense his 230 page book and a 9 week course on his studies into one thought – traditional hierarchies of leadership based on oligarchies are giving way to polyarchies in organizations and those the organizations that don’t adapt are doomed to fail.) As a part of that discussion, we examined why there is a resistance to the flattening of organizations and all of the sudden it hit me. The culture.

Let’s look at it like this. Imagine you are living the American dream. You have your happy little family with 2 ½ kids and a perfectly groomed dog living in the perfect suburban house. You have your perfect routine and your normal Mon-Fri job with no stress. Your life is very happy. Now your spouse approaches you and says, “You know, I got a new job. We are going to have to move. You and I will switch roles within the household and we will be living in an apartment now. The kids will have to make all new friends. We may even have to get a cat (yuck!). We will be making more money and will eventually be happier. This is better.” There may be some pretty stiff resistance to that change. Now imagine a young pair of college roommates and apply the same thing to them. They probably will be excited for the new opportunity. This may not be the best analogy out there but I think it highlights the point that I am making. When we are that happy couple that has embraced the suburban life, we don’t want to change, even if it is ultimately for the better. When there is little loyalty and little buy-in, that change is a lot easier. When an organization has a strong culture, resistance to change will be strong because you are asking people to voluntarily change that which they own. This makes them very uncomfortable as the culture is an actual part of who they are. How in the world do you lead through that? How do I lead my team of recruiters that have achieved buy-in and are working together not just as a team but as a family through uncomfortable change?

 A man that I very much admire, General (Ret) Stanley McChrystal (2011) shared some amazing insight into leading through organizational transformation. He shared a story about how he was participating in a training jump into Sicily Drop Zone at Ft Bragg on a beautiful morning one September. If you want to talk about an organization with culture, you would be hard-pressed to find a stronger example than the Airborne corps of the Army. It is strong fraternity. When Gen McChrystal boarded the C-130 that morning, it was a normal day with the Army training for conventional contingencies. However, by the time that his stick reached the DZ, we were a nation on our knees. Imagine being a Soldier at that time. You see, when I enlisted, just like those men and women, the primary threat to our nation was still Communism. Yes, the USSR had fallen but we were still planning how to defend our interests should they try something. All of the sudden, we went from planning for something that we knew wasn’t going to happen to full involvement in asymmetric warfare where there was no front line. We were scared. We were confused. We were clinging on to the ways of the past. Do you think that we wanted to change? No, absolutely not, but our leaders helped us change our culture to ensure our success.

I guess that is really the bottom line. OD cannot be successful through organizational transformation where there is a strong culture without actually changing the culture. To lead through that change, we have to find a way to change the culture. That task is not an easy one, either. Oertli (2017) noted that in order to accomplish this, we must first be honest. We must be willing to speak a truth that is often hard to hear but also be sensitive to how our audience will receive it. However, we must also recognize the appropriate time to speak these truths. And above all else, give the organization the time it needs to process the message. Don’t force change. Just lead it naturally.  

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organizational Development (8th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. 

McChrystal, S. (2011, March). Listen, Learn…Then Lead [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/stanley_mcchrystal

Obolensky, N. (2014). Complex Adaptive Leadership: Embracing Paradox and Uncertainty (2nd ed). Farnham: Gower

Oertli, J. (2017). How Getting Real with Leaders can Help Company Culture Change. Leadership Excellence Essentials, 34(8), 30.

A635.7.3RB_LeeDarrell - INSEAD Reflection on Self-Managed Teams

One of the true joys of being an Army recruiter is helping our applicants realize how the Army can be used as a stepping-stone to help them achieve their personal and professional goals. I always ask in the interview process (because it is a job interview so should be treated as such) what the long-term goals are of every applicant. Of course I hear all kinds of answers. I hear people tell me that they want to be pilots, doctors, lawyers, professional athletes – all of the things that you would think kids might say. But the most common answer that I hear – which also happens to be one of the most common objections to joining – is that my applicants want to open their own business and work for themselves without having a boss. They don’t want to be told what to do or how to do it. Isn’t that the dream? Of course the reality is that very few of us will go that route. It isn’t that we don’t all have the ability to do it but the reality is that there are more opportunities with companies than there are opportunities to make it on our own. Fortunately, there is a way to have the best of both worlds. It is entirely possible to work for an established organization (or a startup, too) and still live the dream of not being told what to do all the time. The answered – self-managed teams.

