I regularly take photos of natural wonders. Recently, I witnessed teaming in a natural setting. About a month ago, while walking through a park, I crossed a bridge spanning a large pond and saw three turtles sitting on a rock basking in the sun. What was amazing about this was that all three turtles sat completely motionless without making any sound. I took a long-range picture, but it was blurry and I decided to get a closer shot. As I got to within 10 feet of them, they suddenly all dived into the pond at the same time. Now, ordinarily this would seem normal, but what I noticed was the split second decisiveness of their entry into the water. They were synchronized in their movement, it was almost as if they were “subliminally coordinated” to take flight at exactly the same time.

Subliminal Coordination: what does it mean?

In the animal kingdom, and in nature in general, there is a tendency for people and animals to team together by communicating and collaborating, but what if no words need to be spoken, or any sounds uttered to signal an outcome or event? I observed this a number of years ago when my son was playing a video game with his cousin. The two boys were playing a simulation video game that required them to team, as military soldiers, and score points every time they eliminated an alien species. Neither of the boys uttered a word as they silently went about the business in a coordinated synchronized manner moving through the game’s walled passages, scoring points by protecting each other, navigating and challenging the enemy together. What became obvious was that by consistently moving through the game they were demonstrating consistent teaming attributes. They did this by understanding each other’s tactics, intuitively and seamlessly becoming comfortable with each other’s style. This allowed them to repetitively practice each scenario simulation, repeat and mentally learn what mistakes they each made, as well as what made them successful as a team. Eerily as this sounds, it was almost as if both boys had a sixth sense, as they were connected without the use of voice, or sound, but had actually mastered the art of sharing visual cues and mental telepathy from each other.

Real world context: how do we team?

Throughout history, we have witnessed in military, sports, entertainment and business environments, simulations practiced in scenarios that represent real-life situations, where team members have intuitively shown understanding and become familiar with the habits and styles of each other to produce an outcome. Teams are made up of individuals, whose strengths are willingly contributed, making each member both unique and complimentary to the team. Since the advent of mobile devices, application software and communication channels such as texting, diagrammatic representations, video and workflow, we have started to see more examples of subliminal teaming. Subliminal teaming is where members get to know each other and make informed decisions, resulting in synergistically speeding up the process and timing of team deliverables. Constant chatter is eliminated as members get more comfortable with decision making and collaborating online, resulting in actions flowing more seamlessly in a trusting, empowered networked environment. Teams have starting using video gaming, and an entire team can focus on a topic, becoming syncronized with each other through role-playing and visual interactions in their teaming and knowledge sharing tactics.

Rock star vs rock-stars

What we experience in business, politics, the entertainment industry, and the media, is individuals are judged and positioned on the merits of what they individually represent, how they get personified into icons are aggrandized and get perceived as “rock-stars”. Most businesses pride themselves on hiring “rock stars”, with the assumption that if they staff multiple rock-stars, all would be well and all deliverables would be met. In reality, it is often the case where individual rock-stars don’t necessarily make good team leads, or where teams (band members) don’t always cooperate, collaborate and make beautiful music together. In a typical rock-band, if all the members were rock-stars, there would be no concert, as each member would be looking for his or her “minute of fame”, there would be a lot of noise, as no-one would be able to play their unique specific instrument. The rock star focus should be the rock-stars, a team.

Teaming demands coordination, mutual consent and subliminal cooperation from every band member to be able to promote and produce songs. In other words, it takes an entire band to perform consistently, and one rock-star is only as good as the collective contribution and practice from the entire group.

The problem with team structures

So why do we focus so much attention on the individual? Why do we paint this one-ness picture in every real-life teaming situation? Why do we credential individuals to the point of ignoring the most important attributes of teaming, and spend so much time making sure individuals are all as competent as the other team members. Is team success equally important or even more important than individual success? 

One of the factors that tends to discourage teaming is the fact that in today’s corporate environment, people are rewarded as individuals within the confines and goals of supporting a functional role only, and not contributions to a project based role. Furthermore, rewards are not often given to teams, where team members get rewarded for team outcomes or deliverables.

Another example is where the traditional recruiting game is played by credentialing each person based on a set of requirements to fulfill a specific role, but what is often overlooked is the critical teaming capabilities each individual should possess and demonstrate in order to ensure teams are complimented with a diverse set of members to be successful.

How teams can be more successful

• It takes a group of willing and able team members to respect and trust one another
• It takes a behavioral change to empower and encourage team contribution
• It takes an incentive to shift from mostly individual compensation to incentivize team success
• Team goals, objectives and outcomes should be given more definition to be more easily adopted into existing structures
• Assume all members in the team are rock-stars, and deserve to be treated as such
• Encourage team-building, and informally promote rotational team roles for ongoing learning and cooperation
• Promote open communication and collaboration, and explore subliminal coordination among members
• Actively seek ways for team members to be in sync, simulate scenarios and role play when brain-storming ideas, solutions and outcomes
• Respect individual contributions and proactively encourage member strengths as you treat each member as a “different piece in the team puzzle”
• Open up all channels of communication, allowing members to openly interact and share experiences based on repetitive situations
• Break-down barriers and encourage an open team communication environment
• Make sure the team members intuitively get to understand and become familiar with the habits and styles of each other
• Encourage synchronized simulation of solution development, design thinking and agile knowledge sharing

A Teaming example

In agile sprint meetings teams meet on a daily basis and get comfortable with collective member activities as the entire team transparently shares ideas, actions and concerns. This trusting environment promotes collaboration and cohesion between members. Agile teams often have to deal with complex or uncertain task assignments, but through a repetitive process, non threatening approach, they quickly learn to work as a team and intuitively collaborate to produce outcomes, solve problems and learn. This focus on the behavior of selfless teaming, collective member contribution, and thoughtful sharing of problems as well as successes, proves that teaming is very much alive today, and is not just another management fad.

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 5 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.

Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) are often challenged with staying current on technological trends and consistently delivering solution projects. In addition, CIO’s often struggle with allocating the right time, attention and focus towards: strategy, service delivery, issue resolution and the future of technology. The good news is that today’s CIO’s have started to better prioritize time and energy spent on strategic technology matters, tactical execution of solutions, however the world of technology management has changed in various ways, and …

Today CIO’s find themselves in a situation where:

• Technology has become the business. In almost every industry, most firms have an online internet presence and for many firms, technology is at the core of the business, and for others, technology and information processing has not only become common, but replaced paper.
• Technology is an enabler and is the business. Business processes become more integrated with technology, from online transaction processing, to in-house processing and data storage.
• Technology problems tend to get resolved by a collective C-suite team. In addition to business participants, there is a blurring of role lines with clearer division of labor between the CIO, the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and CDO (Chief Digital Officer).
• Business transformation is starting to leverage technology innovation. Under proper governance practices, steering and working groups are spending more time discussing ideas, proposing new solutions and collaborating on technological innovation.
• The role of the CIO has become as all-inclusive role, with responsibility for all aspects of information management. This includes accountability for strategy, innovation, delivery, optimization, and management.
• CIO’s have broader choices when it comes to resource management. Technology groups now have resource portfolios inclusive of blended skilled, dedicated employees, contractors, 3rd party partners, and vendors.

Today CIO’s focus on the following right trends…

but is the right attention given to future opportunities?

1. Focusing on the “Future of Technology”:

Yester-year, the focus was: Build out software for the near-term, run the “factory”, optimize servers and get client requirements, build solutions, and manage expectations.

• Today’s focus is: Ideation and project review forums that encourage active representation in a collective collaboration focused, planning and solution roadmap reviews.
• Future opportunity focus: For the future, forward looking view of technology; CIO’s should expect to continue to manage technology for today, and tomorrow, but put more emphasis on engaging more closely with industry experts, clients in future focused technology forums such as innovation labs and solution think-tanks. These forums start with the Long-Term (3-5 year) roadmap, but also focus on the market offerings and trends associated with horizontal and vertical integration of services, solutions and partnerships.

