EthixBizine Archives

March 2008: EthixBizine:Externalizing Costs; Green Gold; Culture
February 2008: Sleazoid Bosses, Wikinonomics; Wiki-Ethics?

January 2008:

Fired Over Facebook; Team Dysfunctions; Team Requirements

December 2007:

Opt In, Opt Out; Trader Joe's; Who Decides What's Right?

November 2007:

Kickbacks, Compensation Ethics, & the Triple Bottom Line  

October 2007:

Workplace Romances, Endearing Firms,  Ethics as A Team Thing

September 2007:

Disinterested Bosses, Damage Control Ethics, & Corporate Purpose



   
March 2008  
Ask Dr. EthixBiz
 

" Externalizing Costs"

Dear Dr. EthixBiz:
I am troubled when, let's say, "Company A" in-sources jobs to a third-party overseas-based "Company B" in a so-called "turn-key" arrangement.  What happens is that American Company A provides on-site work space and limited sponsorship of Company B contract workers from overseas---but not other basic necessities such as medical and dental care. These overseas-based workers (and their dependents) must then pay out-of-pocket for US medical visits because their home country health care providers refuse to reimburse them for medical expenses incurred in the US. Two questions: is it fair to these overseas based workers for Company A to save labor costs by forcing them to pay out of pocket their own basic health and dental expenses? And in the case of catastrophic illness or injury is it fair for Company A to foist these emergency costs onto US taxpayers (or hospital emergency room budgets) just so they can save money? Is this smart business strategy or unethical business practice?
— Mark C.
Dear Mark:
This is a classic example of what we call "externalizing" business costs. Instead of the business bearing the full costs of its workforce---and making investors shoulder it on the books, or passing it onto customers as part of the price of the product---others bear the cost. Another example: when a business doesn't factor in the cost of clean-up or recycling related to its products, it is externalizing these costs onto others, whether they know (or approve) or not. What we want is full cost accounting, not sneaking costs onto others.
 Having said that, if the Company B workers come to the US fully informed about these matters and willing to take the risk of having to pay out of pocket, it is hard to hold Company A completely at fault. The more serious issue is when costs are deliberately foisted onto the hospital or to the broader community without their agreement.
 The more fundamental problem is the lack of safety-net, basic health care in our society---combined with skyrocketing health care costs. Company A is almost forced by marketplace competition to play this Company B game. Let's hope Company A is lobbying for national health care reform to even the playing field and make sure that everyone living and working here can get basic care.
—Dr. EthixBiz
The EthixBiz Review
 

Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage by Daniel C. Esty & Andrew S. Winston (Yale, 2006)

Daniel Esty is a Professor at Yale University in both the Law and Environment Schools and director of the Center for Business and the Environment. He has considerable experience working in the private sector and as a leader at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Andrew Winston has been a marketing and business development executive (TimeWarner, Viacom) and director of the Corporate Environmental Stategy Project at Yale; he now runs of Winston Eco-Strategies. Their wealth of experience comes through in Green to Gold.

Esty and Winston provide a brief historical overview of the factors which are driving today's concerns of business and the environment. Global climate change may be the most dramatic---and controversial—of these factors, but this is in no way the only issue. Declines in reserves of fish, forests, and oil, growing concerns about hazardous waste disposal and pollution of land, sea, and air, and increases in citizen activism demanding business environmental responsibility---these are some of the important forces that keep environmental issues on the business agenda.

A great strength of Green to Gold is that Esty and Winston are concerned equally with managing the downside and the upside of these issues. First, it is about risk management and cost reductions as expenditures (for energy, resources) are minimized and wastes and by-products are recycled. Second, it is about innovating new businesses and products, turning lemons into lemonade, so to speak. Embracing the environmental challenge can both lower costs and spur innovation.

Green to Gold is packed with specific examples. The book also addresses the challenge of "eco-tracking" and finding the metrics to get real about measuring progress in these areas. Green to Gold describes how to build an "Eco-Advantage Culture" and avoid some common pitfalls. They discuss hundreds of companies, some exemplary, others less so, in a balanced and sometimes surprising way. Even McDonald's and Wal-Mart get praise for some of their initiatives; other companies are described as over-rated on their environmental reputations. The evidence and examples offered by the authors is a cut above many crusading competitor books on this topic.

