Independent Thinking » teamwork

Are You Building Relationships or Burning Them?

Daria Steigman — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:22:41 +0000

His name was Matt, and I loved him.

Matt was a trainer at Gold’s Gym when I first met him. He said hi to everyone, and he’d go out of his way to correct your form or (in my case) nag me to switch up cardio machines more often. When I decided to get a trainer, I worked with him. When he branched out and started up a boot camp program, I signed up right away. Months later, I ran into Matt when I was training for my first marathon. He was excited for me, and he hooked me up with his nutritionist–gratis–s0 I could get some advice on fueling for 26 miles. We lost touch sometime after that. Which is too bad, because I’d recommend him to anyone looking for a good fitness trainer.

At my current gym, there is no one that I would recommend. (My trainer isn’t there.) For the last 8 months I’ve been whipping my body back into athletic performance shape. Not one trainer has commented on my fitness, said “atta girl,” or otherwise showed that they care at all what I’m doing. And I’m in there several times a week–and I’m friendly.

Some of the staff know I’m not in the market for a trainer. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know others who might be.

It seems a cliche to say that “people do business with people they like.” But apparently we can’t say too often that business is about relationships.

Are you building them or burning them?

Photo by the U.S. Army (Flickr).

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Business, Hierarchies, and Social Networks

Daria Steigman — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:07:00 +0000

Remember the Deck of Cards that the U.S. military unveiled after the 2003 invasion of Iraq? In addition to Saddam Hussein, it featured a who’s who of the regime’s inner circle. If you’d diagrammed it, you would have been ended up with a traditional hierarchical chart with Hussein at the top and the lines going down from there.

But that’s not how the military found Saddam Hussein. Instead, Col. Jim Hickey and his colleagues developed a social diagram to understand the Iraqi leader’s network of family, close friends, and tribal ties. (Stick with me here, I promise this post isn’t about politics or military strategy.)

At a recent New America Foundation panel discussion on Social Networks and Modern Warfare, Hickey stressed that filling in the pieces and capturing Saddam Hussein was the result of tremendous teamwork–not just by his troops, but in conjunction with special forces and others operating in Iraq.

Hickey also stressed that:

everyone worked together to exchange information
there were no silos
they worked together to pursue opportunities
no one asked for permission or ran decisions up the chain of command (i.e., they just went with it)

I’m going to suggest that the way the military pursued its objective offers three lessons learned for businesses:

1. We need to rethink influence. Hickey and his colleagues understood that family structures, not government officials, were the key to finding their man. We still over-rely on traditional org. charts rather than looking at how information truly flows within organizations. This has huge implications not only for how companies operate, but also for how we identify good business intelligence.

2. We need to do, then ask. Best Buy‘s Results-Only Work Environment is a good example. The people who developed the strategy didn’t ask permission to implement it; they tested it and proved it worked–and then sought permission to roll it out more widely.

3. Silos have to go. I’ve written about silos before. Hickey did something atypical of many hierarchical organizations: he shared information, and shares the credit today. Companies also need to let go of their fiefdoms.

What would you add?

Photo by striatic (Flickr).

Teamwork

Daria Steigman — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:14:00 +0000

Congratulations to the Boston Celtics. The NBA franchise demonstrates what happens when an organization pulls together people with diverse strengths into a cohesive whole. In contrast to the Lakers’ team-built-around-one-main-man, the “Big Three” showed what happens when a core of people share the spotlight in pursuit of a common goal. It’s called teamwork, and there’s a reason we value it in sports, in business, and in life.