Are you getting more than the sum of your team’s talents?
Nobody quite knows when Margaret Meade first said her much quoted line, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
But whenever it was, I doubt she envisaged that small group as comprising one leader and a bunch of extra hands doing the donkeywork.
Yet, way back when F W Taylor essentially founded the discipline of operational management with his early time and motion studies, pairs of hands was exactly what he thought most people in an organisation were, and that philosophy has subtly pervaded the way we think about organisations ever since.
Even those whose business it is to change the world.
It’s embedded in the way we talk, of Human Resources, of workforce plans, of capacity and capability.
For Taylor, a team could never be more than the sum of its parts, and only that good when the work was organised to be maximally efficient, because otherwise some of those skills and capacity would be underused.
What Meade was describing is something different: a group of people, often with vastly different perspectives, who actually want to spend time together exploring and pursuing a common passion, learning, debating, changing and inspiring each other’s thinking, trying and discarding actions and ideas.
In Meade’s depiction, the parts themselves become significantly better when they’re together, and more than that, by being together they can achieve what none of them could conceive of alone.
The annals of social innovation are full of such examples: of inspired groups and collective leadership, of shared missions to find solutions, to build connections, to change how things work.
So, be honest: what portion of its time does your team spend working in Meade’s paradigm versus Taylors?
I think we all recognise that charities are under constant pressure to hugely underinvest in their core, their infrastructure, and particularly their people, and that many, if not most, routinely succumb to that pressure.
All hands on deck, heads down, sleeves up, noses to the grindstone, pick your own cliché, but that’s the reality for most of us most of the time – running hot, working lean, racing around in our individual hamster-wheels with barely a moment to take a breath.
The idea of creating regular time and space for that Meadian model seems almost unconscionable. But without it, we’re never getting off the wheel.
Even those who’ve graduated from the belief that executive coaching is a luxury they can’t afford, or a remedial intervention like performance management, and have slowly come to realise that it’s a cast-iron investment in individual performance, still tend to see whole-team development through that remedial lens – something to do when a team slides into some type of dysfunction, when its performance starts to crash, when all else fails.
“They’re under so much pressure, relationships are getting frayed, the team’s becoming very tired and fractious. I think we need some time off-site to work some of this through” is an increasingly frequent refrain, especially when charities and their leaders are under such unremitting stress as they are now.
But why is it that team performance is a thing we can only justify giving our attention to when its already falling apart?
We know we cannot create a better, more equitable society by simply reacting to the symptoms of its dysfunctions whenever they appear. That’s why we have research and policy teams, it’s why we create movements, why we continually agitate for change, because we know things could be far better than they are.
Just as most of our teams can be far better than they are.
And make no mistake, it does them no injustice to say this, quite the reverse – it is an explicit recognition of their true potential to put time aside for their collective development.
The fundamental building block of a high performing organisation, especially one that aims to change the world, is not the individual, it is the team. And it’s a team that needs to be more than the sum of its parts.
And if we want to build our capacity, to achieve our missions, realise our visions, engage that social change, it is our team, as a whole, that we need to strengthen and invest in – its interrelationships and dynamics, its creativity and resilience.
Not just when things are tough and the cracks are starting to show, but now.
Because if you believe in that vision, that mission, that change, then investing in their future today is very likely to be the single best way you can invest in society’s future for tomorrow.