Consider the Five TeamNet Principles together as a mental tool, a Swiss Army pocket knife of the mind. Each principle is a separate tool that you can pull out and apply to your situation. They address different aspects of networks, but together they capture the integrated elements of a whole. "Doing it right" means that you have used each principle appropriately, in the proper measure. When you succeed, you have a healthy teamnet.
This section goes into more depth on the principles, including typical network problems. Each of the Five TeamNet Principles carries its own warning. Too much or too little of a particular principle causes different problems, which, with a little attention, can correct. Too little agreement on purpose drives a network apart just as easily as too much agreement, which means that people lose their ability to think independently.
1. Purpose is the glue and the driver.
Every teamnet needs a clear purpose: "Win the MD-12 (Douglas Aircraft's still-on-the-drawing-board, next-generation wide-body, long-haul jumbo jet) systems integration contract and prepare our company to deliver it," says the computer company bid team. "Implement the new schedule planning process by 1 June," says the airline. "Cut operating costs by 20 percent in 60 days," says the hotel chain.
Teamnets achieve success by clearly defining their purpose. It needs to be simple and everyone involved needs to understand it and, if possible, participate in its development. Each project in Harry Brown's manufacturing network has its clear purpose that derives from its overall one-meeting customer needs and making a profit.
Purpose must extend from the abstract to the concrete to be truly useful. It begins with the organization's long-term vision, values, and strategy. These abstractions must translate into time-bound operational missions, measurable goals, clearly identifiable results, and, finally, specific tasks. Action must accompany beliefs and commitments, or the circuit never closes.
Purpose plays an absolutely critical role in teamnets. It establishes legitimacy, functioning in the place of the hire-fire power of hierarchy and the rules and regulations of bureaucracy. It is the basis for the agreements and voluntary relationships that constitute the "work life" of the network.
Which is not to say that purpose isn't important to other forms of organization. "What you're talking about are the Nine Principles of War," said Karl Leatham, a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, now a business process reengineering expert at Computer Sciences Corporation. "Just substitute the word `competition' for `enemy' and `purpose' for `target,' and you'll see what I mean." First among the Nine Principles is The Objective: "Direct every military operation toward a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective."
Failure is easier to predict than success. A range with extremes can express each of the principles. We portray these extremes as "warnings" because they function as failure detectors. So, problems with purpose can range from too little to too much. Keep in mind that each is not the opposite but the complement of the other extreme. When one tendency threatens the health of a network, you then need to introduce a dose of the other.
Warnings: From Glueless to Groupthink
Networks fail without "enough" purpose-"enough" being an imprecise quantity that always depends on local circumstances and timing. Mostly, people know a motivating purpose when they both can feel its power and understand its compelling logic. Teamnets, however, easily can fall apart after they form when the spark of purposeful life flickers and dies. Purpose is a vital source of energy that needs regular renewal, more often the more things change.
The more obscure extreme and source of failure is "too much" purpose. "Groupthink" can also kill a network. People can lose their critical faculties when they become too cohesive to the point of becoming cult-like. Purpose turns into ideology as the group discourages critical thinking. People make expensive mistakes when they put blinders on and refuse to tolerate divergent ideas. The need for diversity around purpose underlies the importance of independent members.
Declaration of Independent Members2. Each member has a healthy independence.
Think of it as a key test: You are not in a network if joining means you have to give up your independence. Members of networks-individuals in self-directed teams, departments cooperating in cross-functional programs, firms in alliance-retain and usually enhance their independence.
The parts of traditional organizations are dependent on a central and higher authority. Each company in Harry Brown's network stands on its own footing. Each will continue to exist even if the network collapses.
This principle underlies the virtual business known as VISA International. Financial institutions totalling 23,000 create its products accepted by 11 million merchants in 250 countries and territories whose data centers clear more transactions in one week that the Federal Reserve system does in a year. Sales now equal the combined revenues of General Motors and IBM, having grown 20-50% compounded annually since VISA's birth in 1970. Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International and VISA USA, established the business on simple principles, many of which stress the independence of the members:
- Equitable ownership by all participants;
- Maximum distribution of power and function;
- Distributed authority within each governing entity; and,
- Infinitely malleable yet extremely durable.
