Written by Natalie Macaluso, Consultant at Will It Make The Boat Go Faster?.
Sometimes you’re in a team and it just clicks, but it’s unfair to assume that just because we find ourselves thrown together with a group of people that we will know how to work well together.
All too often in business, we find ourselves in a team and the ‘working well together’ part is just left to chance. We hope we will figure it out as we go, but there is no system or structure behind it.
You wouldn’t go to war like that. You wouldn’t even enter a three-legged race without figuring out the way in which you were going to move forward to win.
Once you are in a team how do you build it to be as strong as it can be to achieve your goal? When our co-founder Ben Hunt-Davis speaks about his rowing team in 1998, he generally says they were rubbish, but by 2000 he absolutely says they were a good team. What really changed?
They worked on it. They worked on being a team as much as they worked on the outcome they wanted. Any team needs to know how they are going to operate together to achieve their best outcome.
At Will It we help teams develop Team Rules and they are the foundation of bringing everyone together to make the boat go faster.
So, what are some effective Team Rules?
If you are in a team, it means you can achieve more collectively than you can as individuals. To do that, you need to be able to understand each other.
Following a disastrous performance (their words, not mine) at the World Championships in 1998, the team’s sport psychologist encouraged Ben and the crew to establish a set of Team Rules. How do you make the journey to gold as smooth as possible? What is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t?
Looking beyond the rowing boat, here are some other examples of Team Rules in action:
The 24-hour Rule for Women’s Basketball NCAA Champions
Coach Dawn Staley is a three-time Olympic Gold Medallist for the USA women’s basketball team and has been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. She is currently Head Coach of the women’s team at South Carolina University and winner of 10 NCAA Tournaments. Dawn Staley knows how to make teams win.
In the wake of one particularly crushing defeat for South Carolina, losing a championship final by one point, Coach Staley implemented The 24 Hour Rule. Twenty-four hours from a win or a loss, they move on. For some players, losing just isn’t something they understand, and it really impacted their day and even coming weeks to the point where the team had to say, “Let it go!” Coach Staley is keen to engender that losing is part of becoming a champion. Now, whether they win or lose, they have 24 hrs to “bask in victory” or “agonize in defeat.” Then they move on.
Getting some distance – the development of Java Script
If I say Java Script to you, you might think Indonesian Drama or you might know it to be one of the most common languages in computer programming. For those of us in the world that spend a large proportion of our time online, we are interacting with it every day. In lay terms it makes the web pages move. Before, we were looking at static pages. When I say before, I mean in the simpler days of the early 90s.
This revolutionary language was born out of a growing dissatisfaction from a group of engineers and programmers working for US Tech firm Sun Microsystems. Some of the brightest brains were threatening to leave the business and head to a company called NeXt, lead by Steve Jobs before his return to Apple. The programmers said Jobs was “doing things right”.
In a bid to keep them at Sun, they were tasked with developing technology for smart appliances. To be most effective, they established some team rules.
To distance themselves from existing thinking and systems, they physically moved away from the Sun office to an external campus. They collectively agreed to work 100-hour weeks to get the job done at pace.
I think it’s important to mention that these rules are quite extreme, but they worked within the context they were operating. It was the 90’s, it was tech, they collectively agreed it’s what needed to happen to achieve their goal. They were all clear on that commitment and bought into what that meant.
How do you create rules for your team?
When Ben recounts the story in the 18 months leading up to the Olympic games, there were highs, lows and moments of uncertainty. In order to be consistently good, they had to work together as a single unit and lean on the team rules that they had developed.
When it comes to creating effective team rules – here’s what’s most important. They were:
Developed by the team
The rules need to be developed by those in the team rather than bestowed by those on high. They need to be in a language that everyone understands and can live by. They might make no sense to anyone outside of the team and that is fine! So long as the team get them and agree on them collectively.
We have a team rule at Will It which states “There is no Captain Feedback” – It means any-one can and should give anyone else feedback in order to make our boat go faster.
Specific and clear
The rules need to be specific for the world or context that you are in. For example, the crew had a different set of rules in the Olympic Village than they did at their training camp.
If you run an events company, it’s possible you have a set of rules for when you are physi-cally out delivering those events as opposed to day to day running of the business.
Specific also keeps us away from general, which is crucial for high performance. “Communi-cation” is not a great team rule because what does it mean specifically for your team? Get clear about what communication you need to be a brilliant team.
Constantly discussed
As you get to know each other better and you live and breathe these rules, you need to keep discussing them to check they are still relevant. You need to start somewhere but then seize the opportunity as often as you can to refine and improve the ways you operate to-gether.
Simple
You are not trying to find a long list of rules. A short list is a great list. What are the simplest and essential rules required to achieve your goal?
Too many rules and people lose focus and decause you will be constantly discussing them, you will be able to keep checking they are as simple as they can be!
Everyone has understood and bought into them
Everyone understands them because they have developed them and they are simple. Everyone buys into them, because they know that they will make the boat go faster.
Think of this like the last stress test to make sure you have got them right!
Finally, put them where you can see them
At Will It our team rules are on the back of the office door (literally, as you can see in the picture below!). The guys in the crew had them typed up on a sheet and would hold each other to account if anyone wasn’t living by the rules.
Every team has “unwritten rules” and we often see them being lived but they are not always that helpful.
What’s important is that you are articulating them. The rules and behaviours that you collectively agree to live by.
Taking Action
Team rules might seem obvious, but the more we work in businesses, the more we see teams have been just hoping to work well together, or complain about the fact that things aren’t working.
Being part of a team can be brilliant but like any other relationship, it takes some effort.
Team Rules are the perfect framework to get your team working together to achieve it’s goal.
Whether you lead a team, or are part of one, what are the behaviours you think are re-quired for you to collectively be the best you can be? What would everyone else think?
How can you implement this?
What would happen for you if you did?
Get in touch if we can be of help in forming your own team rules – to help you get the best out of your team.