Green to Gold is a 300-page goldmine of valuable insight for all business leaders and managers, not just for environmentalist groupies.

—David W. Gill

 
Gill's Benchmark Ethics
 

Organizational Culture: Four Essential Aspects

Discussion of "corporate" or organizational "culture" has been growing over the past couple decades, and for good reason.

"Culture" is the organizational/group counterpart to what we call "character" in an individual. It's all well and good for an individual to say that he or she is committed to x, y, or z. But do they have the strength of character to make it happen? Character is about our capability, readiness, and inclination to act in one way or another. Character is about the muscle, will, and skill to walk our talk. The positive inclinations and capabilities we often call "virtues” of character; the negative ones have been called "vices."

So too in organizations and businesses: it is our corporate character---our culture---that either enables or disables our performance. An "accidental” or "misaligned" culture has the same chance of success as an out-of-shape competitor in the Olympic Games. A toxic, negative business culture has the same chance of success as a toxic team culture and organization in professional sports.

No matter how glorious our mission and vision or how exemplary our code of ethics and business conduct, the wheels are going to come off if the cultural strength is not there. As Lou Gerstner wrote in Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? (HarperBusiness, 2002; p. 182), "I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game---it is the game."

Business cultures have four aspects, four layers, four components. Neglecting any one of these aspects is a recipe for weakness.

Physical Culture

Our physical infrastructure is laden with values. What I mean by that is that our buildings and grounds, our furnishings and office set-up, our fleet of company vehicles, our equipment, hardware and software, all shout out "teamwork" (or "individual") ……"class hierarchy" (or "equality") ……."beauty" (or "ugly")….."share" (or "protect") ….."come on in and make yourself comfortable" (or "go away") ….. and so on. Don't expect your organization to build camaraderie and teamwork if your office configuration leads them away from each other and provides no congenial meeting space---or if every computer has its own distinctive program configuration.

The point is to figure out carefully what the core values of your culture need to be for success, and then embed those values in the physical infrastructure of the company.

Organizational Culture

Our policies, structures, and processes are also laden with values. For example, our communication and information processes are positive, inclusive, and transparent—or negative, exclusive, and obscure. Some information should and must be protected, of course. The point is to examine our internal and external communication policies and align them with our core values. A second, obvious, example here is compensation: if our compensation is all individual, don't expect teams to perform at their best. If it is all about team and group, don't expect individuals to be as motivated in some circumstances.

The point is that the core values of our company culture need to be intentionally embedded in the org chart, the policies and processes by which we operate.

Personnel Culture

 The third level of culture is that of human flesh and blood. If we believe that "teamwork" is a critical core value but we hire individualists, no matter how high performing in other ways, our culture will limp along. If "fun" is a core value (Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods) and we hire grumpy personalities, no matter how expert in flying or groceries, our culture will be out of alignment. In Good to Great Jim Collins talks about the critical importance of "getting the right people on the bus" and the wrong people off.

The point is that the personal character traits and values of employees must align with the core values of the culture or we will not achieve the excellence and ethics we hope for.

Informal Culture

The fourth level of culture is the informal atmosphere, the company rituals and habits, the stories told around the water cooler. It's how we dress, greet one another, celebrate or mourn together (or alone), make decisions, react to news, good and bad, and so on. Actually, in the corporate culture literature, this aspect of culture gets quite a bit of attention. The difference between casual, fun cultures like Southwest Airlines or Trader Joe's and their more straight-laced counterparts fascinates observers. It is important for managers and leaders to take a cultural reading at this level and take action to build a healthy, positive informal atmosphere. People spend a huge part of their lives in the workplace; making sure that that workplace experience is positive and enabling is just smart leadership.

A cultural anthropologist (like Indiana Jones) would pay careful attention to (1) the physical, (2) the organizational, (3) the people, and (4) the informal aspects of any new civilization they discovered. Business leaders can't afford to overlook any of these aspects of their own corporate cultures as they pursue excellence and ethics.

© 2008 David W. Gill.

