Sometimes a terrible thing can happen to a team. Team dynamics become what I call team “dynumbics”.

People become numb. They become lulled to sleep, not willing to participate in the overall team effort aside from doing their individual tasks and calling it a day. They no longer have a drive to disagree, to be creative or to voice their opinions and ideas.

Why does this happen? In thinking about it, I’ve come up with the 5 dysfunctions of a team as I see them. (I know of Patrick Lencioni’s book with the same title, though I’ve never read it.)

1) Poor Leadership - Poor leadership causes everyone else to suffer. In reality, poor leadership is really the only thing to blame for poor team dynamics.  Leadership needs to recognize the signs of the remaining four dysfunctions, and fix them quickly.

2) Poor Process - Poor process will quickly lull people to sleep and drive teams apart. A poor process can be defined as: no process, a process that is clearly broken, or a process that changes all the time. A process changing and improving from time to time is one thing. However, if you have a fire drill every time a certain task needs to be completed, you have a poor process and you need to spend the time needed to fix it. A poor process just frustrates people.

3) Poor Relationships - Strong professional relationships are key. This needs to be fostered by leadership as well. One simple way to foster strong professional relationships amongst team members is to stress their importance frequently. Like most things, just bring it up. Tell your team that it’s important that they all have good relationships with one another, and that they feel comfortable providing constructive criticism and asking each other for help/input.

4) Lack of Shared Vision - If your team doesn’t have a shared vision for what you are trying to accomplish, how do you expect to accomplish it? Don’t expect that everyone will have the shared vision because you mention it once a year. It needs to be reinforced, brought up frequently, and you need to be evaluating the things that your team is doing to make sure they are furthering that shared vision. Without a shared vision, people can easily become disengaged and feel like they are doing busy work.

5) Lack of Ownership - This is vital for two reasons:

• Ownership motivates people to do their best. If you tell someone that something is “theirs” and that they “own it”, most people are going to do the best they can.  If no one owns it, it’s going to be mediocre.

• If no one owns it, there is no one to hold accountable when it doesn’t get done.  This also means that people will feel like someone else should have done something, which weakens relationships between team members.

Don’t let your team become numb.

One of the things I love most about working is having the opportunity to sit down next to someone else and work side by side with them on something. I literally go out of my way to work with people this way if at all possible. I learn so much, and it’s an opportunity for me to hopefully impart something worthwhile to the person I’m working with. Sure, there are always things that you simply need to just focus on and get done on your own. But when you need to interact with someone else on your team, why not work side by side with them whenever possible?

Working this way is a powerful tool you can use to help create a culture of innovation within your organization/team. Here’s how:

1) Preface your interaction/work session with something like this:

“My goal every time I work side by side with someone like this, is not just to accomplish the task at hand. I have two other things that I explicitly want to accomplish. I want to learn something from you - I want YOU to teach ME something. At the same time, I hope to share some bit of knowledge, or teach you something as well. So please, try and teach me something, I will try my best to do the same.”

It’s important to set expectations this way, especially if you are working with someone that reports to you. Some people will feel like you are micromanaging, so just be clear about your intentions and goals.

2) Recap - When your work session is over, tell your co-worker what you’ve learned and ask them what they learned. THEN, ask them if what you learned is what they were trying to teach you and vice-versa.

3) Encourage everyone on your team to do the same when working with one another.

4) Periodically talk about the things that you’ve learned over the course of a given week or month, and ask the rest of your team members to do the same. It’s probably good to vary the frequency of these discussions.

This accomplishes a number of great things:

1) It shows that you respect your team members, and that you don’t think you know it all.

2) It shows that you are not just task oriented, but that you have an interest in your team members’ development.

3) Knowledge sharing happens, respect for one another increases, and stronger relationships develop throughout your team.

4) Your team members learn, grow, and become more engaged.

All making your job as a manager/team leader that much easier, and helping to create a culture of innovation within your team.

For this last monday in May, I thought I’d end with this great statement by Charles Munger regarding one of Berkshire Hathaway’s keys to success:

“We don’t claim to have perfect morals, but at least we have a huge area of things that, while legal, are beneath us.  We won’t do them.  Currently, there’s a culture in America that says that anything that won’t send you to prison is okay.

We believe there should be a huge area between everything that you should do and everything you can do without getting into legal trouble.  I don’t think you should come anywhere near that line.  We don’t deserve much credit for this.  It helps us make more money.  I’d like to believe that we’d behave well even if it didn’t work.  But more often, we’ve made extra money from doing the right thing.” - Charles Munger

I’m a firm believer in doing what is right, regardless of the cost.  It’s great to see a company as successful as Berkshire Hathaway taking this stance.

In April of 1996 Charles Munger spoke to a group of students at Stanford University Law School. This talk was later published in Outstanding Investor Digest twice (December 29, 1997 and March 13, 1998). During the question and answer section of this discussion, one student asked Munger the following question (remember, this was in 1996):

“You discussed Coke’s mistake. Do you have any thoughts about where Apple went wrong” - Student

Munger’s answer was one that far too few people are willing to give:

“That’s not a field in which I’m capable of giving you any special insight” - Charles Munger

He didn’t have any insight into where Apple went wrong…so he said so. Why can’t more people simply admit that they don’t know something, rather than give a confident answer when they have no real knowledge related to the question or topic of discussion?

One word: Pride.

Pride gets in the way. Too many people are afraid to admit that they don’t know something, even when it’s something they really can’t be expected to know.

I learned this lesson the hard way my first two years of college. I would NEVER go and ask professors for help. If I didn’t understand something, I would try and tough it out by myself. I would work all alone at trying to solve problems and grasp concepts that were completely new to me. I would avoid answering questions in class and stubbornly do poorly test after test. I just couldn’t humble myself to go and ask for help. I beat myself up, wondering why I didn’t just get it. Why were other students enjoying class and acing the tests?

Then I noticed over time that the students that were really excelling were the ones that were with the professor during his/her office hours. They were with the TA during their office hours. They were willing to admit they didn’t know it all. They didn’t “just get it”. They worked at it, and asked for help when they got stumped.

Pride is a terrible thing. Humbleness is something we can all use more of. I’ve noticed that I’m realizing it’s value more and more lately.

Now of course, Munger didn’t JUST say he didn’t have an answer to the student’s question. He took the opportunity to beautifully illustrate the importance of admitting when one doesn’t know something:

“There’s another type of person I compare to an example from biology: When a bee finds nectar, it comes back and does a little dance that tells the rest of the hive, as a matter of genetic programming, which direction to go and how far. So about forty or fifty years ago, some clever scientist stuck the nectar straight up. Well the nectar’s never straight up in the ordinary life of a bee. The nectar’s out. So the bee finds the nectar ad returns to the hive. But it doesn’t have the genetic programming to do a dance that says straight up. So what does it do?

Well, if it were Jack Welch, it would just sit there. But what it actually does is to dance this incoherent dance that gums things up. And a lot of people are like that bee. They attempt to answer a question like that. And that is a huge mistake. Nobody expects you to know everything about everything.

I try to get rig of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge. To me, they’re like the bee dancing it’s incoherent dance. They’re just screwing up the hive.” - Charles Munger

Don’t screw up the hive. Be humble, and don’t lead others astray because you want to appear to know it all.