We all have heard and read a lot over the past few years about team building. It seems the old management style and the traditional hierarchy of bosses, departments, and divisions has given way to the concept of “team” management. The art of leadership, therefore, has become a discipline of managing and leading teams to accomplish a given result.
I certainly have not been immune to this phenomenon. In the last five years, we have bought dozens of books, attended many seminars, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on understanding and deploying this concept: when to use teams, how to empower teams, how to ensure team quality, and so on.
I’m not really sure how well I have learned the team concept, or what difference it has made to our company. Sure, we have grown and profits have improved through this time of team building, but we had growth and profit improvement before we had heard of empowered teams.
I got my best lesson on teams recently when our company participated in the Detroit Free Press/Mazda International Marathon. We had volunteered as a company to assist the National Multiple Sclerosis Society by raising awareness and money for their cause. To do this, we raised pledges for every mile of the race that we could complete while pushing Jim Keskeny, who has MS, in his wheelchair. We split up into two-person relay teams that each pushed Jim for one mile of the race. As they crossed the mile point at their leg of the race, each team of “pushers” passed Jim to the next team.
Now, running a mile doesn’t seem like much in light of the fact that the real participants were running 26 miles, but for a group of people who in general were out of shape, that one mile might as well have been 26. On a positive note, however, almost everyone involved used the race as a good excuse to start exercising in preparation.
In order to produce a schedule for completion, each of us predicted how long our mile would take. That way, we had a time to shoot for that we were determined to maintain. We understood the “goal” and our “deadlines.”
On race day, we were understandably nervous. There were over 3,000 racers in addition to the tens of thousands of spectators lining the track. So off we went, two by two, pushing the wheelchair and fighting for every breath.
By about the tenth mile, a pattern emerged – we were ahead of schedule! It seemed that each pair of runners had more strength and more energy than during their preparation runs. Maybe it was the cool air, or the thousands of people cheering us on, but for some reason we were strong and getting stronger.
Almost four hours after the race started, it was my turn to run the final leg with my partner. I thought of all the extended efforts of the previous runners and wondered if I could keep up the pace (actually I wondered if I could even finish). About half a mile from the finish line, something happened. My pain disappeared and my lungs went on automatic as I saw thousands of people cheering us on to finish. And near the finish line were our teammates urging us on to what was our own private victory.
At that point, it occurred to me – we were a team. We had achieved our goal ahead of schedule and within our energy “budget.” We had gathered many different people in all kinds of physical conditions and had taken the same one-mile task to completion. We celebrated, we were comrades. Then we left, and I wondered at our success. I don’t remember when I had ever seen this type of teamwork at the office and here we were, the perfect team – and we weren’t even getting paid.
Peter Drucker might have credited our planning, Deming might have said we were careful to measure our progress, and Covey might have cited leadership as the reason for our successful team experience. But as I look back at that day, I see that we were just a group of people who came together for a cause, with a sense of pride in what we were trying to achieve. There were no rewards for success or punishment for failure. We were prepared, the leaders were not obvious during the race, there was shared responsibility, we encouraged one another, we were a team.
I still don’t fully understand this discipline of team management. But I think from now on I will study people more than books to find my way.