A self-managed team is “a team that has formal responsibility and authority for making their own decisions about how they organize their work and how they decide how they are going to get their work done” (INSEAD, 2008, 0:41). Self-managing teams don’t have formal supervisors, at least not for the team functions. The teams are generally comprised of experts in their field that work together to achieve an objective (Brown, 2011). There are some minor differences between a self-managed team and a group forming a startup or running their own business. Those groups may be totally autonomous but a self-managed team is still a part of a larger body. Though they may have a lot of leeway in how they achieve their objectives, their objectives are still set by organizational leadership. Therefore they still have an external manager – someone that is outside of the group – that still provides a little bit of oversight. I have never had the opportunity to work on a self-managed team since I am in the military but I may have been on a team close to it. Back when I was an air traffic controller, I was a watch supervisor. We had a pilot that always sat in with us to act as a liaison between the Operations Group Commander and the control facilities. The pilots’s title was Supervisor of Flying or SOF. This title may have made a few of the pilots try to overstep their bounds a few times. I remember once in Iraq I was working in a mobile tower outside of Baghdad. We had a squadron of F-16s there and we had one SOF that thought that he just knew and controlled everything. One evening we had all sorts of craziness happening all over the sky. I was trying to assist my crew in guiding in an A-10 with battle damage while also recovering a Russian cargo plane with low fuel and an engine out. While all of that was happening, there was also an air-evac mission that needed to get off the group immediately plus attack helicopters trying to respond to troops in contact just a few miles from the airfield. Oh, did I mention that we were also taking incoming rocket and mortar fire at the same time? Then this stupid SOF stepped in and tried to key up on MY frequency and talk to some F-16s there were about 10 minutes out telling them that they would be cleared to land so they could get their crew rest. I yanked his headset out of the socket, opened the door, and threw it outside. We were, at that moment, a self-managed team and that external manager learned the hard way that he was not an expert and his job was not to control the team. (That seems like so long ago but I remember it so well. I still get a chuckle out of it when I remember the look on his face! I don’t think that he had ever had anybody dare challenge him before and here I was, this lowly Staff Sergeant, and I threw his headset out the door in the middle of a rocket attack! He never spoke another word to me and we never saw him in our facility again. I should have gotten in trouble for that probably but I got away with it.)

As entertaining as that story may be, it actually highlights both the positive and the negative aspects of self-managed teams. Let’s look at this from a top-down view. “When you're an executive, it isn't easy to know the right balance of reliability and adaptability -- and even if you do, it's hard to get an organization to perform accordingly” (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner, & Lee, 2016, p. 40). Self-managed teams allow leaders to somewhat “set it and forget it”. While leadership determines objectives, they can find the best teams to achieve the task and then take a hands-off approach. Looking at a self-managed team now from the view of the employee, there are no limitations from bureaucracy or politics. You are free to work with your counterparts to develop ideas and adjust procedures as needed to achieve the overall objective. However, this isn’t to say that there is no structure or oversight on a team. There certainly is. However, it is primarily internal. When multiple self-managed teams are used within a larger organization, the organization sets an overall constitution which is in part driven by the self-managed teams but each team is independent within the organization. Let’s look at it like a larger circle – the organization – filled with smaller circles – self-managed teams. “So the circles don’t just manage themselves; within those guidelines, they also design and govern themselves. The constitution doesn’t say how people should do their tasks. It explains in a broad-brush way how circles should form and operate” (p. 43). Does any of this sound familiar? To me, it sounds a little like the way our government operates. We are a unified nation yet each state operates independently. We have a president – an external manager – that provides oversight but the state governor still manages each state. (This is a very loose analogy, of course, as the POTUS has a lot of control but it may help up to understand how self-managed teams exist within an organization.) Of course, one of the headaches with a self-managed team can be the lack of ability to control how they operate and develop (Brown, 2011). With such little oversight and management by a non-expert, it can be easy for the team to begin to seek their own goals that do not align with the rest of the organization. In the case of our nation, this led to a civil war. Obviously our nation is not actually a self-managed team but it does well at highlighting some of the advantages and disadvantages.

A self-managed team can achieve organizational objections uninhibited by bureaucracy but can easily get out of control and begin to work toward goals that do not align with the rest of the organization. So how do we harness their effectiveness without letting them get away from us? Consider a string quartet as an example (Tal-Shmotkin & Gilboa, 2013). The members are highly skilled in their trade and feed off one another. They work together to produce their music and please the audience. However, to integrate into a larger orchestral work, they require more than just each other. They require a steady conductor to provide visual ques for tempo and volume. The conduct need not play one of the instruments himself (or herself). He only need to know how to conduct. Our approach to leadership of self-managed teams must be approached in much the same way. We can’t try to hold back their work but we need to provide ques as to the direction that they need to go to integrate with the organization. This is, of course, easier said than done as it requires an established trust. One cannot just decide to become an external manager for a self-managed team. There must be a relationship and ultimate power must still reside outside of the team but that power can only be used to intervene as an option of absolute last resort lest the performance cease.

