We're blindingly following the wrong teams...I think

You know the setting. You're in that slightly uncomfortable conference chair, you don't want to be seen playing on your phone, and you're trying your hardest to concentrate. There's a middle aged white guy (I'm going off % chances!) on the stage, sharing some wisdom and inspiration about teams.

As he clicks the slides, he shows the 1950's black and white video of a pit stop showing a team taking a few minutes to change a tyre. Or tire if you're in the US. And then he shows you a modern day pit stop. This last season, the amazing Red Bull team were changing 4 tyres on a car in 2.5 seconds.

Anyway, the speaker pauses for effect. Then makes some statement about progress, rate of change, and being an F1 pit crew.

You should probably have played on your phone.

I attend a fair few conferences, and the anecdotes are free flowing, with additional doses of moderate inspiration.

Sometimes they'll refer to the All Blacks, and the brilliant book Legacy by James Kerr. In fact, one quite awful MAWG at a Product Management conference referred to the All Blacks as "the most winningest franchise in sports history". Suffice to say I found a moment to explain 2 things:

1: The word "successful" over the word "winningest".

2: The All Blacks represent a country, not a franchise!

I digress. You'll also hear stories about my favourite coach of all time, and probably the Man Utd treble winning team of 1999. I'm amazingly proud of that moment in history as a Man Utd fan, don't get me wrong.

But there's two things I want to challenge about these often quite lazy analogies that people use.

Outcome v's Environment

There is no doubt in the case of Red Bull F1, Sir Alex Fergusons Man Utd and the brilliant dominance of New Zealand, that the outcomes were outstanding.

But let's be honest, that there environments are completely different to a modern day team in a business.

Luckily, some of the best authorities on this do the hard work for you and make the connection of their outcomes, to your working environment. Examples for me include:

• Dr Andy Walshe , who can talk you through elite performance of sports teams, and then how they used that to inspire some of Red Bull's business teams and advance humanity.
• Dr Kara Allen using her broad knowledge of sport to look at cultural and social impact to make the world a fairer place for all.
• Jeff Eggers who can talk through nail biting Navy Seal missions, but transpose that into real life experience advising a President of the USA and helping enterprises navigate manageable risk.

One of the major differences in most sports/military teams, and our day to day business teams, is the mix of training versus delivery.

Take a football/soccer team. There are days and days of gym, workouts, practice matches, stretches, drills, fitness training, food and nutrition, mental preparedness...etc in order to perform on the pitch for 90 mins. In fact if you go to a Premier League game, they spend as long warming up and warming down for the game, as they do the game itself.

If you copy and paste that to your environment, the results might be fascinating. I mean, I've got some pretty understandable bosses at work who appreciate me experimenting, but if I said "I'm spending 95% of the week getting ready, and I'll do 30 mins of elite project work at the end", they might quite rightly have questions.

Don't get me wrong. We could definitely learn more from the preparation, planning, and research, of elite sports teams, but we HAVE TO APPLY IT TO OUR ENVIRONMENT.

Also, we don't win games. You don't win projects. Although I can admit that I used to attend a lot of status meetings that felt like a 0-0 bore draw, but that's a different case all together. We're looking for sustained performance across a longer time period.

Pitch v's Zoom

This isn't a remote or hybrid argument. For those that know me, know that a little bit of me dies each time someone opens up the "hybrid debate". It's soul destroying.

Work with me on a belief. If we suspend the exhausting debate on WHERE we work, being the current hot topic of OFFICE or REMOTE, and we pretend for a moment we don't care. For the majority of organisations, you are still working in a DISTRIBUTED TEAM.

Whether you sit on a different floor, alternate building, other state, or distant timezone, you are working right now as a distributed team.

There's a lot of clever tech out there, but you can't change an F1 tyre via Zoom last I checked. You can't score a try asynchronously.

It means as a business team, you're much more likely to be suffering from brain fatigue from back to back Zoom/Teams meetings, and less likely to have cramp that someone runs on and uses the magic sponge to solve.

What I think we need to do to build sustainable and effective business teams, is look at the principles that hold true regardless.

Ask ourselves what we can learn from analogies from sport, military, philanthropy, nature, and science, but ask ourselves HOW MIGHT WE APPLY THAT TO OUR WORLD rather than blindly trying to copy.

Healthy Business Teams:

Inspired by lessons learnt from a high variety of external teams, and baked in years and years of our own research, we have developed what we believe are attributes to healthy teams wherever and however you work.

These are taken from the Atlassian Team Health Monitor , which is available FREE for you to use in your team. Sharing is caring ;-)

1. Team cohesion

We have the mutual trust and respect necessary to be an effective team for healthy collaboration. We have a strong sense of connectedness between members.

2. Balanced team

We have the right people, with the right skills, in the right clearly-defined roles. This enables us to successfully deliver the value for which this team is accountable.

3. Encouraging difference

We seek and voice different viewpoints from diverse sources, both internally and externally, and we take the time to respectfully work through points of difference.

4. Shared understanding

We share an understanding of our mission and purpose and our key milestones to deliver our strategic plan effectively as a team.

5. Value and metrics

We understand the value we provide and the value back to the business, our definition of success and how that value is tracked and measured. We ultimately leverage our metrics to make decisions and action as necessary.

6. Suitable ways of working

Our ways of working together within the team enable us to do our jobs effectively, whether we are distributed or co-located. This includes the tools we use, how we meet and collaborate, and how we make decisions.

7. Engagement and support

It's clear to other teams how and when to engage with us, teams do this effectively and consistently receive the support they need to progress. We have a clear understanding of?who we depend on, and?who depends on us.?

8. Continuous improvement

We always make time to celebrate our successes as well as earnestly reflect on, take action against, and fulfil our improvement opportunities. We have regular and intentional feedback loops within and outside of the team to make improvement decisions.

Questions:

• What's the worst conference analogy you've heard?
• Where do you seek inspiration from to learn more about effective teams?
• If you had to drop one of our 8 areas, which one would you drop and what would you replace it with?