Sport, that which is played by more than one person, has always been defined in terms of the team. The team has always mattered, and all that has mattered to the team has been winning.
English cricket, apart from the occasional excellent international team, has also thrown up notable county teams. Yorkshire in the 1960s was such a team, one that was littered with opinionated and domineering characters - Brian Close, Ray Illingworth, Fred Trueman, Geoffrey Boycott - some of whom had a visceral dislike of others. In spite of whatever conflicts there may have been in the Yorkshire dressing-room, the team kept on winning.
In management and business circles of the 1980s and 1990s, when gurus and consultants were casting around for the next topic from which they could earn a more than decent crust, the "team" surfaced as one such topic. There were seminal contributions on the subject of the team in organisations, and they drew heavily on examples from the sporting world. That Yorkshire team was, as far I am aware, never referred to, but one English sports team which was highlighted was the Liverpool FC of Shankly, Paisley and Fagan.
The gurus took what they saw as the attributes of great sports teams and moulded them to create models of how teams in organisations should work. Simultaneous with this almost anecdotal method was the more scientific furtherance of what Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers had published in 1962. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was the foundation for an explosion in psychometrics and in examining team roles.
The Kevin Pietersen affair is baffling in different ways. One of them is the reference to the need to inculcate team values and ethics as an apparent justification for his sacking. The conclusion one is left to draw is that Pietersen was either insubordinate, too outspoken or simply too different to be tolerated any longer. Yet, there is an irony to be found in the language of the England and Wales Cricket Board. Team values, team ethics; these are the words of its chief executive, Paul Downton, and they are the terminology of the management guru. The team, its organisation and its roles, has gone full circle. What was taken from sport has been grabbed back from the business organisation, and in the process, something appears to have gone wrong.
Fundamentally what seems to have gone wrong is an inability to manage the team and team members by instinct rather than by some rubric set out in a manual. Shankly and his successors had no recourse to a manual. They managed as they thought right, and they were right more often than not. The team was paramount, but within the team were individuals: all different, all needing a way of handling. Brian Close was known to have been a tough captain, but he was also known to have been able to deal with different personalities. One way was to threaten to or to actually punch Geoffrey Boycott.
To what extent the England cricket team's management by manual has been influenced by psychometrics I couldn't possibly say, but we know that psychometrics are used because Stuart Broad has revealed that they are. If so, what might the insight into Kevin Pietersen have been? His style of play is that of the creator and the innovator, the member of the team who thinks outside the box. Yet, he himself has described himself as an introvert. Myers-Briggs and the tests it spawned would suggest that the innovator and the introvert are, to no small extent, mutually exclusive. Pietersen, in other words, wouldn't conform to an expected type.
And there is of course no reason why he should conform to type or indeed why anyone should. Far from being an assistance to team management, the guru approach can be a hindrance if what is sought is a team comprising individuals who think the same. At its most extreme, this leads to groupthink in which the desire for cohesiveness is more important than individual freedom of expression and which can be the consequence of team failures and faults in leaders.
Any group which has pretensions to being a "team" and so having cohesiveness and a team ethic can fall foul of a groupthink straitjacket and end up losing valuable members in the process. It happens in politics. It has happened in the Balearics. The cabinet "team" of President Bauzá did away with its language non-conformist Rafael Bosch. Trust was needed, just as trust has been cited with regard to Pietersen. Failures of the "team" and of the leader, those regarding the opposition to the green taxes for example, demanded a scapegoat. Pep Aguiló was the obvious choice, just as Pietersen was the obvious scapegoat. The replacements are team clones, conformist to the core. The team ethic is secured. But at what cost? Discipline is one thing, thinking is quite another.
Showing posts with label Teams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Teams. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
Monday, March 18, 2013
The Team Myth
Australia's cricket coach, Mickey Arthur, may be either a genius of human motivation or a total drongo. Not being a fair dinkum Aussie, the South African Arthur may well have a made a rod for his own back in effectively suspending four players for the third test against India.