Bernstein, E., Bunch, J., Canner, N., & Lee, M. (2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype: The Overwrought Claims - and Actual Promise - of the Next Generation of Self-Managed Teams. Harvard Business Review, 94(7/8), 38-49.

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organizational Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

INSEAD. (2008, September 22). Self-Managing Teams: Debunking the Leadership Paradox [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBnR00qgGgM

Tal-Shmotkin, M., & Gilboa, A. (2013). Do Behaviors of String Quartet Ensembles Represent Self-Managed Teams? Team Performance Management, 19(1), 57-71. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/10.1108/135275913113120

A635.6.3.RB_LeeDarrell - Team-Building and EcoSeagate

You probably remember the old Army commercials on television back in the ‘80s with that catchy little song and phrase, “be all that you can be”. The Army did away with that and eventually went to something a little less catchy, “An Army of one”. Do you remember those commercials? I remember one where a guy is running through the desert with a ruck sack and his weapon by himself at first and after a few seconds a helicopter flies over his head. It was a brilliant market concept except for one problem – it did the exact opposite of what it was intended to do. “An Army of one” doesn’t mean that anybody can be a one-person army like Rambo or something. It meant that we all have a role to play to make up one body. The idea was to promote teamwork showing that the cook or supply specialist was every bit as important as the infantryman or doctor or general. The concept was conveyed on too deep of a level for most of the intended demographic to grasp. However, regardless of the failed marketing campaign, the Army may be the ultimate team-based organization.

When I was in 5^th Special Forces Group, we were extremely tight-knit. We were always together. We trained together, deployed together, fought together, bled together, mourned together, relaxed together – we were a family. That is to be expected when you are with the same small group for years at a time. On my last deployment, I was assigned to an A-team on a small outpost miles from any kind of support. There were only 23 of us living together for all those months so yes, we were close. However, not every job we do in the Army instills the same level of camaraderie that the infantry of Special Forces may bring about. As a recruiter, though I work on a small team, we live a very different way than I did when I was in 5^th Group. We don’t have people shooting at us (well, our office is in Washington Heights which is a little rough so maybe sometimes… just kidding!) and we all are able to go home to our own families every day. The teamwork doesn’t come quite as naturally so we have to work a little harder at it. In order to bring us closer together, we build team-building activities into our training calendar. Over the past few years, some of the things that we have done have included going to Six Flags, playing paintball, going ice skating, having luncheons or barbeques, and going fishing. I seem to recall once going on a booze cruise and accidentally leaving one of our teammates stranded in Jersey. Whoops.

Team-building outside of the workplace is not a concept that is unique to the Army. Developing interpersonal skills is every bit as critical to the success of our organization as developing our professional abilities. Many organizations today use outdoor experimental laboratory development (sometimes known as corporate boot camp) to develop teamwork and leadership skills.

The idea is to take a group of people who normally work with one another and put them in an outdoor setting where they participate in experiential learning exercises. The outdoor setting is very different from the normal work environment; the learning exercises are so varied, and so typically foreign to the background of most participants, that no one has a distinct advantage. Thus the outdoor lab puts participants on an equal footing. This seems to encourage discussion of leadership styles, teamwork, and inter- personal relationships. (Brown, 2011, p. 273)

