key: cord-0034538-s96wvcdo
authors: SEIJTS, GERARD; GANDZ, JEFFREY
title: One-Teaming:: Gaining a Competitive Edge through Rapid Team Formation and Deployment
date: 2009-08-07
journal: Organ Dyn
DOI: 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2009.07.005
sha: cfc628ddf02cb093e2285784db58f34acbb8263d
doc_id: 34538
cord_uid: s96wvcdo

nan

Gaining a Competitive Edge through Rapid Team Formation and Deployment

The ability to form instant, highly effective teams that can take on any challenge is a source of competitive advantage for most enterprises. For many firms, it means the difference between getting the job and losing it, satisfying the client or disappointing the client. For example, the professional services firm Deloitte LLP is driving organizational improvement by shifting to the ''One Deloitte'' culture. One Deloitte describes how the firm presents itself to the market; it has a consistent way of doing business in an effort to better serve clients. A key success factor for delivering better service is improving communication to foster integration across functions and among firm members.

In late 2008, U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama moved extraordinarily quickly to put together his economic team, largely because the global economic crisis was in danger of spiraling out of control. Both the U.S. and global markets demanded that Obama act with speed; economic experts agreed that swift and bold action was required to help prevent the U.S. from plummeting into a deep recession. Rahm Emanuel, Obama's designate Chief of Staff said: ''He [Barack Obama] has been working tirelessly with the transition team on the development of his economic team . . . He wants us to move with deliberate haste -emphasis on deliberate, as well as equal emphasis on haste.'' But even in times of crisis, it is paramount that team members ''gel'' so that the team is in a position to have an immediate impact. Innovation requires teamwork and speed. For instance, in most firms, several different divisions have to cooperate in order to develop new products and services and bring them to market. Each division must be predisposed to say yes to new ideas and be willing to do what it takes to execute them. Observers have suggested that Yahoo! is becoming less responsive to market forces, in part because team leaders have started to look for reasons to say no to ideas and initiatives. Individuals have begun to place the needs of their business units ahead of the needs of the corporation. Yahoo! is becoming risk-averse, a dangerous situation for a firm in its market. Hence, the recent shift to ''One Yahoo!''-a set of behaviors designed to encourage teamwork and help decompartmentalize the enterprise.

These three examples -Deloitte, Obama's economic team, and Yahoo! -illustrate the virtues of cultivating instant and highly responsive teams. There are three necessary conditions for creating and developing this organizational capability, which we call ''one-teaming.'' First, you must have good team leaders who know how to organize a team, task it properly, and manage team processes. Second, you must have employees who are prequalified and trained to be great team members, even though the teams of which they will be part have yet to be formed. They need to be able to short-circuit the time-consuming and energy draining processes of forming, storming, and norming before the team can perform. These processes are important, but they distract newly formed teams from actually performing in crises. Third, the culture of the organization must fully support teamwork as a complement to individual performance. Such a culture is characterized by several conditions: team results are more important than individual outcomes; team members support and help each other for the sake of the team's objectives; team members seek input from others, listen to them, and speak up themselves; and existing systems in the organization facilitate effective team dynamics.

There is a substantive body of research that supports the proposition that team involvement and commitment in the decision-making process leads to qualitatively better and better-executed decisions. This is true for many, but certainly not all, business conditions. No doubt, it is faster and easier to simply issue orders and tell people what to do; but this approach doesn't guarantee goal-directed action. In contrast, involving employees in decision-making increases ownership and commitment and fosters a work environment in which employees choose to contribute to team and organizational goals. However, team-based decisions have one major downside: they take time, particularly when the teams have to be assembled, brought up to speed, and taught to work effectively together.

There are many reasons why newly formed teams take a long time to get up to speed, including:

Employees need to get to know each other. They have to become familiar with how other team members think, what biases and prejudices they hold, and what experiences they bring to the challenge.

The more diverse a team is, the more likely it is to come up with creative solutions. But diversity poses its own problems-as employees struggle to understand each other, overcome stereotypes, and deal with different communication styles.

Good leadership starts with self-awareness. To maximize the team's effectiveness, individual team members must understand their own strengths and weaknesses, as well as those of their colleagues. Such candid examinations are imperative to effective teaming, yet can take considerable time to complete.