Consider, by analogy, the epochal change in the nature of computing in the last decade. Engineers designed computer systems in "master-slave" arrangements for most of the first 40 years: a glass-enclosed host computer with "dumb" dependent terminals attached. The entire system crashed when the central unit went down.
The unquestioned hegemony of huge in the Information Age was first cracked by the computer-on-a-chip in the mid-1970s, which led to the personal computers (PCs) that decimated the centralized behemoths. The architecture of networks is ascendant in computing in the 1990s. PCs, workstations, mainframes, and other intelligent devices represent the independence of members connected in networks.
Members of a network are so substantial in their self-sufficiency that they do not depend on the network itself. A healthy independence is necessary, even a prerequisite, for healthy interdependence.
Warnings: From Dependent to Stubborn
Networks fail at one extreme when their participants-whether organizations or individuals-cannot behave independently, the source of many network failures in large bureaucratic cultures. Bureaucrats may be free in theory but in practice fear making decisions and prevent others from taking responsibility that constitutes real independence. If you want a more flexible organization, be prepared not only to tolerate but vigorously support risk taking.
People also carry independence to the other extreme, to stubbornness, where their narrow-minded behavior overwhelms cooperative efforts. Those who are so independent that they can't see a common purpose fragment the network, destroy its coherence, and doom it to fail. Small business networks often fail because some members just are too stubbornly independent.
Link City, Planet Earth3. Teamnets have many links-expansive relationships among people and extensive connections through technology.
Many people wrongly regard a network as nothing more than a mesh of physical links. Even so, they unconsciously point to the network's distinguishing feature. Links-multi-faceted, omni-directional, complex, technical, and personal-are the cardinal characteristic of the Information Age organization.
Look first to see your links at the physical communication systems besides meetings and collocation that you use (or soon will): phones, faxes, memos, letters, overnight mail, conferencing (phone, video, computer), e-mail, the Internet, cellular phones, mobile computing. The list goes on, and these are only the person-to-person media.
It's not news that our world is more connected than ever before, and that the trend still is accelerating. It's a blind spot, though, when people think that networks only mean computers, telephones, and other channels of communication.
Even technology networks are more than computers and telephones. What use is an e-mail or voice mail system if people aren't using it? Cayman Systems, a network hardware vendor, advertises that it "hasn't forgotten that what we're really connecting is people, not just computers."
People develop relationships over time through their interactions. They must use some physical links to communicate. Channels to interactions to relationships and back.
Technology alone is inert. Look at the interactions that arise from the work to see a network in process, the pattern of who talks to whom how often. There, trust develops and relationships crystallize-in the interactions over time and in moments of crisis. One company that installed a new communications system without a clue how to use it for more productive work relationships is representative of many who ignore the social side of change. New communication technologies stimulate new forms of organization and induce change, planned or not, desired or not.
Warnings: From Isolation to Overload
A lack of links is a clear cause of network failure. Missing physical connections, interactions that peter out, and stillborn relationships plague every network. No true network will form where personal connections are weak, where people are not close. There is no trust without real relationships, and without trust, there is no network.
The failures caused by too many links, too many messages, too quick a pace, are less obvious. Overload is a major and widespread problem of the Information Age. You're in trouble when you dread calling into your voice mail or checking your e-mail because you know that once you begin, you're committed for the next few hours. Clogged communications systems shoot overload to first place on the failure indicator list for fast-growing networks. Overload depresses learning, which is central to the Information Age organization. The well-functioning teamnet manages information dynamically-filtering, categorizing, storing, sharing, and updating it, offering interpretation, just in time-without great hassle.
Climbing through TeamNet Leadership4. Fewer bosses, more leaders.
