The Joy of Working in a Jelled Team
(Adapted from chapter 21 of “Peopleware” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, 3rd Edition)
We tend to use the word team fairly loosely in the business world, calling any group of people assigned to work together a “team”. But many of these groups just don’t seem like teams. They don’t have a common definition of success or any identifiable team spirit. Something is missing. What is missing is a phenomenon we call jell.
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The production of such a team is greater than that of the same people working in unjelled form. Just as important, the enjoyment that people derive from their work is greater than what you’d expect given the nature of the work itself. In some cases, jelled teams working on assignments that others would declare downright dull have simply a great time. Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. The team can become almost unstoppable, a bulldozer for success. Managing these bulldozer teams is a real pleasure. You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of their way. They don’t need to be managed in the traditional sense, and they certainly don’t need to be motivated. They’ve got momentum. The reasons for this effect are not so complex: teams by their very nature are formed around goals. Before a team’s jelling happens, the individuals on the team might have had a diversity of goals. But as part of the jelling process, they have all bought into the common goal. This corporate goal takes on a special importance because of its significance to the group. Even though the goal itself may seem arbitrary to team members, they pursue it with enormous energy.
Management by Naive Optimism
Some managers are disturbed by the sentiments of the preceding paragraph. They find it distasteful having to come up with artifices for getting workers to accept corporate goals. Why should we need to form elaborate social units to do that? After all, professional workers are supposed to accept their employer’s goals as a condition of employment. That’s what it means to be a professional, right? Here’s some news: believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is THE sign of naïve managerial optimism. The mechanism by which individuals involve themselves in the organization’s objectives is more complex than that. People are smart. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that people will run thoughtful value judgments all the time. What would be a surprise is if they stopped making value judgments when they arrived at work. They don’t. They are continually at work examining each claim for their individual energies and loyalty. Organizational goals are under constant scrutiny by the people who work for the organization, and most of those goals are judged to be really arbitrary.
But why do managers then seem to easily drink the kool-aid of corporate goals? Throughout the upper ranks of the organization, there is marvelous ingenuity at work to be sure that each manager has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals. Only at the bottom—where the real work is performed—does this ingenuity fail. There, managers think they can just count on “professionalism” and nothing else to assure that people are all pulling in the same direction. Good luck with that. If you happen to work for the First Congregational Church Of Eternal Love And Free Hugs or any other organization in which all employees are bound together by blind faith, then you may be able to count on their natural affinity for the organization’s goals. Otherwise, forget it. While the executive managers may get themselves all heated up over a big increase in profits, this same objective is pretty small potatoes to people at the bottom of the heap.
VALUATION UP HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.
Yawn.
COMPANY LOGS RECORD QUARTER.
Zzzzzzzz.
Getting the system built was an arbitrary goal, but the team had accepted it. It was what they had formed around. From the time of jelling, the team itself had been the real focus for their energies. They were in it for joint success, the pleasure of achieving the goal, any goal, together. Refocusing their attention on the company’s interest in the project won’t help. It just makes success seem trivial and meaningless.
Signs of a Jelled Team
A few very characteristic signs indicate that a jelled team has occurred. The most important of these is low turnover during projects and in the middle of well-defined tasks. The team members aren’t going anywhere until the work is done. Things that matter enormously before jell (money, status, titles) matter less or not at all after jell. People certainly aren’t about to leave their team for a trivial thing like a little more salary. Sadly, managers often miss this strong indication of their own success! Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity. Teammates may all use the same catchphrases and share many in-jokes. The teams may congregate at lunch or hang out after work. There is a sense of eliteness on a good team. Team members feel they’re part of something unique. There is invariably a feeling of joint ownership of the product built by the jelled team. Participants are pleased to have their names grouped together on a product or a part of one. The individual is eager for peer review. The team space is decorated with views of the product as it approaches completion. There’s a sense that whiteboards are never enough. Discussions are long and passionate. The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work. The pure joy of working there. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions are easy and confident and warm.
Killing the Magic: Teams and Cliques
If, as a manager, it made you at all uneasy to read about jelled teams feeling slightly superior to the rest of the world, you’re not the only one. We can almost hear you thinking, “Wait a minute, what these guys are calling a ‘team’ may be what we would call a clique. Teams may be good, but aren’t cliques something to be avoided at all cost?” The difference between a team and a clique is like the difference between a breeze and a draft. Breeze and draft have identical meanings: They both mean “cool current of air.” If you find that cool current of air delightful, you call it a breeze; if you find it annoying, you call it a draft. The connotations are different, but the denotation is the same. Similarly, there is no difference in denotation between a team and a clique, but the connotations are opposite. Managers use team when the tight bonding of the jelled working group is pleasing to them. And they use clique when it represents a threat.
Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity. The greater the insecurity, the more frightening the idea of a clique can be. There are reasons for this: Managers are often not true members of their teams, so the loyalties that exclude them are stronger than the ones that bind them into the group. The loyalties within the group are stronger than those tying the group to the company. For all these reasons, the insecure manager is threatened by cliques. They would feel better working with a loose collection of uniform plastic people, interchangeable, and unbonded; an army of emotionally detached contractors, consultants, and advisors.
The jelled work group may be at times cocky and self-sufficient, irritating and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager’s real goals than any assemblage of interchangeable parts could ever do.∎