Team members bring their own set of interests and objectives to the team, usually because they are accountable to different constituencies. Individuals tend to look out for themselves and protect their turf, at least initially. Hence, it can take considerable time to build commitment to the team's goals.

Team leaders need to forge strong interpersonal relations, handle conflict, and instill a sense of ''one-ness'' in the team. Not all leaders are up to the job.

Employees tend to smooth over task-related disagreements in order to avoid lingering conflict among team members. Hence, team performance suffers.

Teams formed under pressure try to short-circuit the processes that are necessary for developing an effective team. They make mistakes and perform poorly, and their failures lead to finger pointing and blaming, which further degrade team performance. Often, the consequence is a poorly performing group, rather than a high-achieving team. If this happens often enough, the whole organization develops an anti-teaming bias, and the firm misses out on the benefits that accrue from team-based decision-making. For example, in March 2008, two members of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's triumvirate of artistic directors resigned just before their first season opened. The resignations were a shock to the Canadian arts community. Stratford insiders opined that, ''it had never really been a happy group.'' What might have contributed to this development? Some observers thought that the personalities of the three artistic directors were too disparate. Others suggested that the artistic directors were not always willing to ''back down'' and work together to create great plays. The team was not united; two camps had emerged. Another reason for the acrimonious relationships was that there was no decision-making protocol for dealing with disagreements on issues such as programming and marketing. The two artistic directors sensed they were without the power to make the decisions they felt needed to be made. It appears that the three artistic directors never made it past the storming and norming phase of team development.

One-teaming melds high performers from various functional or organizational backgrounds to form an instant, well functioning team. Our thesis is that people who are selected, trained, and developed to work in teams, and who can work as leaders or followers in any team, before that team is constituted, are more likely to form effective teams faster than those who lack these skills and characteristics. The question is: how do you make this happen? The answer might be found in the lessons from these three stories: Fire at Mann Gulch, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) experiences with the Apollo 13 and Columbia space craft, and the tragic events that unfolded on Mount Everest in 1996. These triumphs and tragedies have spawned many articles and books, in part because they offer some compelling lessons in leadership and teamwork. We revisit these stories to highlight the critical role that one-teaming played in one of the situations, and because we believe that the absence of one-teaming significantly impacted the outcomes of the other two. We also highlight one business organization that made a concerted effort to develop teaming skills in its managers. When a major crisis actually happened, these managers were prepared to work effectively together to handle it.

On August 5, 1949, 12 U.S. Forest Service smokejumpers lost their lives in a fire sparked by lightning at Mann Gulch, Montana. What appeared to be a routine firefight turned disastrous as the men raced frantically from a hellish, fast-moving forest-and-grass fire. Less than two hours after the team of 15 elite airborne firefighters had parachuted from a plane, the crew found themselves caught between a raging fire and the rocky slope that blocked their route to safety. With less than a minute remaining before his team would be engulfed by flames, R. Wagner Dodge, the crew chief, discovered a way out. He started an escape fire that cleared a small area of flammable prairie grass and bushes. Dodge survived because he ''literally burned a hole in the raging fire,'' explains Michael Useem in The Leadership Moment. However, most of Dodge's frightened crew ignored his order to jump inside the expanding ring of fire. Instead they tried in vain to outrun the blaze.

The Mann Gulch tragedy inspired a movie, Red Skies of Montana, and a book by Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. It has been analyzed by countless management students in the Harvard Business School case study, Fire at Mann Gulch. Scholars such as Michael Roberto, Karl Weick, and Michael Useem have tried to piece together the factors that contributed to the Mann Gulch disaster. Their insights offer at least two lessons for one-teaming.

The first lesson from Mann Gulch is that stable group norms and agreed-upon procedures are paramount in a crisis-like situation. In contrast, the U.S. Forest Service maintained a rotating smokejumper policy. Their teams were based on rest breaks; when a smokejumper returned from an assignment, he dropped to the bottom of the volunteer list. This practice had two key implications: (a) the team did not always represent the strongest assembly of firefighters, either in terms of camaraderie or the knowledge, skills, and judgment needed to fight the next fire and (b) the firefighters did not have the opportunity to develop together as a team, since they fought each fire with a different set of colleagues. The Mann Gulch crew had never worked together under the leadership of Wagner Dodge.

