Clarity - The First Imperative of Collaboration
What’s first in building a team: Trust? Shared goals? Nope - CLARITY.
Earlier in this series I introduced The Three Imperatives of high performance collaboration: Clarity, Intentionality and Discipline. The Imperatives arose out of research I did on over 120 teams at Mars and they describe three indispensable ingredients for team success.
In summary, teams need
Clarity about what requires collaboration and what doesn’t in order to be
More intentional in their collaboration. Their intentionality must then be supported by
Enough discipline to keep things on track. Discipline includes regular meetings structured around the right things and aligned to the Why and What I described in previous blog posts.
In this post I’ll focus on Clarity Imperative; the other two will be covered in subsequent installments. The need for clarity emerged early in my research and is illustrated perfectly by this next story. It’s a story I tell a lot because it is foundational to my work.
tEAM MEETING SNAPSHOT
Mars Chocolate, Hackettstown, NJ
I was working with the North America &ms team in the Hackettstown NJ office of what was then called m&m Mars. The team leader, Mike, had asked me to help them with his recently formed cross-functional team’s effectiveness. I was invited to observe them during one of the regular team meetings.
There were roughly 18 people at the meeting. They were drawn from all the major functions: finance, supply chain, marketing, sales, etc. We were in a small conference room with an oversized oval table and too many chairs to fit at the table. A number of people’s chairs were pressed up against the walls because there wasn’t enough space.
It was a bright winter day. The lights were off, the Venetian blinds closed though a little light seeped between the narrow metal slats. Adding some light, a projected spreadsheet glowed on one wall and featured about 40 lines on it, the text and numbers so small you could barely make them out.
We were about two hours into a day-long meeting. Three team members were involved in heated debate about one line in the spreadsheet. Everyone else was on their Blackberries or computers doing emails, preparing presentations, doing work they could have been doing at their desks. They weren’t involved in or paying any attention to the debate; it apparently didn’t involve them.
Prior to the recent reorganization that forced them into a team, the m&ms brand was doing fine being managed by independent but coordinated functions. Now they found themselves squeezed into a room together unsure of what was expected. Watching this I thought to myself, “This group of people has no idea why they are all crammed together in this room.”
team value is not just results
At that moment a little fantasy popped into my head. I imagined the President of the organization walking into that packed room; he was known to randomly walk in on meetings. In this imaginary scene everyone had a number written over their forehead representing what they cost the company on an hourly basis, their salary, wages and benefits. The President does some quick mental math and, shocked at the numbers, blurts out, “Why don’t you go to your desks and do something productive? Watching an argument isn’t productive. Trying to compose emails distracted by a dispute isn’t productive!” It didn’t happen, of course. But if it had, you could not have blamed the President for his outburst.
This team was acting out lack of clarity. They weren’t sure why they were in that room except that they were all connected to the same brand. They thought they understood why they were there - to work on m&ms. But what did that mean, exactly? What work required them to be together? What value should their combined presence create? In truth, they didn’t understand why they were a team. That lack of clarity was the root cause of this wasteful meeting and many others like it.
Back then, I wouldn’t have called it “clarity.” I just knew that team had no sense of its shared purpose. That meeting has become a touchstone for me; it began my awakening to the importance of clarity of collaborative purpose and intent. Without clarity we waste time in meetings we don’t need to be part of, listening to stuff we don’t need to hear. With clarity we understand the things that make being a team valuable, what’s worth meeting about and engaging around. It’s that simple.
That’s the essence of the Clarity Imperative. My next blog post is about the Intentionality which grows out of Clarity and is the heart of the Framework.
