A Collaborative Culture Drives Performance

I love the story of the “Space Race” of the 1960s. We can glean several key leadership lessons from this historic period of time as both the United States and the Soviet Union raced to put a human being on the moon.

As this so-called “space race” began, the Soviet Union had a string of firsts; they put the first satellite in space before NASA was even created. They put the first dog in space, launched the first probe to land on the moon, and then successfully launched the first human being into space. During this time, NASA toiled under its own programs, and disastrously failed to launch a rocket only a few feet before crashing. It was clear to many people in NASA that when President Kennedy gave his famous “We Choose to go the Moon” speech, that America was not prepared to achieve this key performance objective.

So how did things change? What revitalized this fledgling space program from a series of catastrophic errors to a program that successfully outpaced its competitor and not only landed but safely returned a team of US astronauts from the surface of the moon? The turnaround began in 1963, when engineer George Mueller was named the director of the Office of Manned Space Flight. One of the most fascinating things about Mueller was that he was not an aerospace or aeronautical engineer, nor did his background have anything to do with rockets. He was an electrical engineer and as such he had a profound knowledge of systems and processes.

One of the first things Mueller did was consolidate different departments, each uniquely involved in the process of putting an individual in space: The Manned Spacecraft, Flight, and Launch Operations offices. One of his other key achievements was a complete reorganization of the direct reporting chain of each project, so that each program now had a manger and direct report and then he made each manager aware of how each project contributed to the overall success of the program. In a systematic and science based approach to outcomes, Mueller created a reporting chain that had a clear vision, clear objectives, and clear accountability for outcomes. How novel!

One of his most revolutionary practices was the mass sharing of information across NASA – in a word he enhanced the access and dissemination of information into an expanded network of people.  Long before the Internet and email, the ability to rapidly share information was quite difficult. Mueller used a radio sharing system that allowed individual managers and engineers to share information with one another anytime a significant event occurred and rapid change was required. In short, George Mueller was able to transform NASA into a dynamic collaborative culture that had over 300,000 participants and 20,000 contractors. In less than 6 years he transformed a fledgling space program into one that was able to put the first “man” on the moon. That’s quite an influential thing to do. George Mueller knew that a culture of collaboration - shared vision, common goals, and mutual support among team members - is the secret sauce to performance outcomes. It still is today as well.

Creating Integrated Teams

Competition is the new collaboration. Another element adding to the influential leader’s arsenal of collaboration is integrated teams. Bringing the skills of improved communication and cooperative attitudes together will help you create integrated teams. So let’s look at how integrated teams will improve employee engagement and motivation, increase productivity, and improve safety and quality outcomes of your organization to drive performance to the highest levels. 

We all have heard throughout our lives the importance and value of teamwork. Even as children, on sports teams and in school, we have consistently been influenced by the concept of teamwork. Real teams out perform a cluster of people in a working group. There is a distinct performance difference between the two entities. So how do we take these long held beliefs that teamwork is more effective in driving performance and apply it to the workplace - especially, when we are living in an era where competition is the new collaboration? Is it really possible to bring teamwork to an environment where our role and the roles of others are currently viewed as being independent of the goals, objectives, and mission of the organization? The answer is, yes! We create integrated teams by implementing the skill sets of improved communication and cooperative attitude we have already learned.  

What is an integrated team? An integrated team is a group composed of people with different areas of expertise and knowledge. Members of this team function in harmony, contributing their respective technical and behavior skills toward the completion of a task or the accomplishment of a goal. This team follows what the professional literature calls an integrated systems approach whereby the work is interconnected and the members are interdependent, so low performance in one segment of the system does not have disastrous effects on the performance of the entire system. Remember that we rarely get the relationships we wish for, but we do get the relationships we work for.

Evidence Supports Collaborative Environments

The Leadership Excellence Network, a health care collaboration between the National Center for Healthcare Leadership and General Electric demonstrates the superiority of team decision making. Early results indicated improvements in organizational climate, better understanding of organizational goals and expectations, greater individual and leader accountability, lower turnover, and higher retention of leader candidates. There is a caveat, however, in that while an integrated team is most optimal during an organizational crisis, it is usually at this time that conflict is brought on by various factors, including, and most significantly, behavioral dysfunction among team members demonstrated by low trust, communication lapses, lack of accountability, and competing personal agendas.

Anyone can put together a working group and call it a team, but it takes an influential leader to be able to create and sustain a highly functional integrated team. Sustaining such a team requires the leader to provide guidance and needed resources and then, get out of the way and stay out of the way. Influential leaders know that micromanagement won’t work. 

As leaders, we need to focus on forming teams whose members have behavioral competencies, including interpersonal skills that enhance the team members’ financial, operational, clinical, and human resources knowledge and abilities. Technical competence is necessary to performance but without behavior competence, performance will stagnate. The good news is behavior change is essential to performance and behavior change is something you have absolute control over in developing and blending of both technical and behavior competence. As you seek to expand your leadership influence in the growth of your professional career to achieve performance excellence - behavior change is the real change you can make. That is worth thinking about today.