Our group was “Advanced Technologies,” doing cutting-edge work with the Promise of Object Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and the like. We sat inside the IT group that ran the business, barely off the mainframes in the early 90s, and that group had issues often enough to land in the external auditor’s report as a “risk item” … never helpful.
Being new, with my IBM background, the CIO asked me to facilitate a half-day meeting with the Ops team. As we ranked the projects, I gently pointed out that the Network team’s projects were a priority for … the Network team. Desktop … Desktop. Storage … you get the point. The team leaders all looked at me, “the new guy from outside,” as the REAL issue … which I was used to…
Bands are visible Teams. You see instantly when they are together, and when they are not … which is probably why I enjoy studying them. Here is Scott Avett on his brother: “From a very early age, we were inseparable and (my brother) sort of pressed and insisted upon that bond, whereas I was the older brother who sometimes saw Seth as someone who’d badger me and wouldn’t leave me alone when we were young… instead of letting our differences pull us apart through life, I’ve seen that anytime we’re at the forefront of a dilemma we crowd around and bring those differences together. We talk about them, spend time with them, and either accept them or leave them alone. But it’s rare. Our similarities are more prominent than our differences, but our differences are real, substantial and valid, and that’s what helps make us who we are as a unit.”
The Promise of computers … and Teams … is surprisingly similar. You look at both and say “Wow, look what we can do!” … followed very closely by “Wow … that is all we can do?” Leading either takes a balance of those 2 competing jobs: defining reality and providing hope. Raised around computers, and having studied engineering hard through college and grad school, I remember the day I woke up and realized “Mark, you’re in IT.” The group at IBM we were used to had disappointed us regularly … and now I was in it. Along with a collection of people with surprisingly little understanding of computers, which did not stop them from building systems that worked … occasionally.
The Ops group was not a Team … it was a collection of groups with no idea how to pull together. In musical terms, different keys, different time signatures, playing in groups that rarely harmonized. My report was as gentle as I could make it, but the CIO saw the audit item as a real risk, removed a number of leaders, and put new ones in charge. Buried in the report was my finding that most leaders across the WHOLE organization had no interest in the new NeXT computers he was personally championing, and that without someone to lead that team, Ops and Development would slowly squeeze it out… You guessed it. I was the person he put in to shepherd that technology forward.
My technical chops were interesting, but the IBM qualification I used most? How to play defense against a very large bureaucracy. The best part was the team I inherited, which became outstanding in ways I would use as the model for every Team I built after. The philosophy I took from it: every well-formed, high performing team has all the members of the Pooh books in it. Each perspective is needed to cover everything, and you have to bring them together … each alone is not helpful. In our first meeting, the 8 of us realized we were 1) hated by everyone, 2) needed to figure out how to really work well together, and 3) had to build on … not compete against … each other’s talents. NeXT was not well known or liked anywhere, so most of them were used to the “land of misfit toys” … as was I. And we very quickly went to work on being a Team that Promised to stand together.
So this week I want to focus on the Promise … and the differences … of Teams, through a few principles that were engaged not just here, but in hundreds of Teams I have worked with since. If you want to play along, think about the teammates who brought out the best … in you. Were they like you? Or different … and how did you respond to those differences? Do they all have to conform to your vision of leadership, or what did you actually learn from them?
Your “Simple… Not Easy” move: name 1 teammate who was nothing like you, and write down the 1 thing you still use that you learned from them. Then tell them.
We learned together with our differences. The Promise was that our Team could outperform most of the organization … the part that loves to talk about things it doesn’t know … and its Ten Thousand Words.