Being unfamiliar with your teammates might not pose a problem on mundane or routine tasks; but it is likely to backfire for tasks that are novel or complex and thus require a lot of coordination, trust, and ''sticking together.'' Many of the young and relatively inexperienced smokejumpers had never seen a fire of this magnitude. They had never worked together or shared their experiences, so they weren't well prepared for an emergency situation. Stable group norms and agreed-upon procedures are essential for working through challenges. These norms provide a clear plan for action; for example, how to share information, set priorities, assign individual tasks and responsibilities, and handle contingencies. The smokejumpers never learned how to act as one. The scheduling policies of the U.S. Forest Service had not prepared the men to stick together during challenging situations.

Contrast this approach with disaster planning in the province of Ontario, Canada. There, representatives of hospitals and health agencies, police, and government routinely engage in crisis scenario simulations. The objective is to get to know the strengths and weaknesses of the various individuals on the crisis management team (e.g., their team skills, ability to deal with ambiguity, and multi-tasking) before a real crisis hits. This process also evaluates the provinces' emergency response command, communication, and coordination structures. A key learning from Ontario's 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak was that the dual leadership structure that was in place was less than ideal for controlling and combating the outbreak. One person involved in the crisis put it as follows: ''We never knew who was in charge.'' One-teaming implies that organizations prepare their teams to deal with challenges and adverse situations before a crisis emerges.

Air France trains and retrains its flight crews in effective teamwork, several times throughout their careers. The training includes building and maintaining teams, transferring information, solving problems, making decisions, and maintaining situational awareness. The training exercises take place under conditions that recreate, as near as possible, the crises that crew members might encounter on the job (e.g., smoke in the cabin). Air France is rigorous in preparing employees to deal with challenges.

C o n s t a n t C o m m u n i c a t i o n A second lesson from Mann Gulch is that a leader must constantly communicate with his or her team. Dodge has been described as a man of technical expertise, but few words. But, as Michael Useem explains, ''Being a person of few words may be fine in a technical position, but it is a prescription for disaster in a position of leadership.'' Dodge came up with the idea of an escape fire, but he could not get his people to follow him. Robert Sallee, one of the survivors, later said, ''With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us?'' Dodge was an unknown to many of the smokejumpers, and he did not know much about them either. Prior to the landing, and during the mission, he had done little to assert himself or establish trust. His reticence denied his crew the value of his decades of knowledge and wisdom gained fighting fires. None of the smokejumpers understood the escape plan and there was no compelling reason for them to follow Dodge into the fire.

Robert Scott, who was president of Morgan Stanley on September 11, 2001, says it best: ''If you wait for a crisis to begin to lead, it is too late.'' In other words, yesterday's groundwork determines how successful a leader will be today. And there is one more important reason to constantly communicate in high-pressure situations-it keeps team members connected to each other.

The following example is illustrative. Air France Flight 358 crashed on landing in Toronto on August 2, 2005. A well-coordinated, multi-agency response team ran a successful rescue operation and there were no fatalities. Greater Toronto Airports Authority President and CEO (chief executive officer) John Kaldeway later told reporters: ''We practice this month after month. You practice this against the hope that it will never happen. But we train and we practice and yesterday, the event that we wished would not happen, did.'' The report that investigated the crash praised the ''seamless'' tracking of events and communication between the parties involved. Maintaining communication and information flows is central to one-teaming.

At the same time, it is essential that communication build confidence among employees and observers that their leaders have the skills and judgment to master the challenge. This is not what happened during the early stages of the global financial crisis that unfolded in late 2008. Political and financial leaders said that government initiatives to resolve the crisis were adequate and would be successful. They were proven wrong within weeks. A crisis of confidence quickly emerged and, like Wagner Dodge, these leaders lost their authority to lead.

Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970; it was the third manned lunar-landing mission. Two days into the flight, at a distance of 321,860 kilometers from Earth, one of two oxygen tanks in the service module exploded. The moon landing had to be abandoned, and Apollo 13 became a mission of survival. The only practical way for the astronauts to return to Earth was to round the moon and depend on its gravity to fire them back like a slingshot. The crew endured difficult conditions with limited power, cabin heat, and potable water. The flight controllers showed incredible inventiveness in bringing the crew safely home. One man stood head and shoulders above the rest during the crisis: NASA's lead flight director of mission control, Eugene Kranz.

Why was Kranz such a great leader? The answer is at least threefold. First, Kranz did what Wagner Dodge failed to do. He constructed his teams and his problemsolving procedures before either was actually needed. He prepared his people for challenges with simulated crises and assignments. He emphasized the importance of mutual understanding and teamwork across various specialties. He seized opportunities for coaching to foster the professional development of his people. Kranz had access to the best of the best potential team members. He kept individuals who walked on water and weeded out those who swam or sank.

Second, one of the first steps to achieve excellence is communicating high standards of performance. Kranz demanded extraordinary performance. He was an unwavering optimist, even when additional challenges were thrown at him. Kranz did not allow people to think the worst; he feared that would dull the mental edge required to solve problems. So he urged his teams to focus on the Apollo 13 instruments that were working and the resources that were available, not those lacking. But, as Michael Useem explains, Kranz's optimism was not the product of blind faith. It was the result of trained confidence. One-teaming works when team leaders and members are ''stretched'' and then given opportunities to reflect on and learn from their experiences.

Third, Kranz picked the right goals and showed laser-like focus in achieving them. He demanded that decisions be both fast and precise and he understood that he had to keep everybody's eyes on both these goals, because it is so easy for priorities to be confused. For instance, consider mountain climbing. Do climbers pay their guides to make good decisions, or to get them to the top of the mountain? People cannot achieve their goals if they don't know what they are.

Contrast Kranz's leadership with the events that contributed to the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, as documented by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report. For example, the leadership of the mission management team emphasized the need for efficient and concise discussions. The team stuck to this approach, even after it became clear that chunks of foam insulation had broken off the fuel tank during liftoff and had hit the Shuttle's left wing. Some engineers wanted to see more data, but Linda Ham, chair of the mission management team meetings, discouraged novel lines of inquiry and scenario planning. Ham's opinion was that the foam strike was not a problem. She failed to invite dissent and did not listen to the experts; she never asked the tough questions. By contrast, Kranz pushed his colleagues to generate options to find solutions and rapidly analyze alternatives. He peppered his colleagues with question after question and demanded answers. He coined the phrase, ''Let's not make things worse by guessing.'' Kranz created a climate for people to contribute; Ham did not. Kranz listened to the opinions and arguments of others before he expressed his own, decisive conclusions.

Ham and several of her colleagues held preexisting beliefs that stopped them from communicating openly with the increasingly worried engineers. Dissenting opinions were not welcome, and Ham was not open to new answers. Her behavior reflected an aspect of NASA culture that the Columbia Accident Investigation Board described as: ''. . . self-deception, introversion and a diminished curiosity about the world outside the perfect place.''

In contrast, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operation has identified eight principles of a healthy nuclear safety culture in the commercial nuclear electric generating industry. Two of these principles stand in stark contrast to the ethos at Columbia mission control: (a) executive and senior managers are the leading advocates of nuclear safety and demonstrate their commitment, both in word and action and (b) individuals demonstrate a questioning attitude, challenging assumptions, investigating anomalies, and considering potential adverse consequences of planned actions. Implicit in these principles is avoiding ''group-think'' by encouraging diversity of thought and intellectual curiosity. Leaders are expected to reduce dangerous complacency by encouraging all employees to voice dissenting opinions and by fostering the attitude of ''it can happen here.'' But, the commercial nuclear industry has already shown that operators have not universally embraced a safety culture. In 2002, a safety audit revealed that boric acid had eaten almost all the way through a reactor pressure vessel head at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station on the southwest shore of Lake Erie, Ohio. A subsequent investigation uncovered a series of organizational contributors to the incident, including a workplace atmosphere that did not listen to employees or encourage them to raise problems.

