Culture-Driven Team Building Capstone: Week 1

I’m studying the course Culture-Driven Team Building Capstone on Coursera. These are my revision notes for week 1.

Tony Morales Interview

• Intergrowth:
  • a global leadership advisory firm
  • helping with talent and organisation issues, such as executive search, executive coaching, leadership development, organisational design, risk, culture transformation, strategy
  • Tony is a senior consultant at Intergrowth
• Logistics and Transportation Corp approached with an RFP:
  • Need an executive search firm to help find new CFO
  • Intergrowth was selected on the basis of that tasks, and then continued to engaged with the company in a number of other practice areas.
• CFO search – first impressions:
  • The problem looked a little funky for an organisation of this size ($2b enterprise)
    • No succession plan in place for their CFO
  • There were many other organisational dynamics issues that stemmed from their history
    • Origin story: two blue-collar immigrant workers, saved enough money to buy a bus, slept in it while building capital and expanding the business, until eventually became hugely successful
    • Problems with this:
      • the founders were never really operationally sophisticated
      • struggled moving from old economy thinking to digital age of transformation enterprises (e.g. Uber, Lyft)
      • there may be disconnects between how the company is currently operating, and how it ought to operate
  • This is a great story about how critical thought around leadership and leadership intervention can really benefit organisations
• The transportation industry:
  • is going through a lot of change (e.g. Uber, Lyft, Tesla)
  • Transportation isn’t what it was 30 years ago, or as it had been 100 years ago
  • An organisation in the transportation industry that is still being run in “mom and pop” style would have some problems around innovation management

What Are Teams?

• A team is any group of people that performs some collective task on which they have to work together, that is, they have to cooperate
• In businesses, there are many tasks that require coordination. It’s the job of management to make sure that people coordinate on these tasks.
• It is the cooperation in the performance of a task that makes a group a team
• “We” intentions versus “I” intentions

A Closer Look at Culture

• Culture is whatever people learn from other people, and transmit to other people, especially by interacting with them.
• Culture:
  • ways of behaving and speaking
  • how to think and reason
  • values and goals
• Embodied culture is the things we don’t event need to think about (e.g. dribbling ball, singing anthem, attitudes to horse meat)
• Values and goals that guide our actions
• Teams need their preconceived routines, their ways of reasoning about the world and their goals and values

Being Unaware of Culture

• We are not even aware of a lot of culture we acquire from others
• For example, how close we stand to each other
  • Proxemics is the study of the amount of space people feel necessary to keep between themselves and other people
    • Intimate zone (0 to 18 inches in America)
    • Personal zone (18 inches to 4 feet in America)
    • Social zone (4 feet to 12 feet in America)
    • Public zone (beyond 12 feet in America)
  • These distances vary based on your cultural upbringing
• Cooperation on teams involves expectations of this sort.
• When the expectation are violated, the performance of the team can suffer

BART

• BART stands for Boundaries, Authority, Roles, and Task
• BART is a way of thinking about teams that emphasises psycho-dynamic processes
• Boundaries
  • e.g. time, physical setting, psychological, etc
  • Time boundary examples
    • people arriving late, checking mail during meeting, etc
    • In many cultures, commencing a meeting on time is considered very important, a trademark of being very professional at work.
    • In other cultures, they’re very lenient. It’s OK to stary a meeting 15 minutes later than the scheduled time.
  • Perhaps the team does not value boundaries.
• Authority
  • e.g. who wields authority, who has formal or informal authority
  • e.g. the person who was the designated leader was not the actual leader. The acutal leader was another team member who was a subject matter expert.
  • Who is considered to be an authority in the context?
  • We have formal and informal authority
• Roles
  • e.g. formal and informal roles
  • e.g. one team had a member who was seen and designated as the contrarian
    • every point that was made, he felt called upon to disagree, contract, argue
    • he was really their critical thinking partner, so that turned out to be positive
  • Think about what the role says about the group or team and how you can understand that
• Task
  • e.g. at least 2 tasks
    • work task
      • What is it that we’re assigned to do?
      • What is our purpose?
    • survival task
      • How do we sustain ourselves?
      • How do we continue our activity?
  • Teams can often get confused between their survival task, as opposed to their assignment