Print Version
February 2008
Ask Dr. EthixBiz
 

“Covering Up for Sleazoid Bosses”

Dear Dr. EthixBiz:

A colleague spent more than ten years in ethically compromised organizations working under leaders who cheated on their taxes and had business officers cover it up, lied to employees about budgets and benefits costs, conducted extramarital affairs in the workplace, and committed general employment policy violations . . . . the stories are worthy of TV. This person believed it was her job to find creative ways to spin these compromises to staff and the result seems to have been a dulling of her ethical conscience. How might you advise her to sharpen her ethical conscience and now speak diplomatically and confidently about what’s true in the workplace?

—Susan P.

Dear Susan:

Your colleague was in a tough position—not quite doing the bad stuff itself but asked to cover it up. Letting it go on for ten years is indeed a recipe for a dull, inattentive conscience. But it could also be a recipe for some jail time and a real career buster. If we know about illegal activity (tax cheating, lying to employees, violating policies) and don’t report it, we are legally liable for participating in the cover-up. We are accessories to the crime. We don’t even have to be active in the deception as your friend was; just being silent about crimes is enough to court serious trouble. Fear can be a great motivator for change. Your colleague---and her bosses—need to be fed the daily stories of companies and careers destroyed when people get caught. Love, however, is an even better motivator than fear. What I mean is that business people need to be challenged and inspired to aim higher. They need examples of successful companies and leaders with great character and ethics. Feed your colleagues and bosses a constant stream of stories of ethical excellence in business. I just read this morning about Southwest Airlines’s financial performance, on-time record, and customer and employee satisfaction for last year: top of the airline charts for something like the 35 th year in a row. People need to know that you don’t need to operate like (for example) CEO Glen Tilton and United Airlines; you could go the route of Herb Kelleher, Gary Kelly, Colleen Barrett and Southwest Airlines.  So as a friend I would challenge and encourage my cover-up colleague to be all she can be, to aim higher and do the right thing, to build relationships with colleagues of character, to be the kind of person her kids can be proud of some day, to caution and pressure her bosses to clean up their own act, avoid disaster and achieve their own potential and greatness. She needs some support to make and sustain such changes---maybe you and a couple other colleagues meet once a week as a coffee (and support) group. If things get too bad she must blow the whistle and (probably) find a new job. Her support group can help her know when that point is reached.

—Dr. EthixBiz

 
The EthixBiz Review
 

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams (Penguin/Portfolio, 2006)

“Wikinomics” is defined by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams as “the art and science of mass collaboration”---or “the art and science of peer production.” The inspiration, of course, is Wikipedia---the online encyclopedia created by ten thousand volunteer authors, ten times larger than the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and fact-checked to roughly the same degree of accuracy.

Tapscott and Williams argue that today’s IT collaboration tools are bringing about radical changes in business and beyond. The successful business leader/manager will of necessity understand and utilize the new powers and possibilities of the wiki (Hawaiian term for “quick”) world.

Four basic principles run through this “wikinomics”: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Openness means that transparency replaces secrecy. Hierarchy, in turn, is replaced by self-organizing peering relationships within and between organizations. Sharing replaces proprietary thinking. Acting globally represents a step beyond acting multi-nationally.

Tapscott and Williams describe seven models of wikinomic collaboration. (1) “Peer production” is exemplified by Wikipedia and Linux. (2) “Ideagoras” are forums in which both problems (without solutions) and solutions (without applications) are openly shared---inviting outsiders as well as insiders to invent answers. (3) “Prosumers” brings consumers into the design and production process, not just the purchase and use stage. (4) “The New Alexandrians” (e.g., the Human Genome Project) invite collaborative research among laboratories and between university and industry and see amazing advances in scientific knowledge. (5) “Platforms for Participation” describes things like Amazon’s reader review section, and other collaborative knowledge sharing sites. (6) The “Global Plant Floor” describes how not just parts but whole modules are produced in different places, shipped and snapped together at the last moment (e.g., Boeing’s newest planes). (7) The “Wiki Workplace” is exemplified by the “Geek Squad’s” development and subsequent incorporation into Best Buy.

All of Don Tapscott’s books (with several different co-authors) have been fascinating and insightful reading, including Wikinomics. I give this book a “buy” recommendation. Tapscott is a bit cheerleader as well as journalist---breathless with excitement about the possibilities (is it just me that feels exhausted at the thought of more info and chaos at a higher pace?). Tapscott acknowledges that there will be inevitable growing pains and adjustments but he really sees wikinomics as an irresistible trend.