Humility is one of the most important qualities a leader can possess, especially in instant teams. Leaders with a strong dose of humility realize that ''it is not about me.'' They get the work done without drawing attention to themselves. They listen and make room for others to contribute to the challenges at hand. And they treat people with respect regardless of their status, functional background, age, and so forth.

Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, differentiates listeners who intend to reply from listeners who intend to understand. True team leaders diagnose before prescribing; they avoid the barriers to good verbal communication-filtering, second-guessing, discounting, and placating. Leaders of instant teams should err on the side of listening with the intent to understand. And they must listen to a lot of people, including those with whom they might disagree.

On Friday, May 10, 1996, a severe and sudden storm trapped several climbers high on Mount Everest as they were descending from the summit. Eight climbers died, including renowned guides Scott Fischer and Rob Hall, who were each leading paid expeditions to the summit. Many individuals within the climbing community considered Rob Hall to be the ''Dean of the Mountain;'' he had a reputation for reliability and safety. Many have tried to understand what happened that day. Journalist Jon Krakauer was in Hall's party on assignment from Outside magazine, and he later related his experiences on the mountain in the bestseller Into Thin Air. The guide Anatoli Boukreev felt so impugned by Krakauer's book that he co-authored a rebuttal in The Climb.

Mountain climbers and scholars have identified many factors that contributed to the Everest deaths, including team dynamics, particularly the notion of psychological safety. Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is a safe place for taking interpersonal risks. For example, in psychologically safe teams, members trust and respect each other and are confident that they will not be rebuked, marginalized, or penalized for speaking up or challenging prevailing opinions. The idea is that when team members feel safe to raise questions, the team as a whole tends to learn more, and is likely to make better decisions.

There are at least three factors that contribute to a sense of psychological safety: member status differences, leader coaching and support, and the level of prior interaction. Unfortunately, the Hall and Fischer expeditions both appear to have had relatively low levels of psychological safety. Consider, for example, the observations of people involved in the expeditions.

Martin Beidleman: ''I was definitely considered the third guide . . . so I tried not to be too pushy. As a consequence, I didn't always speak up when maybe I should have, and now I kick myself for it.'' Rob Hall: ''I will tolerate no dissent up here. My word will be absolute law, beyond appeal. If you don't like a particular decision I make, I'd be happy to discuss it with you afterward, not while we're up on a hill.'' Jon Krakauer: ''A group of complete strangers . . . trust in one's partners is a luxury denied to those who sign on as clients on a guided ascent . . . [we were] a team in name only.'' How is this relevant to one-teaming? There were many questions and doubts on Everest. Scott Fischer appeared to be exhausted, not all climbers were ready to tackle the mountain, the turn-around time wasn't firm, and individual responsibilities were unclear when the group got separated. Krakauer later wrote, ''The accumulation of many little things-a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.'' What would the outcome have been if individual climbers had been comfortable and confident enough to raise their doubts? One-teaming implies that the team leader is also a team member, and willing to create room for others to contribute to the team process. The effective team leader understands that relying on a single pair of eyes or ears is very risky.

It is plausible that reluctance to speak up contributed to the financial market crisis of 2008. Many directors joined the boards of financial institutions in simpler times, long before the days of collateralized debt obligations, structured investment vehicles, credit swaps, and other complex financial tools. Few directors stood up and said, ''Stop! I don't understand these things. I won't agree to them until I do.'' Why not? Perhaps they observed what happened to those who did voice concerns. The directors who did sound cautionary alarms were discounted as risk-averse, nonentrepreneurial conservatives. Dissenters and critics were marginalized and shut out. Financial institutions have since found that eliminating contrasting points of view cut their decision-makers off from their best chance of spotting and correcting problems.

A safe psychological climate is vitally important for successful teams, especially in complex, fast-paced environments. It is the team leader's role to establish such a climate; to do this, he or she must resist the temptation to simply give orders. Leaders must carve out space for team members to make suggestions, try ideas that might not work, point out potential problems, and admit mistakes. The more comfort that team members have in speaking up, the more they will share information, which ultimately benefits the performance of the team as a whole.