These corporate boot camps appear to be very similar to the team-building that we experience in military training. The rigorous physical demands are so extreme that no one person should attempt to complete them on their own. Even though we some may have the raw ability, we must learn to rely on our teammates for physical, emotional, and moral support. One such example of an outdoor experimental laboratory comes from Seagate Technology. Every year, the organization invests about $2 million to run a challenge known as EcoSeagate. The company flies 200 employees from all levels of the organization to New Zealand where they split into 40 groups of five people to compete against one another. This is a very physically demanding and intense challenge that culminates in a 40 km adventure race with running, biking, and hiking through rugged terrain with little guidance. As exciting as a team-building exercise like this may be, there remains one fundamental problem – there is really no way to quantitatively measure to the return on the investment. I asked my friend, Gene, about this (Gene completed an MBA in Quantitative Finance at NYU Stern a few years back) and he said that he loves it because he was a Marine so “gets it” but would have a hard time getting investors to buy off on something like this. There is just no proof that it is financially worth it. Fortunately, we have advanced to the point that we understand that qualitative analysis is just as important as quantitative analysis within modern organizations. Solid qualitative analysis may be difficult to directly measure but “high performers are attracted to organizations that recognize their contribution, and if you don't, they will go somewhere else. The flip side is also true. Weak performers will self-select out of organizations where there is a strong recognition of high performance” (Smolkin, 2016, p. 30). Something like EcoSeagate accomplishes this very thing. It may be impossible to determine the actual added financial value but it is part of the process of ensuring that the best performers remain with the organization and the mediocre performers either increase their performance or will quietly exit.

What are some of the qualities that an event like this would bring? Bob Whitmore of Seagate lectured on the benefit of teaching conflict resolution (Chao, 2008, April 25). The event forces people to work together to through uncomfortable situations that are rife with conflict and force resolution which is a lesson that can be applied within the organization as well. Conflict resolution is a learned behavior. We can’t achieve it until we practice it. Another benefit of events such as EcoSeagate is that it teaches us to collectively share in our struggles. There was a point in the event in 2008 that a massive storm was forecast during the competition (Chao, 2008, April 26). Together, as if in one voice, all of the participants let out a little sigh/moan together but they knew that they were pressing on together as well. It wasn’t as if they were experiencing the woes as individuals but rather as one body.

Since EcoSeagate took place in New Zealand, many of the video clips showed natives performing the Haka. If you have never seen this dance performed, it may strike you as being a little odd but this is a traditional war dance from the native New Zealander warriors. The All Blacks, the famous NZ rugby team, perform it before every match to intimidate their opponents. (I’ll add a link right below this to watch some of the All Black Hakas.) To me, that Haka captures the true spirit of events such as EcoSeagate. Not just anybody can perform the dance. These men, much like my old 5^th Group buddies, have experienced brutal hardships together, bled together, struggled together, and persevered together. When they perform the dance, they bring all of that back and proudly display how they have overcome it. It is possible to bring that into our organizations and you can’t measure that with numbers.

All Blacks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5chRqRr8iQs

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organizational Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Chao, M. (2008, April 25). Eco Seagate 2008 1/3 [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=520&v=zCOfOFMiLtE

Chao, M. (2008, April 26). Eco Seagate 2008 3/3 [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovAvZLB5mYU

Smolkin, S. (2016). PERFORMANCE: Performance Ratings Still Earn Unsatisfactory Scores. Employee Benefit News, 30(10), 12.

A635.5.3.RB_LeeDarrell - Management Assessment - Is a startup for me?

I write this blog with a heavy heart. This will be my first blog that my good friend and brother-in-law, David Odum, will not read. He has provided support and feedback since I began the Master’s in Leadership program and has continued to share my blogs that he found relevant with his Accenture teammates. David lost his battle with cancer at 2:55 am on Friday. For those of you at Accenture that still read my blog, I appreciate your support. As David was one of my primary influencers for selecting this area of study, I hope that you will continue on this journey with me in honor of him.

On my class discussion board last week, I talked about a conversation that I had the other week at the NYAC with one of my friends, George Tockstein, George does something in commercial real estate and also teaches a couple of classes at NYU so he is pretty familiar with the practical applications of management but he was perplexed as to why someone would choose to major in leadership. He had always considered leadership to be something learned through experience. I explained that he is right but that we can learn from the experiences of others but, just as with management, there is a fundamental doctrine to leadership as well. If we study management, why not study leadership? The two are closely related. To me, the difference between management and leadership is this – management is using your resources to achieve a goal and leadership is getting others to want to follow you to achieving the goal. There are organizations that separate the two functions but I would venture to say that the overwhelming majority expect their managers to be effective leaders (though leaders can exist at every level of the organization).

Since it is practical to study management and leadership (for the purposes of this blog, let’s assume that leadership is synonymous with management), it only makes sense that we measure where we are from time to time. One way that we can accomplish that is through surveys. The key is honesty, though. We often answer personality surveys the way that we want to be perceived instead of as we actually are. In fact, when someone joins the Army, there is a test that they have to take called the Tailored Adaptive Personality Assessment Survey (TAPAS). The way that they answer the questions will provide three scores – a “can do”, “will do”, and a third that I can’t remember. Based on the scores of their other tests, moral standings, immigration status, and level of education, our applicants have to achieve certain scores. I always tell them to think “what would Jesus do?” when taking the test to ensure a passing score. However, if we want to know our strengths and weaknesses as managers, we can’t answer how we think Jesus would answer. It can be so hard to be honest of those surveys, don’t you think?