2. Demand management and prioritization: 

Yester-year, the focus was: Traditionally, in the past, IT and Business employed “siloed” governance and prioritization processes; IT aligned with the business, documented decisions, and “figured it out”, but it was a lengthy process that was neither collaborative nor inclusive.

• Today’s focus is: Clients demand to “do more with less”, expect integrated tools with client teams deciding where to optimize, where to invest, and how much to spend?
• Future opportunity focus: With the advent of mature governance models, advanced business intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence (AI), forward thinking models, demand planning, and automated decisioning, CIO’s can expect faster, more predictable decisioning, anticipate changes in advance, and be in a better position to more predictably manage time, resources and costs.

3. Real-time Governance:

Yester-year, the focus was: Outdated technology management practices of meeting-up with the business counterparts to discuss topics annually, monthly and daily and address tactical execution, such as: running IT, building technology and managing resources.

• Today’s focus is: Deployment of integrated cross-functional engagement model inclusive of representative management, stakeholders, clients, partners and collaborators in disciplined repetitive forums with clear ownership, decision rights and outcome tracking.
• Future opportunity focus: CIO’s can expect a future governance model to include active participation from internal decision-makers, industry experts, and 3rd parties parties with real-time ongoing reviews, automated scenario planning with metrics to drive pragmatic and informed decisions.

4. Business Transformation:

Yester-year, the focus was: Typically, business owners spent time on business technology strategy and would send the CIO the requirements to design, build, test and deploy solutions.

• Today’s focus is: Transformation managed as a joint team effort between the business, IT, and various internal stakeholders. It is run as a program, with horizontal representation across the enterprise with agreed upon deliverable outcomes and results.
• Future opportunity focus: CIO’s can picture a scenario where cross functional teams will replace functional technology forums. Technology teams will evolve into enterprise collaboration agile forums with enterprise and industry representation. These teams will be chartered to solve business technology issues across business processes instead of single functional point solutions.

5. Future state solutions: 

Yester-year, the focus was: Firms typically maintained a vertical single solution focus, that may not have scaled-well, had limited functionality and only served short term client needs.

• Today’s focus is: A horizontal future state business process team collaborating and collectively focusing on full-lifecycle solution development from strategy (build/buy/host/improve) to sourcing, to definition, to development, to support and optimization of technology solutions.
• Future opportunity focus: Technology component-based solutioning will become digitized including on-going reviews, use of visually interactive collaborative tools to enable CIO’s and business counterparts to better plan, anticipate changes, execute and calibrate technology. More emphasis will be placed on selection and quantification of technology solution benefits.

6. Efficiency, consistency and effectiveness of technology management:

Yester-year, the focus was: The CIO ran the factory and kept systems running, built software for todays needs and attempted to measure efficiency and effectiveness of technology and services;kept track of delivery and not necessarily improving processes, practices, consistency and better utilization of resources, closing skills gaps and filling headcount budgets.

• Today’s focus is: Business clients and CIO’s expect results. After all, time is money. CIO’s have benefited greatly and have easy access to: on-demand service delivery and fulfillment; the emergence of cloud solutions; (x) As-A-Service; pre-built, customizable products and package solutions, better access to and cheaper service provision, and standardization of strategic advisory. Service delivery expectations have increased, with CIOs demanding shorter timeframes from internal and service providers to get higher quality resources at cheaper prices. Technology has become the ENABLER of business, IS the business, and so therefore delivery of technology is under the microscope. Solving complexity is the CIO’s challenge.
• Future opportunity focus: CIO’s and business expect to leverage technology better: as an enabler (of change/as a service/and as a business outcome); be better able to demonstrate success in terms of on-demand services, reduced costs, reduced timelines, and be more predictable when proposing and delivering solutions.

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 2 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.