Everyone is a leader at the time when his or her unique experience and knowledge adds to the group's intelligence. Bell Atlantic's CEO Raymond W. Smith describes leadership on "ever-shifting, cross-disciplinary teams" as "determined by who's most expert on the matter-not the corporate hierarchy." That networks have multiple leaders surprises many people.
All human organizations have leaders-whether informal or formal. Hierarchy and bureaucracy minimize leadership; teamnets maximize it.
When Hyatt Hotel's Sales and Marketing organization went from functions to market segments, they appointed two leaders for each new market team. Each person holds a separate portfolio of responsibilities within the team. Everyone has something vital to contribute with leadership broadly distributed.
Consider these questions to gauge whether you have fewer bosses and more leaders: Do you hear only one voice at meetings? Are there subgroups with task leaders? Does more than one person make commitments and take responsibility? Do people feel heard and that they have a voice in decision-making? Do they participate-or at least feel that they can? This "sense of participation" is a key indicator of teamnet health.
Look for new styles of leadership. In particular, look for the natural networkers, the coordinators. These are the people at the nexus of relationships, people who are natural catalysts. They constantly develop matches between people's needs and resources.
Warnings: From Leaderless to Followerless
Without many leaders, networks fail, so it is easy to see how this spread out organization could suffer from a lack of leadership. The "leaderless network" problem often creeps up slowly, almost undetected as the original crop of leaders burns out before new leaders are ready to come online. Suddenly, one day the energy is gone, and no one knows why.
An abundance of leaders can bring its own problems. The "prima donna" effect is a good name for the other extreme. Experts come in, do their thing, and leave, while bosses breeze by dropping orders, and special interests focus only on their own niches. If we're all leaders, but none of us has learned to follow, we have a power struggle on our hands. Incessant squabbles paralyze the network. Leading and following is a dance; step on as few toes as possible, please. Heed the motto that Hyatt Hotel put on t-shirts: "Teamnet: It's an attitude."
The Hierarchy and the Lower-archy5. Teamnets are naturally clumpy and clustered.
Contrary to popular belief, a network is not two-dimensional. Small groups, forming and reforming, make up big networks. Even the smallest networks carry out work in subgroups of ones, twos, or threes.
The word "teamnet" carries connotations of this multi-level reality: networks of teams of people.
Groups within groups nest internally in some teamnets. Arthur Andersen & Co.'s Business Systems Consulting group (BSC), headquartered in the Boston office, comprises 765 consultants spread around the world in 80 locations housing 2-45 people each helping small-to-medium sized businesses install technology networks to meet business needs. The teams are local; the network is global. BSC, in turn, is part of Arthur Andersen's Audit and Business Advisory Services group, which reports to the Managing Partner-CEO of Arthur Andersen & Company, S.C., the main partnership that holds both Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting.
Externally, teamnets are open organizations that evolve along with their environments. So it is equally important to consider the larger context. Teamnets may be part of a larger enterprise, or part of an industry, market, or movement-a hierarchy of levels.
We tend to network at our own level, where it is easiest to establish peer relationships, ignoring the other levels at our peril.
Warnings: From No Uplinks to No Downlinks
It's easy to lose touch with the hierarchy. But it's very dangerous. Many a promising teamnet effort has succeeded briefly then shriveled and died because it lacked links to the senior levels of the company or to the stakeholder opinion leaders. In one dramatic case involving two companies, the vendor's executive committee killed a multi-hundreds-of-million dollar deal at the last minute because it was not briefed on the project until the moment of final decision. Often, problems with the hierarchy show up late in a change process rather than earlier when there is still time to address them. Remember: the hierarchy always has the last word.
It is just as dangerous to forget the ground floor, where work takes place, the people at the operating levels who support the network's activities. The people on the front lines of production, such as Harry Brown's hourly work force in Erie, Pennsylvania, and those in services, such as at the Front Desk of the Marriott in Jacksonville, need to network. Customers and suppliers need involvement up and down the line rather than simply as passive recipients, where only a sales person and purchaser communicate. Change just as effectively is killed from below as above. When people on the front line are out of touch, they shield themselves from innovations launched from above, which causes unintended side effects.