Research from the Harvard Business School on cardiac surgical teams shows that psychological safety is crucial in high-impact work settings. Amy Edmondson and her colleagues examined how surgical teams from 16 hospitals across the U.S. implemented a complex surgical procedure. The new technique disrupted well-established team routines among surgeons and staff and required substantial changes in communication patterns and information flows. The results showed that some teams learned faster than others. Leadership was a key factor explaining why some teams were quicker to adopt and internalize the new surgical procedure. Successful teams had leaders who facilitated a climate of high psychological safety that enabled constant communication and subsequent team learning.

How do firms create these one-teaming values? First, senior managers have to model one-teaming behaviors. Second, the organization needs to establish systems that both recognize and reward successful team outcomes and foster learning from failure. For example, recruitment and reward systems should reinforce one-teaming values. A compelling example of how one organization shapes and reinforces oneteaming values is WestJet Airlines Ltd. The airline was founded in 1996, and has since turned into a successful enterprise: its share of the domestic airline market continues to increase, and its corporate culture is among the most admired in Canada. Don Bell, one of the founders, explained that: ''We're in the hospitalitybusiness and our culture is everything to us.'' Two core elements of the WestJet culture are a ''cared-for feeling'' and a focus on teamwork. How does WestJet facilitate these values and associated behaviors? First, processes such as selection, performance management, leadership development, rewards and recognition, and measurement bring to light and reinforce the desirable behaviors (e.g., show initiative in meeting and exceeding customer expectations, and demonstrate helping behaviors toward colleagues even during the most difficult times). The senior leadership appointed a team -CARE, or creating a remarkable experience -whose task is to propagate the culture or value set throughout the organization. Second, there is a strong expectation that ''we all pitch in.'' For example, the pilots are expected to help clean the cabin, and members of the senior management team can be spotted in customer service agent uniforms or assisting in the call centre during peak times. Such behaviors are essential to the success of WestJet. Third, there is frequent communication from the senior leadership, both formal and informal. This communication brings a sense of one-ness to the organization. The senior leadership also spends time in listening mode through surveys and fireside chats.

In August 2008, Maple Leaf Foods Inc., a Canada-based food processing company, got the news that every company in that industry dreads. Several batches of packaged meats produced in one of its plants in Toronto had tested positive for a strain of listeria, and had been linked to the deaths of 20 people, many of them elderly and frail and confined to hospitals or nursing homes.

Over the course of the next six months, Maple Leaf's dominant and driving concerns were to deal with the crisis, acknowledge that the company was accountable, execute a country-wide recall of products, identify and fix potential causes of contamination, and rebuild the company's reputation and business. Hundreds of people in executive, management, and nonmanagement roles played an active role in the recovery.

Many articles and stories have been written about this event and especially about the exceptional leadership of Maple Leaf's CEO, Michael McCain. But he would be the first to admit that this was a company that had invested millions of dollars, over many years, in preparing for an unpredictable event such as this. Maple Leaf had invested in programs and courses to ensure that all managers and executives were completely aligned with the firm's strategies and values. They shared a common leadership model, and had spent days and weeks learning how to work together and practicing the teamwork skills necessary to cope with such emergencies. They had already delved deeply into their roles as leaders and thought about how they would function in crises.

The pay-off from this investment of time, money, and effort was what some have described as the bestever crisis recovery effort mounted by a large corporation. In a little over six months, Maple Leaf acknowledged and fixed the problem, settled lawsuits, rebuilt consumer and customer credibility, and restored business volumes. As McCain said: ''It would not have been possible to do what we did without this prior investment in leadership development-what we call the Leadership Edge.''

These case studies and anecdotes suggest that there are four common themes to successful one-teaming: team leadership; team composition; extensive practice as a coherent team and as a potential member of an instant team; and clear team norms around communication and process. We conclude with four prescriptions for making one-teaming happen in organizations.

It is easy to make recruitment mistakes, but the consequences are difficult to undo-frustration, poor performance, inefficiency, lower productivity, employee turnover, and additional training costs. Managers tend to hire or promote people based on their previous performance; not enough attention is paid to the behaviors and characteristics that candidates need to be effective in a new role. For example, an employee may be a star performer as a financial expert or researcher, but fail miserably as a team leader. Consider the examples of Douglas Ivester at Coca-Cola Co. and Steve Case at AOL Time Warner Inc.