In the first week or two of this class, we had the opportunity to take a management assessment (MA) survey through NextSteps Research. The survey questions were similar to those that I have answered in the past when I took my Attentional and Interpersonal Style (TAIS) inventory for Army recruiting duty. The difference in the surveys, though, is that the TAIS focused more on overall personality whereas the MA focused a bit more on how I prefer to work with teams. I was tempted to answer the MA questions how I wanted to be versus how I am but fortunately the TAIS taught me how that can give us a false sense of security and can come back to bite us in the rear.

Most of us have heard the story of how Steve Jobs created Apple in his garage. What I didn’t know until this week is that he had kind of a rough history there after it got off the ground (Severance, 2012). Jobs had a conflict and parted with Apple in 1985 (I never knew that!) and began a second new company, NeXT Computer, Inc. Jobs was in competition with his former company building cutting-edge computers and software for the next several years. In 1992, NeXT left the hardware portion of the business and focused solely on software. In 1996, Apple purchased NeXT and hired Jobs as an advisor. He was later appointed acting-CEO and later became the full CEO of Apple. So for 11 years, Steve Jobs was not even a part of Apple. When he left, some of the most brilliant managers from Apple followed him on his new startup adventure. I wonder how I would have fared on that team.

By using the results on my MA, I can clearly see how I could contribute to a team such as that. First, I probably would not have followed Jobs to NeXT. I am best suited to work in a large dynamic venture business environment. That means that startups probably are not where I would excel. However, there are aspects of startups that fuel me. For example, I strive for achievement,  have a high tolerance of risk, and work well with a mix of teamwork and independence. If I did go to NeXT, a few of my traits would be very fitting. First, Steve Jobs was very excited but wanted to achieve a consensus before action (EverySteveJobsVideo, 2014). This is an attribute that was identified a little more in my TAIS profile than my MA but I desire to solve problems through consensus. When a consensus cannot be reached, I seek resolution. (True resolution means that the issue is solved in a way that is acceptable for all involved instead of just strong-arming an idea.) Jobs felt that “there needs to be someone who is sort of the keeper and reiterator of the vision because there’s just a ton of work to do” (6:58). My MA also shows that I am very keen on multi-tasking and am highly driven by achievement. I don’t allow myself to lose sight of the vision when I get bogged down and am able to continually share the vision and help others keep on track.

I think it is equally important for us to recognize how we can hinder a group such as a startup. As I mentioned, I don’t think that a startup is the right fit for me at all. One primary reason is that my MA reflects what I already know about myself when dealing with innovation. I am not an innovator at all. My strength lies with refining existing processes and not with developing new ones. I like to improve on existing procedures to solve problems. Also, I have a desire for structure. That doesn’t mean that I am not open to fluid environments but a startup would likely be too fluid for my needs. 

The bottom line is that we must be honest with ourselves. We should know where we fit and where we don’t. Just because we have traits that can contribute to a team doesn’t mean that it is the right team for us. I would rather be on a team where I could excel than on a team where I would just be marginal. This shouldn't discourage any of us from going to a startup if we feel driven to it, though. Steve Jobs described the success of new ventures as coming from a reverse pyramid (EverySteveJobsVideo, 2014). One person isn't able to do it all. It starts with an idea which may go to a developer. The developer may have no idea how to market the product so it goes to a marketer. The marketer may have no idea how to collect feedback and follow up so it goes on to another and so on and so forth. Everything began with one idea. Everybody can play their part. It reminds me of that show, Shark Tank. The sharks didn't create the ideas or products. They only invest and help tweak them. 

