Here are some thoughts on teams. I formed them as a member and leader of ad hoc teams over the last 25 years.

James J. Pottmyer

© Copyright 1996, James J. Pottmyer

Thoughts on Teams

TEMPERAMENT

Teams need a mix of several types of people:

• WONKS and NERDS derive inner rewards from solving especially difficult problems. So long as effort is organized so that each wonk and nerd knows the limits of his or her piece of the problem, several of these people can work together on a team.
• WARRIORS derive inner rewards from winning over other people. It is essential to have just enough individuals with this temperament on a team to handle the external threat of competing warriors. If you get too many warriors together, they so enjoy combat that they will battle one another if too few external enemies exist to absorb their energy.
• SOCIAL LEADERS derive inner rewards from nurturing human relationships and fostering cooperation. A social leader frequently knows all the office gossip, who is or is not talking to whom, and what "buttons" work for what people.
• A "BENCHMARK" gives a full, professional day's work for a day's pay but derives inner rewards from activities off the job. A benchmark establishes a tempo that helps to keep the wonks and nerds from burning out prematurely or from artificially expanding a problem to make it more interesting. One benchmark for every three or four wonks and nerds is enough. Too many plodding benchmarks demotivate the wonks and nerds.

Avoid certain types of people in constituting a team. Most social misfits get eliminated from the mainstream work force early. A few, however, seem to survive over the long term:

• BRIDGE TROLLS derive inner rewards from ownership of "turf." Some bridge trolls are degenerate warriors -- seeking dominance over other people by making them pay a treasure or say an incantation for permission to pass. If a bridge troll is entrenched whom you cannot displace from a team, employ the troll to defend something on your flanks. You don't want the obfuscation of a bureaucratic bridge troll confusing the situation on the main front.
• A MILO MINDERBINDER (from the character in Catch 22) derives inner rewards from "cheating the system," getting more than a fair share. Haggling, wheeling and dealing, living life on the edge are all important to Milo. It is better to train your wonks, nerds, warriors, and social leaders to be a little inventive and duplicitous in circumventing bureaucracy than to take on a latent criminal. Everything halts when a Milo causes an "X-Gate."

RISK AVERSION/RISK TAKING temperament is the one area in which team homogeneity is worthwhile, rather than well-chosen diversity. If the range of opinion in what constitutes acceptable risk is too great, risk-averse members will constantly keep "Pearl Harbor files," while the risk takers gripe about timidity and inertia. (Amplification)

ROLES

Every team should have someone to fill these roles:

• FUNCTIONAL EXPERTS know in detail the requirements the team must satisfy. They act as surrogates for end users of the product or service that a team develops or provides. There is no substitute for knowing what you are doing. Functional experts can be wonks, nerds, warriors, social leaders, or benchmarks.
• A TEAM LEADER motivates team members, organizes effort, assigns or approves individual tasks, and monitors progress. The team leader is the court of last resort for resolving disputes within the team. A team leader should have BOTH positional authority (derived from an appointment) AND recognized professional reputation. A team leader might be by temperament a wonk, nerd, warrior, or social leader. A team leader would not ordinarily be a "benchmark" unless he or she is a functional expert of enormous repute. (Teams that lack a leader are "committees;" they have only a presiding officer. Committees can be important in legitimizing the efforts of individual members, but committees seldom have synergy to contribute something greater than the sum of individual efforts.)
• A DECISION MAKER analyzes alternatives against different criteria, chooses paths, and communicates decisions. This person has good intuitions as to when just enough facts are in to proceed to a decision. He or she must also have a history of success, making decisions that seem good in retrospect. The decision maker must also steer a steady course despite minor perturbations, but not obstinately in the presence of major changes or new information. The decision maker can but need not be the team leader, so long as the team leader delegates authority and stands behind the subordinate's decisions 90+ percent of the time. A decision maker can be a wonk, nerd, warrior, or benchmark. He or she will seldom be a social leader.
• A MARKETER explains the team's activities and sells its products or services to the outside world. The least effective way to handle external interfaces is to anoint each and every team member as a customer relations or public relations specialist. On a small team, the team leader frequently doubles as a marketer. To gain credibility, it is important that the marketer be expert in the functional domain, not seem to be too much a generalist. Unless a wonk, nerd, or benchmark is a preeminent functional expert, it is better to use a social leader or warrior as the marketer.

Not every team necessarily needs people in the following roles. They could be essential for particular teams depending on objectives and expected output.

• A VISIONARY has the mental agility to imagine several different possible future states, to elaborate each possibility with consistent details, and to explain convincingly the prerequisites and consequences of possible futures to others. It can be confusing to have several visionaries working the same problem at the same time.
• DETAIL-MINDERS are unusually attentive to ensuring that things are completely accounted for -- that nothing drops through the cracks.

IS THIS A KNAPSACK PROBLEM?

One formulation of a classical "hard" problem is to select a set of objects from a larger number of possible ones so as to fill a knapsack as full as possible. Trying to consider every possible team of seven members chosen from a dozen and a half people available would require computing figures of merit on 31,824 possible teams. Adding another half dozen people to the pool increases the possibilities by an order of magnitude.