Both these leaders are widely reported to have failed to create strong executive teams. True team leaders know how to foster effective team behavior, even during the most trying circumstances. We say: hire people who have existing track records that they can be an effective team member and a successful team leader. Look for the competencies of team membership and leadership, as well as the character and temperament that make for effective contributors and leaders. These skills and character dimensions should be explicit in the hiring process. The better the skills and the stronger the fit, the greater the potential of instant teams.

S i m u l a t i o n s a n d A c t i o n -L e a r n i n g Pilots and flight deck crew use flight simulators to learn to handle an aircraft. Medical students practice resuscitation skills on patient simulators. These people understand the need to practice before a crisis happens; not doing so is a recipe for disaster. The flight crew of the US Airways plane that landed it, largely intact, on the Hudson River in January 2009 credited their extensive safety related training to their success in handling this situation, even though they had not practiced for this specific event. Teams cannot coast along, simply assuming they will be able to respond quickly and effectively to situations that require oneteaming. Extensive practice is vital. But look at any team you know and you will very often find it is ill prepared to deal with high-stress situations. It is far better to teach and practice one-teaming before these skills are put to the test in a crisis-like situation. Give the team time to work together and opportunities to bond so they can build the trust and confidence they will need to perform well in a fast-paced environment. Simulate high-stress situations in which one-teaming is likely to be required. Use teaming experiences as data for action-learning and create reflective moments so that the team can constantly improve. It is unlikely that the precise situation you simulate will occur; however, any practice will help the team meld into a highly effective unit when the unthinkable or unpredictable does happen.

Business leaders and teams often find themselves under intense pressure to produce tangible results. They are always switched to performance mode. Teams and their leaders do not find the time to reflect on team dynamics and outcomes. Maybe they do not see the need. But the formal debrief is a powerful learning tool. Debriefing helps teams truly learn from their experiences and thus course-correct . . . almost in real time. As the story goes, the Apollo 11 space mission was on track to the moon about three percent of the time; almost 97 percent of the journey was spent off-course. But the crew reached its destination because it was continuously checking and correcting. As team leaders, encourage your teams to spend time in both performance and learning modes. The learning mode may not rack up billable hours, but it is critical for developing individual and intact team competencies, building relationships, establishing team norms, and accelerating decision-making. When called on, these skills will be the difference between a highachieving team and a poorly performing group. Learning helps avoid complacency.

H i g h -P e r f o r m a n c e C u l t u r e Organizations often pay lip service to initiatives related to human resources and organizational development. ''People are our most important asset'' has become a cliché that is rarely reflected in action. Leaders say one thing, but do another. They say they want an open and transparent organization but communicate so poorly that employees have to second-guess decisions. Half-hearted approaches to organizational development are guaranteed to disappoint and fail. As organizational leaders, build a high performance cycle or culture which recognizes the value of one-teaming. Talk about it, proselytize its value, and participate yourselves. Leaders should make certain that all human resource and organizational development activities are clearly aligned with the organization's goals. This includes recruitment and selection, performance appraisal, mentoring, and leadership development programs.

NASA's experiences with the Apollo 13 and Columbia spacecrafts, the Hall and Fischer expeditions on Mount Everest, and the listeria crisis that Maple Leaf Foods faced. For additional details regarding the contributing factors to these failures and successes of team leadership, see

Tragic Ambitions on Everest

Lessons from Everest: the interaction of cognitive bias, psychological safety, and system complexity

National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Government Printing Office

Young Men and Fire

For example, the references to the Greater Toronto Airport Authority and the Air France crash come from Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Runway Overrun and Fire (Ottawa, ON: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2005)

Gerard Seijts is an associate professor of organizational behavior and the Ivey Alumni Association/Toronto Faculty Fellow in Business Leadership at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. He received his Ph.D. in organizational behavior and human resource management from the University of Toronto. His areas of research are leadership, teams, performance management, and organizational change

Jeffrey Gandz is a professor of business administration and managing director, program design, for the Executive Development division of the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario. A former associate dean and M.B.A. program director at the Richard Ivey School of Business, he currently designs and delivers programs for corporate clients

e-mail: jgandz@ivey.ca)