Cricket is a strange sport. It is a team game yet its component elements are individual. In recent years, it has been possible to discern more obviously defined roles for players within a cricket team, partly the consequence of the development of different formats. These may always have existed, but they were far less apparent, especially in the days of Geoffrey Boycott who would, nevertheless, maintain that what was widely perceived as selfishness was in fact playing for the team.
What is also more evident nowadays is the very notion of the "team", one by which all players pull in the same direction in the pursuit of a common cause. This, you would have thought, would always have been a given in an apparently team sport, but not so. One of the more glaring examples occurred during the infamous Bodyline tour of Australia in 1932-33. Gubby Allen refused to bowl leg theory, so going against his captain Douglas Jardine's strategy. Allen, like Jardine, an amateur and a product of the public school system and Oxbridge, had the background and the bearing to enable him to take a stand. Under England's cricketing apartheid, Allen was a "gentleman". The paid ranks, the professional "players" like Harold Larwood, did what they were told. So much for a team ethic.
Arthur's suspension of the four players was the result of his wish and that also, so one supposes, of captain Michael Clarke to establish a particular team ethic. One of the criticisms of Arthur is that he indulges in psycho-babble, but all he has attempted to do, albeit in a cack-handed manner, is what other sports sides now typically strive to do, which is to create genuine "teams".
The psycho-babble, so the critics insist, has been lifted from management and business, yet much of this jargonising about teams came originally from sport. In organisations, "teams" as a concept didn't really exist until the 1980s. It took studies of outstanding sports teams to bring the concept about. In so doing, a framework was established for understanding the nature of teams and therefore teamwork and for distinguishing them from what were merely groups of workers.
Teams were to be created according to certain rules. One of these was their purpose for existing. It was in accordance with shared objectives. Team players had to buy into these shared objectives and provide roles that met them, even if this meant a certain humility and subordination of the ego to the common cause. By acquiring these objectives and by adopting the required roles, what were once groups now became teams.
This apparently sensible development was, however, to become undermined by the subsequent sheer ubiquity of the term "team" and its transfer into marketing-speak. The "team" became a means of promotion. Just as "quality" was a panacea of which a company could boast (even if it didn't conform to notions of quality), so the "team" was a de rigueur marketing tool designed to establish, in the minds of the customer, a perception of a company working in the best interests of that customer - the common cause. Unfortunately, most of it was rubbish and it still is.
Come to Mallorca on holiday now, and you will find that there are all sorts of "teams": the hotel "team", the entertainment "team", even the bar or restaurant "team". The word has become a meaningless shorthand but one, nevertheless, that is intended to convey the impression that "teams" are there for only one reason, and that is to serve the customer. Some may do precisely this, but they may well do so more through luck rather than judgement or through a specific strategy that has set out what it means to be a "team". Others won't do anything of the sort, because these "teams" are merely a collection of individuals rarely that committed to any objective other than getting paid or, with some parts of the summer tourism industry, getting laid.
So, when you click on a website on which there is a signing-off by "your team" (and it is usually is your and not our) or you see a display in say a hotel lobby with smiling faces as part of "your team", don't be taken in. They may be teams, they may be very good teams, but they may just be groups of people hiding behind the convenience of marketing guff.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Cricket is a strange sport. It is a team game yet its component elements are individual. In recent years, it has been possible to discern more obviously defined roles for players within a cricket team, partly the consequence of the development of different formats. These may always have existed, but they were far less apparent, especially in the days of Geoffrey Boycott who would, nevertheless, maintain that what was widely perceived as selfishness was in fact playing for the team.
What is also more evident nowadays is the very notion of the "team", one by which all players pull in the same direction in the pursuit of a common cause. This, you would have thought, would always have been a given in an apparently team sport, but not so. One of the more glaring examples occurred during the infamous Bodyline tour of Australia in 1932-33. Gubby Allen refused to bowl leg theory, so going against his captain Douglas Jardine's strategy. Allen, like Jardine, an amateur and a product of the public school system and Oxbridge, had the background and the bearing to enable him to take a stand. Under England's cricketing apartheid, Allen was a "gentleman". The paid ranks, the professional "players" like Harold Larwood, did what they were told. So much for a team ethic.