[EverySteveJobsVideo]. (2014, January 1). Steve Jobs Brainstorms with NeXT Team (1985) [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNeXlJW70KQ

Severance, C. (2012). The Second-Order Effects of Steve Jobs. Computer, 45(1), 10-11. doi:10.1109/MC.2012.31

A635.4.3.RB_LeeDarrell - Build a Tower, Build a Team

In early 2015, I attended the Senior Leader Course for my MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) at Ft. Gordon in Augusta, GA. One thing that was a little humorous about it is that I was scheduled for the course when I was still a 25S, Satellite Communications Operator/Maintainer, but had converted to 79R, Recruiter, after it was scheduled. I was attending a school for a career field that was no longer mine so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the technical portions of the instruction. (SLC is a one-time requirement only regardless of the MOS so it wasn’t exactly a waste of time.) My instructor there was really into board games and group games. One of my favorites was one called Ultimate Werewolf where you basically have to read body language and use logic to figure out who the werewolves were in the group. Another was called Ugg-tect where you have to use caveman style grunts and words along with an inflatable club to get your team to build a structure out of blocks a certain way. One more than was pretty fun was a marshmallow challenge where we were given sticks of spaghetti, a yard a yarn, a yard of tape, and a marshmallow. The challenge was to build the tallest structure. We couldn’t get ours to work.

Author Tom Wujec (2010) has used this marshmallow challenge to study teams for several years. First, I have to say that I take great comfort in knowing that about 40% of the teams are unable to build a structure that can support a marshmallow. I mean I am no Einstein but it was embarrassing to not be able to figure out how to get at least a small structure in the 20 minutes that we were given to build it but at least we weren’t the only ones! What is surprising, though, is what teams are able to build the tallest successful structures. Engineers aside (they have somewhat of an unfair advantage in this challenge), the teams that were the most successful structures were all recent graduates…of kindergarten. One of the worst performing segments are recent MBA students and graduates. Wujec attributes this in part to habits of lying and cheating but provided little evidence of that. So why is it that these little kids are outperforming MBAs? In part, none of them are jockeying for power as business professionals often do. However, the primary underlying reason is much more fascinating. “Business students are trained to find the single right plan, and then they execute on it” (2:38). Their plan focuses on reaching the end state but then what happens once the plan is executed is that the clock begins to run out and they find themselves in a crisis situation. The children, however, do things a bit different. First, instead of working toward the goal, they start with the goal and work backward always keeping the marshmallow on top. More important, they build several prototypes. They are not executing just one plan but rather execute idea after idea after idea.

Part of our studies this week focused on different team functions. Brown (2011) highlights two primary functions being group task functions and group maintenance functions. Group task functions are processes that directly work toward an objective whereas group maintenance functions focus on developing interpersonal skills that cultivate a positive environment with open communication in which ideas are freely shared. Think back to what you learned in Kindergarten. You likely were learning more about sharing with your friends than you were about being a leader so it is no wonder that the kindergarteners are coming up with so many ideas. They may not have an official leader and may not understand how group objectives can be refined but they understand how to share ideas even if they seem silly.

Wujec (2010) made another interesting observation to highlights the need for both of these functions within a group. Obviously, he gathered this data from the teams that successfully built a structure. The overall average height of towers was 20”. Teams of CEOs did just a little better than average at about 22”. (That is good. I would hope that my CEO knows how to work to a higher standard.) However, teams with CEOs including an administrative assistant were able to build towers over 30” tall. What this highlights is that when you have a group of high-performers that have the ability to achieve objectives but only focus on group tasks, the full potential of the group is not unlocked. Wujec noted that administrative assistants have strong skills of facilitation and process management. They are not focused solely on the objective but on organizing the group and coordinating to utilize the best resources. They are focused on those group maintenance functions and encourage maximum participation by all.

Let me focus in on group facilitation as a group maintenance function. To me, one of the most critical tasks as a facilitator is to ensure my team explores every possible option.

As a facilitator, be careful that participants are not settling too soon—that is, choosing a solution that seems to solve the problem without continuing to look for a better solution. Although one solution may be adequate, superior solutions stem from thinking that is initially divergent—creatively exploring possible solutions before agreeing on any one choice. (Lewis, 2008, p. 57)

Again, business professionals are trained to look for the one right answer (Wujec, 2010). When a solution is found that will work, it is easy to think that that is the answer. Facilitators are responsible for ensuring that the team is open to other right answers. That is why the teams of CEOs with executive admins outperform those without. That group facilitation is ensuring that all options are explored.

I am interested in trying this out at our next Company training meeting. I would be interested in trying it two ways – first with our own centers and then with mixed groups. The takeaway that I would hope that we would all get from it is that every idea is worth exploring. I am sometimes guilty of not entertaining other ideas in my own center. I hope I haven’t inadvertently discouraged someone from sharing a better idea.

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organizational Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Lewis, L. S., & American Society for Training and Development. (2008). 10 Steps to Successful Facilitation. Alexandria, Va.: ASTD Press.

Wujec, T. (2010, February). Build a Tower, Build a Team [Video file]. Retrieved from  https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower