Five Ways Your Organization's Culture is Killing Your Teams
Anyone who has ever worked on a team can easily name a half dozen dysfunctions that occur within teams. Less often do we think about the larger cultural factors that make it difficult for teams to succeed in the first place.
Gotick and Elton in their book The Best Team Wins: The New Science of High Performance offer a few of the most common ways that the organizational culture in which a team exists can smother it before it has a chance to shine.
1. Scalability: Even if you can get everyone on the team working together well, chances are the interface between the team and the rest of the organization doesn’t work so well.
As General Stanley McChrystal observes in his book Team of Teams, it’s easier to make a team and fit it into a pre-existing hierarchical culture - where it’s saddled with all the disadvantages of a hierarchical structure and ends up in competition with every other team – than it is to create an organization structured as a team of teams.
Doing that means overcoming organizational silos by connecting every team to every other team it needs to work with through a single person who can be the focal point for that connection. Note that this has less to do with the ‘flat org chart’ fad than with who cooperates with whom.
2. Leading to the person: If a team is led without regard for the talents, backgrounds and potential of its members, their talents will never be properly used.
Some people are administration genii – but give that job to someone who hates pushing paper, and your team will never get anything done. In a culture of top-down leadership, everyone on the team is probably walking around with dozens of ideas they could contribute – and are all keeping to themselves, because they know there’s no way they’ll be allowed to use them.
3. Safety of dissent: Seeking out dissent, constructive criticism, alternate ideas, different ways of doing things, is something only a very secure and confident team and team leader can do, and only in a context of an organization that realizes the profound strength to be gained from this practice. Your employees know most of what you’re doing wrong already if you know how to ask.
As Steve Jobs put it in an interview, “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and be run by the best ideas, not hierarchy.”
Sociologist Geert Hofstede quantifies this factor as “power distance”, where more power distance is a more absolutist boss and less is a more meaningful culture of dissent.
4. Homogeneity: A homogenous team, whether in terms of background, specialization, education, ethnicity, gender, personality or anything else, reliably performs worse than a team which includes many different points of view, even though it often rates itself as performing better.
You’ve probably heard the term “groupthink”; homogeneity lays the groundwork for groupthink. It takes at least two points of vision to see in perspective. The more perspectives you have, the better your work will be and the more obstacles it will avoid or overcome.
5. Reasonable allowance for risk: When a team operates in a culture that is averse to risk, whether because of fear of repercussions from above, fear of taking chances with new approaches or some other factor, it becomes self-limiting.
Possibilities will either go unexplored, or take years to bear fruit because of all the hoops the team had to jump through – persuading all the stakeholders, getting management to sign off, addressing risk concerns, getting cancelled or pushed back by nervous bosses, and so on and so forth.
In one example cited by Gotick and Elton, Sikorsky, the well-known helicopter manufacturer, had evolved a culture so risk-averse that it was hobbling its ability to build and test genuinely new concepts.
The need for safety is obviously not unreasonable in manned flight – but in a world where drone technology is commonplace, the company giving itself permission to build, test, crash and modify an unpiloted prototype in short order was incredibly liberating. It was simply more productive to be able to try, fail and learn than to try to perfect their product in the design phase.
The danger of going too far in the opposite direction is real. It has predictable causes, such as:
Short-term greed leading to long-term cost: The firms over-committed to the 2008-9 US real estate bubble had competent risk analysis professionals working for them, who tried to explain the enormous systemic risk involved. They were told not to rock the boat while everyone was making so much money. The BP oil spill occurred because it was cheaper in the short term to ignore the safety concerns being raised by the rig workers. In both cases, cultures of suppressing bad news in favour of short-term profit came with enormous long-term costs.
Over-commitment to a project leading to inadequate safety measures: Some of the most spectacular failures of the aviation industry fall under this heading. The Tu-144 'Concordski' is an example of a prestige project where safety took a back seat to other considerations, with disastrous results.
Lack of effective checks: At one time, Boeing was renowned as an engineers' company, and had an enviable safety record in passenger aviation. Unfortunately, mergers changed that company culture, and management was moved far away from the engineers whose input had always guided business decisions in the past. Simultaneously, the US government's desire to decrease regulatory spending led to many regulatory functions being performed by the company itself. The combination of these two factors meant that it was comparatively easy for a safety defect with an otherwise minor change to proven airframes to be overlooked or suppressed. The results have cost Boeing years' worth of production and certification delays, lost orders and lost prestige.
Most often, when risk-taking leads to substantial damage to an organization, it's the result of poor governance and a culture of short-term thinking at the top, not the initiative of the professionals in mid-level teams.
When corporate culture crushes teamwork, it’s most often because the concept of ‘team’ has been limited in some way. Fear of giving teams the freedom they need to work effectively as teams and not as mute cogs in the machine, fear of giving up control, is almost always the reason for that limitation. That fear is a sign of the kind of dysfunction that kills companies and organizations.
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