Arthur's suspension of the four players was the result of his wish and that also, so one supposes, of captain Michael Clarke to establish a particular team ethic. One of the criticisms of Arthur is that he indulges in psycho-babble, but all he has attempted to do, albeit in a cack-handed manner, is what other sports sides now typically strive to do, which is to create genuine "teams".
The psycho-babble, so the critics insist, has been lifted from management and business, yet much of this jargonising about teams came originally from sport. In organisations, "teams" as a concept didn't really exist until the 1980s. It took studies of outstanding sports teams to bring the concept about. In so doing, a framework was established for understanding the nature of teams and therefore teamwork and for distinguishing them from what were merely groups of workers.
Teams were to be created according to certain rules. One of these was their purpose for existing. It was in accordance with shared objectives. Team players had to buy into these shared objectives and provide roles that met them, even if this meant a certain humility and subordination of the ego to the common cause. By acquiring these objectives and by adopting the required roles, what were once groups now became teams.
This apparently sensible development was, however, to become undermined by the subsequent sheer ubiquity of the term "team" and its transfer into marketing-speak. The "team" became a means of promotion. Just as "quality" was a panacea of which a company could boast (even if it didn't conform to notions of quality), so the "team" was a de rigueur marketing tool designed to establish, in the minds of the customer, a perception of a company working in the best interests of that customer - the common cause. Unfortunately, most of it was rubbish and it still is.
Come to Mallorca on holiday now, and you will find that there are all sorts of "teams": the hotel "team", the entertainment "team", even the bar or restaurant "team". The word has become a meaningless shorthand but one, nevertheless, that is intended to convey the impression that "teams" are there for only one reason, and that is to serve the customer. Some may do precisely this, but they may well do so more through luck rather than judgement or through a specific strategy that has set out what it means to be a "team". Others won't do anything of the sort, because these "teams" are merely a collection of individuals rarely that committed to any objective other than getting paid or, with some parts of the summer tourism industry, getting laid.
So, when you click on a website on which there is a signing-off by "your team" (and it is usually is your and not our) or you see a display in say a hotel lobby with smiling faces as part of "your team", don't be taken in. They may be teams, they may be very good teams, but they may just be groups of people hiding behind the convenience of marketing guff.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Feels Like Team Spirit
Easter is here and tourists are flocking in. They come expecting sun and what do they find? Oh well, never mind. What they also find is an abasement of language. While some words - gay, pants, sad - acquire additional meanings, some do not move on, but become un-words. There is no word that is as un-wordly as "team". Yet, the poor tourist will find him and herself surrounded by, confronted by, greeted by, wished by, served by teams. Tour operators have teams, hotels have teams, even some bars have teams.
"Your so-and-so team." We will be here to attend to your every need, we will be as one. One for all and all for one. We will all adhere to principles of the highest standards of customer service and will work to the greater good of the company we represent with shoulders-back, chest-out pride.
That's what you are meant to believe. That's what "team" is meant to mythically convey. It is of course managerialist doublespeak. The word means nothing of the sort, because it hardly ever means any of the above. It is an un-word.
Put two people together and you have a team. Put more than two people together and you also have a team. Actually, you don't. What you have are more than one person as part of a pair or a group. You do not have a team. But by saying that you do, you seek to convince customers - tourists - and probably also yourself, that you are somehow guided by some light of righteousness that will indeed attend to the every need. Team is an un-word and it is usually complete drivel.
There didn't used to be teams, except on a sports field. When management consultants realised that there were some new wads to be made, they delved into the world of sport and found that there were teams. They then highlighted examples of great teams. Liverpool FC of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Zealand rugby team under David Kirk in 1987, and others. They divined the factors that made for teams.
