What are Best Practices for Bringing Diverse Teams Together?
Interview with Jennifer Choate, President, Green Country Integrated Resources, Inc.
There are many opportunities to team with other companies, whether through partnerships, joint ventures or M&A. However, taking advantage of these opportunities necessitates facilitating internal and external teams as they adapt to new roles and tasks. What are best practices for bringing diverse teams together?
Jennifer Choate’s Advice:
People are an investment. Just like the stock market is not up every day, neither will be the performance of your people. Bringing people into new relationships, roles and responsibilities takes patience, work and nurturing to discover the best in people and to leverage their potential.
Understand where you are and build the organizational chart of the new organization that you will build. Fill in all spaces with the individual who currently holds responsibility for each role. This means that some people will have several different roles, but then don’t they anyway? This is OK. As you add additional people, they will fill many of these roles. This exercise creates a vision and engenders a sense of belonging.
Build a set of company or project values to guide individuals through the trade-off decisions that will drive future growth. Involve the full team in this exercise to encourage broad ownership of the values. Reinforce these values by consistently and frequently applying them. During team meetings, refer back to them with examples to illustrate their effectiveness.
Develop and express in a consistent way the boundaries of the company or project. If Enron had had as one of its boundaries “we don’t embezzle” a crisis would have been averted.
Focus on systems and processes, not just on tasks. The core of any organization is people and relationships. These are best expressed through systems and processes, not tasks. Tasks express discrete roles, even if these may be sophisticated, but don’t encompass the richness or complexity of systems, processes or the people involved.
When dealing with people always ask “What is my role?” Then backseat your own role and ask “What is their role?” Then listen. In each situation, work hard to understand the other’s perspective and what opportunity or concern they are bringing to the table. See that individual as the key to growth or decline. Avoid projection, or trying to make someone or a situation into someone or something that they are not.
Particularly in a company or venture that focuses on high levels of customer service and productivity, be thoughtful and act urgently. At the same time, it is important to train employees to avoid emergencies. You want the response to customer needs to be swift and effective, without destroying operational rhythm.
Sandy McMahon is publisher of Ceo2Ceos (www.Ceo2Ceos.com), a non-commercial site for executives to share best practices. He is also President of Executive Forums of Silicon Valley. With over 20 years of executive experience, Sandy has a BA from Brown, an EdM from Harvard, and an MBA from Duke.