Among the problems and challenges of the open, free, anonymous, wiki-world: If everything becomes common property, where does the profit motive get to do its motivational work? If everyone has equal access, how are things like expertise and truth preserved (e.g., Amazon reader reviews are notoriously unreliable; political sabotage of Wikipedia entries is not unknown)? As thought and action become more global and less local, what happens to cultural- and bio-diversity? Do we really want results that represent a homogenized, common denominator world? One universal account of the human genome seems like a wiki-win. But would mass collaboration confine us to a world of Olive Gardens, Starbucks, and CNNs? Oh joy.

Bottom line for me: some things will always best be done by individuals acting under their own inspiration and genius; most things benefit from collaboration at various stages; and some things benefit from mass collaboration of the wikinomics type. But not everything. To paraphrase Cisco (“no technology religion”), No wikinomics religion! Say Yes and embrace it when it aligns with your personal or corporate mission; say No when it doesn’t. Sometimes mass collaboration will lead to breakthroughs; other times it will lead to mediocrity and paralysis.

—David W. Gill

 
Gill's Benchmark Ethics
 

Wiki-ethics?
by David W. Gill

Ethics is a social and relational thing. It is about how we should treat one another (people and planet). It is largely a collaborative enterprise.

Creating A Code of Ethics

 With a few qualifications, corporate ethics can be helped by becoming a kind of “wiki-ethics.” The most obvious place to begin is with the organization’s code of ethics. Ever since I started researching, teaching, and consulting more than three decades ago, it has seemed to me that the best people to write a code of ethics are the practitioners in the trenches---not management, not HR, and certainly not some external consulting firm.

First of all, it is a question of expertise. Who knows the ethical temptations to cut corners or bend the rules in sales transactions like people in sales? Who knows the temptations and dilemmas of accounting better than accountants? In hiring better than HR? My approach is to ask all employees to describe how they spend their time on the job. Map out their business practices. Then think about a new employee hired to take on these roles and practices (maybe a new branch office somewhere). Assume that you can’t be available 24/7 to mentor the new employee through every possible circumstance. Now write a couple simple, clear, but adequate guidelines to help keep those practices on track: avoiding trouble, achieving the goals. A certain amount of editing and iterating is required before the code is ready to roll out but this is the core exercise. In the end, the code is radically better fitted to company reality than some abstract legalisms created and handed down by external authorities.

Periodically the guidelines need to be reviewed and updated: go back to the practitioners for this help. Could the code be posted on the company web site for a month, inviting and allowing employees to edit to text directly, Wikipedia-style? Not a bad idea at all, though (like Wikipedia itself) the final editorial responsibility must lie with management.

Second, a collaboratively written code like this is “owned” by the people. They wrote it, they own it. Wiki-ethics is not just about expertise but ownership. Usually, if we made something and own it, we embrace it, value it, and care for it. Wonder why company codes of ethics are generally boring and un-valued by employees? Because they are experienced as flawed abstractions coming from upstairs where they really don’t know what’s going on in our life in the trenches.

Interpreting, Applying, and Evaluating our Company Ethics

Company ethics training so often directs people to sit as isolated individuals in front of computer screens to fill out this year’s compliance and ethics training. But life and ethics is not like that. This is a distinctly second-rate approach to ethics and values training. Far better to bring people together in seminars, discussions, and focus groups to discuss issues, standards, and the best resolution of dilemmas that may come up. So too on line: better to host some threaded discussions and blogs about company ethics, than just a one-directional content presentation to passive viewers.

“Interpreting and applying”---figuring out what’s right and carrying out what’s right---are usually complex and challenging tasks in our organizations. Collaborating with others is an essential process in lifting our ethical health and performance above the norm.

“Evaluating” our ethics is also a process that benefits from wide discussion and commentary. All employees, not just all managers, should be surveyed about the strengths and weaknesses of our stated standards, our training, our performance on our ethics and values. Ethics audits and assessments must be “upward” (employees evaluating management and the company) as well as “downward” (management evaluating employees).

Healthier (and wikier) still, inviting suggestions and evaluations from outside the company is a move likely to add value. Competitors, partners, academics, community and family members---why not be transparent and open about our standards and guidelines and invite a broader input?

Preserve the Core . . . Stimulate Progress

Jim Collins and Jerry Porras’s Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994) argued that sustainably great companies always demonstrated a kind of yin/yang dialectic of tenaciously preserving and guarding their core purpose/mission/vision/values on the one hand and radically, bolding experimenting/reaching/developing/growing on the other.

Collins and Porras give lots of business history and data to make their point but I think it is also common sense. We can embrace and benefit from chaos to the extent we are anchored to our core purpose. The criterion for evaluating the ideas and possibilities in the wiki-chaos is the potential to contribute to the purpose.

So too in ethics: the legitimacy of our ethics depends on its alignment with the organization’s core purpose and mission. Our code of ethics is an account of how to get there from here, how to treat one another, our stakeholders, and the environment in order to achieve our mission and vision with sustainable excellence and success. The organizational core mission and vision must welcome comment and seek ownership by all the members of the organization. But they cannot be open to negotiation to nearly the same degree as the details of the code of ethics. (if they are, what we are considering is an entirely new organization).

An open, collaborative “wiki-ethics” is the way to go—so long as it is anchored in a clear, strong, inspiring organizational mission and vision.

Print Version

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January 2008


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Ask Dr. EthixBiz
 

“Fired Over Facebook”

Dear Dr. EthixBiz:

MySpace and Facebook profiles and comments have sometimes led to employee dismissals. If an employee is writing about his own life experiences on a computer not owned by the company and records his thoughts outside of working hours and off company premises, should the company have the right to discipline or fire the employee simply because they don’t approve of these postings? A veteran Delta airlines flight attendant began a blog in 2003, always referring to her employer as “Anonymous Airlines.” When she posted pictures of herself in her Delta uniform she was quickly fired. She has sued the airline (pending) and written a book about her experiences. She is not the first blogger to be fired from a job after commenting on an employer.

-Sean O’Morrisey

Dear Sean:

Without knowing more details about the Delta employee’s case (did Delta have any stated policies regarding off-the-job behavior or on-line blogging? What exactly was she saying in her blog comments? How was she posed in those photos? Etc.) I can’t really form a very helpful opinion on that case.

We are in a sort of brave new world of internet-enabled info distribution and transparency. Our opinions and postings can go anywhere and everywhere whether we like it or not. Companies need to formulate policy guidelines and be clear to employees about what they expect and what the implications of these policies are. Individual employees need to be smart and never post anything in one of these quasi-public forums they wish to remain private. Write up your Facebook profile as though your boss may be reading it---or as though it will be researched by a future employer (it probably will be!).

In my opinion it is ethical and fair for employers to require that our off-the-job behavior should not unreasonably feed back negatively on the reputation of the company. The exact nature of such a requirement has a lot to do with the nature of the business, of course. Off-the-job scandal for a brewery worker is different than for an AA chapter director, for example. It is only fair, in the other direction, that employees be allowed to organize and even to protest and criticize (in a reasonable, factual way) their employers.

 Bottom lines: Healthy organizations establish clear, reasonable policies on these matters. Those companies which want to attract innovative, creative, leadership-gifted people need to maintain an open, non-paranoid culture---and not be threatened, overreact, or snoop on their people. Successful employees, on the other hand, will add to their courage and boldness a bit of caution and common sense about what they say and do off the job and on-line. .

—Dr. EthixBiz

Remember: Everybody has a right to “Ask Dr. EthixBiz.”
Send your questions and hard cases to ask@ethixbiz.com

 
The EthixBiz Review


The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (Jossey-Bass, 2002)

Why add another review of a book that was published six years ago? When I saw The Five Dysfunctions of a Team reappear on the Wall Street Journal business best seller list again recently, I finally decided I needed to find out what’s going on. What keeps this little book in the stratospheric company of Good to Great and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People year after year? What does Patrick Lencioni know—or do---that other business authors don’t?

Patrick Lencioni is president of The Table Group, a management consulting firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Earlier in his career he worked at Bain & Company, Sybase, and Oracle. Among his other books are The Five Temptations of a CEO,The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Death by Meeting, Silos, Politics, & Turf Wars, and most recently, The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.

Five Dysfunctions (like Lencioni’s other books) starts with an extended business “fable” (184 pages of the total 225), followed by a brief summary of the lessons of the fable. In Five Dysfunctions the story is about a company Lencioni calls “DecisionTech.” The young Silicon Valley start-up is floundering after a promising beginning. A new CEO, Kathryn, is brought in to try to right the ship. The fable introduces a half-dozen individuals on her leadership team and describes her challenges and strategies in building an effective leadership team for the company. There is some drama, conflict, complexity, and texture to Lencioni’s story. It feels real and doesn’t paper over the ambiguities and trade-offs involved in actual business situations. Basically, pretty plain stuff. No gratuitous sex or violence (not that we should expect any but I was wondering why over a million people bought this book!).

Here are the dysfunctions: First, an absence of trust among team members. This leads to the second problem: a fear of conflict. Without no-holds-barred productive conflict, teams cannot generate their best ideas. And that leads to the third dysfunction: lack of commitment. Teams don’t get buy-in unless everyone’s voice has been heard and taken seriously. Without commitment, problem four arises: avoidance of accountability. Without commitment to clear directions, accountability is elusive; and this leads to the fifth dysfunction, inattention to results. Without the foundational trust, clarity, and accountability team member attention drifts away from what should be the goals of the team’s existence.

Bottom line: you couldn’t call Lencioni’s fable great or gripping literature but it obviously works as a learning vehicle for many, many readers. His five basic points are insightful, no doubt about it, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book. It is very well-written and a relatively quick read.

Personally, though, I prefer to read biographies, histories, and analyses of real companies, leaders, and teams. In fact, I urge all managers and leaders to commit to a regular diet of such reading. Remember the old adage: “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.” As for the content of Lencioni’s argument, it strikes me as more of a trouble-shooting commentary than a serviceable formula for building effective teams. By itself, Lencioni’s book will help overcome some critical dysfunctions---and this is great. But it is insufficient as a general blueprint for building functionally great teams.

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Gill's Benchmark Ethics
 

Three Requirements of Functional Business Teams
 by David W. Gill

A basic mantra of EthixBiz is that “ethics is a team (not solo) sport” (see the October 2007 EthixBizine for my column of that title). An individualistic ethics is inherently weaker than a relational one. In fact, many historians and sociologists would say that all ethics and morality are by nature “socially constructed.”

But let’s go further. Not just ethics but business itself is predominantly a team thing. Why do companies exist? Because we can do certain things better together than we could on our own. If that is not true, why bother? Let’s skip the group struggles and just pursue our work on our own.

Within organizations it is critical to maintain a healthy yin/yang between (1) unleashing and empowering individuals to take on tasks best done unencumbered by others, and (2) building effective teams/groups to carry out tasks (like ethics) best-served by multiple perspectives.

Few things are more destructive to organizations than ineffective, time-consuming, boring, aggravating teams (by which I mean committees, working groups, task forces, even departments; we’re speaking broadly here about sub-groups in organizations, the intermediate groupings between the individual and the organization as a whole).

All teams, groups, committees, and departments---even those viewed as permanently essential (e.g., the HR department)---need to be reviewed regularly and dumped if they are not adding clear value to the organization.

Inspired by Patrick Lencioni’s wise reflection on five dysfunctions of a team, I couldn’t help but think about the three requirements I have discovered in my work with teams.

Requirement #1: A Clear, Unmistakable Mission

The first thing I notice about dysfunctional teams is their lack of a clear raison d’être---a “reason to exist.” What is our purpose, our goal, the job we have been assembled to accomplish. One organization I worked in actually dropped the term “committee” in favor of “task force”---just to make it plain that these teams had a job to do.

If we can’t articulate a compelling reason why we are coming together as a team, we are dead in the water. Trust, communication, accountability, etc.: all these team virtues are secondary to the matter of purpose. It is purpose and mission that inspire (or not), that unite (or not), that drive (or draw) the team forward in constructive ways.

Here are some important aspects of team missions:

  • The mission has to be clear, understandable, articulate. Fuzzy purposes lead to fuzzy performance.
  • The team/sub-group mission must be in clear, recognizable alignment with the grand, overall mission of the company.
  • What inspires effort is creating/building something great together----or fixing/repairing some big problem together. Tap into one of those missional themes to leverage people’s enthusiasm and high performance.
  • Set clear timelines for the accomplishment of the mission and work of the team. Teams that float along without clear, ambitious but achievable deadlines will sink.

Requirement #2: Effective Team Leadership

The second dysfunction on teams I have seen and worked with is lack of effective leadership. All the other components may be in place but bad leadership will still ruin the team. A sports team may have a great playbook, supportive fans, warm and open relationships, and talented players; but if the leadership is not there, they will not win. We see it all the time.

An organization I used to work for had lots of great, talented people---whose energy was too often wasted by drifting, purposeless committee duties. A working rule in this paranoid organization was that committee and departmental leadership should be rotated at least every three years. It was thought that this was necessary to prevent anyone from building an entrenched mini-kingdom in the organization. What it actually did was to ensure mediocre leadership, lack of continuity, and, in consequence, low morale and poor performance. There are other ways than term limits to prevent min-fiefdoms from arising.

Here are some team leadership essentials:

  • Leaders need to have passion for the mission, not the position. Good leaders want to get the job done, want project success and are champing at the bit to get it done well.
  • Effective leaders have great eyes and ears: like great quarterbacks the “see” the whole field of play; like great counselors and friends they really listen to what others are saying.
  • Effective leaders are good at synthesis; they see or build connections between what individuals contribute; on the personnel level it’s called collaboration.
  • Good team leaders hold themselves and their team members accountable; they set team members free and trust with their individual tasks but coach, evaluate, prod, encourage, and reward as appropriate.

Good team leadership isn’t automatic. It is much more than mechanically working through an agenda.

Requirement #3: Empowering & Equipping Teams for Success

The third dysfunction on business teams I have seen is a lack of empowerment and equipment to get the mission accomplished. The purpose could be clear, talented leadership could be in place, but the team will still underperform if it is not given the means to accomplish the end.

On the material level, I’m talking about meeting and work spaces, communication and computer hardware and software, and adequate budgetary support. The material infrastructure empowers or impedes team performance.

On the policy and structure level, this involves clear and effective job descriptions, scheduling, guidelines for communication, research, and collaboration, meeting and decision-making protocols, reporting, and reviewing. It also means having reward and compensation systems that recognize team accomplishments. Policies and procedures either empower and encourage team performance---or they discourage and undermine it.

On the personnel level, teams need to have solid players with the gifts and experiences to cover all the key positions on the team. You can’t have all running backs and no blockers---or vice versa---and win games. In light of the mission and the nature of the business “game” that will be played, teams must be empowered by good quality personnel in all that right spots.

Good business teams are essential. Teams are not easy or automatic. Clear mission, effective leadership, and an empowering infrastructure and culture are how functional teams are born and sustained.

© 20087 David W. Gill.

Print Version

 

We encourage the use of these materials in business and educational contexts but please write first for permission: zine@ethixbiz.com

© 2008 David W. Gill, EthixBiz.com.

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December 2007
 


Ask Dr. EthixBiz: “Opt In, Opt Out: What’s Right?”
EthixBiz Review: The Trader Joe’s Adventure by Len Lewis
Gill's Benchmark Ethics: Six Criteria for Right & Wrong in Today’s Business

 

Ask Dr. EthixBiz


“Opt In, Opt Out: What’s Right?”

Dear Dr. EthixBiz::

For e-commerce companies, customer mailing lists are a significant asset. Because of the low order rate from catalog mailings and email blasts, having a large and solid list of customer info with previous order history is crucial. While many websites make it easy to opt out of their mailing lists, others aggressively market to the masses even if the email is unwanted. Email is cheaper than catalog mailings and has a more immediate response. This has created tremendous spam volume for everyone. However, I have happily purchased items I had not expected to buy (discounted plane tickets, flowers, gifts) when tempted by an unsolicited email ad. Should retailers stop mining our order history for info and stop emailing ads out to everyone or always wait for customers to request mailing list removals?

-Joyce Solano 

Dear Joyce:

The basic ethical issues relate to justice and privacy.