Managing Reward Systems

• Reward systems in the workplace like performance reviews, bonuses, and promotions are powerful ways to shape culture and create an atmosphere of inclusion
  • They can also be a source of implicit bias.
  • Disadvantaging certain groups of people, even if they appear to be totally neutral.
  • If you’re serious about boosting diversity on your team, you have to think about the unintentional forms of bias that could be hiding in your reward systems
• Symphony orchestras
  • Few of them reflect the population of the cities they represent
    • Just over 10% of orchestra musicians are people of colour
  • This is due to:
    • unequal access to music education
    • hidden biases in systems of reward and advancement from an early age
  • People of colour are tenured at a rate of about 30%, which is way lower than their white colleagues
    • Peers nitpick small imperfections in their performances and character that they would normally let slide with white musicians
    • This can happen totally unconsciously and in small ways
    • Those small unintentional forms of bias lead to fewer opportunities for people of colour at a large scale
• Same effect can happen with informal rewards systems. Such as praise from supervisors, recognition for team members’ achievements, or even just who we listen to at meetings
• How to combat biases?
  • Measure outcomes
    • When you set specific targets for diversity, and measure progress toward achieving them, you can uncover unintentional bias in an objective way and that leads to better accountability.
  • Post results publicly
  • The Shield (see Promoting Diversity in the Workplace)
    • The unspoken rule on the team was men direct the conversation at meetings
    • Mazzara created a new rule for the team. He told them that no one should be interrupted when they were pitching an idea

Addressing Representational Gaps

• Representational gaps: gaps in perception about team problems, including the team’s ultimate task and what’s important to execute team goals
• Representational gaps arise from:
  • differences in knowledge sets
  • differences in value sets
  • conflicting interpretations of new knowledge
• How to reconcile incompatible views?
• An intentional effort is needed on teams to reconcile different perspectives.
  • This is important because functionally diverse teams often lack shared knowledge
  • Compatibility is established by providing adequate time for team members to build relationships and get to know each other
• Key is for team members to mutually understand the values, beliefs and attitudes represented in the team
• There needs to be a shared understanding of how individuals within teams identify problems
• Four keys to representing any problem: GAEO
  • Goal hierarchy: how we prioritise goals
  • Assumptions: how we assume others behave, or how we assume others are limited in time or resources
  • Elements: components of the problem that are changeable
  • Operators: the ways that the components of the problem can change
• Companies can set ground rule expectations that establish these shared ways of understanding problems.
  • Teams can recognise that different behaviours may exist, and these behaviours are unique to particular countries or cultures
  • This recognition and acceptance of differences helps to establish shared knowledge, and creates opportunities for mutual understanding among team members
• At an organisational level managerial staff must set an example for valuing diversity on teams.
  • Examples:
    • Mentoring relationships
    • Job shadowing
    • Relationship building time
    • 360 feedback
  • Watch out for the potential to blur roles and to reduce creative solutions
• Managers need to be strategic in drawing out their teams’ creativity
• Jim Shaw, former executive vice president of MTV networks
  • a “left-brain” guy in a “right-brain” organisation
  • Initially responded to creative suggestions by discussing possible ways where the idea could go wrong
  • This had the effect of shutting down the idea
  • Instead of diving in with his perspective on the suggestion, Jim learned to incrementally share contingency planning information.
  • This way creative people can fully explain themselves and get their ideas on the table
  • No two people on Jim’s team thinks alike, and this needs to be accounted for
• Example from the last section of team that broke apart (Beth & John):
  • Remaining four called themselves the “Small Beautiful Team”
  • Set out to reestablish goals, roles and norms for their team
  • They managed representational gaps between them through establishing frequent check-ins for information sharing and goal setting
  • The norms of active and deliberate listening where critical to their building compatibility across their views and mutual understanding of each other’s perspectives
  • Decisions were much slower and more deliberate than before.
  • One conversation when the new CEO (Nigel) called attention
  • Roles because more evenly distributed and more clearly defined
  • Representational gaps will inevitably exist, but with thoughtful intention, compatibility across individuals and high function can be achieved when mutual understanding is the goal

Course Structure

1. Write a paper:
   • What are the potential issues you think this company could be facing
   • What factors would you as a consultant need to consider?
2. Peer Review
   • Read someone else’s paper and comment on it
3. Make a diagnosis
   • Write 5-8 questions down that you would want to ask the client to find out more relevant information about their situation