Shared objectives and goals, clearly defined responsibilities but also flexibility, clear lines of communication, total support from a leadership figure, the right systems, the right training, the right mix of abilities and skills. These were some of the factors, and some organisations set about putting them in place. They were not wrong to do so, and nor had the consultants been wrong to invent these factors. Away from the sports fields, some teams did emerge, but for the most part they were teams by name alone. Puffery, gloss, delusion and misrepresentation. Un-teams.
"You will be a team-player," usually in a fast-moving and dynamic environment. Thus chants the recruitment ritual, and so the tourist, in the hotel, at the airport or wherever will be in the hands of just such a team-player, even if he or she isn't and hasn't the faintest idea what it means. But they will have said they are, because what else are they supposed to say. "No, I am a socially-inadequate loser with psychotic tendencies."
Teams, team-players. They are lost in lexicography. But are found in teams because someone has said that they are teams and probably have the t-shirt or the uniform to prove it. And like sports teams, they will even have their names to add to the impression. Your reception team, your entertainment team, your kiddies-club team, your kitchen team, your toilet-cleaning team. They will smile from display units and will be teams.
Why do they do it? Partly because team is an un-word, one used by default and one now demanded by convention. But used properly, as in the concept of the team is applied correctly, then it can be powerful in delivering true service. Some businesses locally do deliver this, sometimes systematically perhaps and sometimes by luck or instinct. They do actually employ people who are genuinely team-players. They themselves have good team leaders. And more often than not, they are the ones which don't puff themselves up behind the "team" facade. They do it anyway.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
"Your so-and-so team." We will be here to attend to your every need, we will be as one. One for all and all for one. We will all adhere to principles of the highest standards of customer service and will work to the greater good of the company we represent with shoulders-back, chest-out pride.
That's what you are meant to believe. That's what "team" is meant to mythically convey. It is of course managerialist doublespeak. The word means nothing of the sort, because it hardly ever means any of the above. It is an un-word.
Put two people together and you have a team. Put more than two people together and you also have a team. Actually, you don't. What you have are more than one person as part of a pair or a group. You do not have a team. But by saying that you do, you seek to convince customers - tourists - and probably also yourself, that you are somehow guided by some light of righteousness that will indeed attend to the every need. Team is an un-word and it is usually complete drivel.
There didn't used to be teams, except on a sports field. When management consultants realised that there were some new wads to be made, they delved into the world of sport and found that there were teams. They then highlighted examples of great teams. Liverpool FC of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the New Zealand rugby team under David Kirk in 1987, and others. They divined the factors that made for teams.
Shared objectives and goals, clearly defined responsibilities but also flexibility, clear lines of communication, total support from a leadership figure, the right systems, the right training, the right mix of abilities and skills. These were some of the factors, and some organisations set about putting them in place. They were not wrong to do so, and nor had the consultants been wrong to invent these factors. Away from the sports fields, some teams did emerge, but for the most part they were teams by name alone. Puffery, gloss, delusion and misrepresentation. Un-teams.
"You will be a team-player," usually in a fast-moving and dynamic environment. Thus chants the recruitment ritual, and so the tourist, in the hotel, at the airport or wherever will be in the hands of just such a team-player, even if he or she isn't and hasn't the faintest idea what it means. But they will have said they are, because what else are they supposed to say. "No, I am a socially-inadequate loser with psychotic tendencies."
Teams, team-players. They are lost in lexicography. But are found in teams because someone has said that they are teams and probably have the t-shirt or the uniform to prove it. And like sports teams, they will even have their names to add to the impression. Your reception team, your entertainment team, your kiddies-club team, your kitchen team, your toilet-cleaning team. They will smile from display units and will be teams.
Why do they do it? Partly because team is an un-word, one used by default and one now demanded by convention. But used properly, as in the concept of the team is applied correctly, then it can be powerful in delivering true service. Some businesses locally do deliver this, sometimes systematically perhaps and sometimes by luck or instinct. They do actually employ people who are genuinely team-players. They themselves have good team leaders. And more often than not, they are the ones which don't puff themselves up behind the "team" facade. They do it anyway.
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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