Exhaustive search is fruitless, so heuristics are used to constitute teams. What I see done for the most part is:

1. Select a team leader who then helps in furthering the search effort for others.
2. The team leader's major weakness (e.g., functional knowledge, decision-making ability, confidence, visionary capability, or social skills) becomes the highest priority to use in filling the next position.
3. The search then continues to fill the next most important deficiency, and so forth, until all major bases are covered. As outstanding deficiencies become progressively less serious, increasing emphasis is given to using two-fers, people that have the flexibility to contribute in multiple areas.
4. A tentative list is developed from which to recruit team members. Some come enthusiastically; some drag their feet; and some are jealously defended against recruitment by a boss who wants to use them elsewhere.
5. The enthusiastic group are counted in. The available pool is then scanned to see who can substitute for some of the problematic initial nominees. The team leader decides who is so essential that he or she warrants expenditure of a "silver bullet" to force onto the team. The magazine of silver bullets is always inadequate for putting together a team entirely of first choices, so substitutes are recruited.
6. The final team assembled has major "holes." Every team must be inventive in working around its weaknesses.

FURTHER SUGGESTIONS AND RULES OF THUMB

• Someone who has not been a member of a successful team by the third try or by age 30 will forever be a skeptic. Changing a culture to one built around teams entails (1) finding the believers who had their early successes and (2) getting to young people in time to give them an early success.
• Accept no part-time help. No matter how emphatically this rule is stated, part-time help will always be offered and must always be turned down. Sometimes it is useful to establish an oversight board or review committee to allow powerful part-time volunteers to put their "signature" on the team product with minimum disruption to its activities. Once you constitute such a board or committee, it is difficult to stop it from meddling in day-to-day activity.
• Keep the number of external key people with whom the team interfaces cognitively manageable. For small teams (four to a dozen members), the external personal contacts should be limited to about 50. Large teams (40-50 members) can handle perhaps 200-300 external contacts. It's important to understand who you are dealing with, to remember who told you what. Budget your contacts carefully. Otherwise, the team spends all its effort telling the outside world how great things are going to be and none making its output truly great. The marketers on a team always object to limiting contacts -- they want to sell their wares to anybody and everybody -- but limits are essential.
• Recruiting for a team in DISA does not yet rely upon establishing team rewards. In an agency noted for doing nothing and talking a lot, the opportunity to have a short-term job actually accomplishing something is reward enough. Of course, this may be simply picking the low fruit. Converting the first 10 percent from hierarchic bureaucrats to team players is easy. Manipulating the last 10 percent with rewards and incentives is unexplored territory wherein dwell monsters.
• Other organizations' bridge trolls are suspicious of your team. There are three ways to deal with external bridge trolls:
  • Flattery. Sometimes simply telling someone that he is indeed a powerful and fearsome troll helps to co-opt him into letting you pass.
  • Big, Big Billy/Nanny Goat Gruff. If the team has a powerful sponsor, you can butt the troll off the bridge. Unfortunately, the fall seldom kills the troll who waits for a future chance to get even.
  • Sacrifice a Treasure. Sometimes you just have to do what the troll demands. Usually the treasure demanded is some of your irreplaceable time, so strike the best bargain possible.
• Contractors are difficult to incorporate into a team as full-fledged members. The number of puppet strings that you can pull to manipulate a contractor is limited. If you try to exercise too many incentives, to use too many strings, you end up with a hopeless tangle. The mechanics of awarding contracts and the limits on personal services in government contracts make it difficult to use contractors with the same agility as in-house personnel on fast-response tasking.
• Setting up a team capability in duplicates and competes with one already offered by a line or mission support organization is dangerous. An existing organization will defend its rice bowl, undermining the team if necessary. Outsourcing to an existing organization in the bureaucracy is preferable if it can be given incentives or otherwise controlled to perform acceptably. Beware, though, that the absence of a charge back mechanism in DISA makes the "funny money" in a team's budget for intra-agency outsourcing difficult to use as a control. You never really have it; you can never really withhold it. External managers forget earlier readiness to handle work outsourced from a team when it comes time to perform.
• Constitute a team "just in time." Almost anybody can shed an existing job in two weeks. If you allow people to dribble in according to claimed prior commitments, you will forever be repeating introductory remarks; and the sociology of team building will be set back.
• Never rebuild a team with 50 to 75 percent of the membership of a prior team. It is possible to replace or add a few people to a previous team. All of the rules remain the same, and the number of newbies to be indoctrinated is manageable. If less than half of the members from a previous team are used for the new one, then everybody realizes that a completely new entity is being formed. The problems arise when more than half, but not almost all, of the members come from an old team. The members carried over are bothered by having to repeat team building activities to establish working relationships that they think should automatically be inherited from the old team. The newcomers resent the old-timers' arrogance in assuming that they have privileged, preexisting roles.

Go back to: