January 2008

EthixBiz News
Ask Dr. EthixBiz: “Fired Over Facebook”
EthixBiz Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
Gill's Benchmark Ethics: Three Requirements of Functional Business Teams

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EthixBiz News

Welcome to David W. Gill’s EthixBizine monthly---a free e-zine, distributed twelve times per year, for business leaders, managers, students . . . and anyone else interested in promoting more ethical business.

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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.

-David W. Gill

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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.

Print Version

© 2008 David W. Gill.

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