Last week I had a full day five-day intensive management workshop where I was tossed in with five other people, four of them I had never seen in my life. It was a rewarding and entertaining experience, as knowledge and lessons came from many perspectives, ways and forms. Our team was one of eight competing for the launch of a major product. We were fortunate to build great success from what we were asked to deliver. We took the lead from day one and never looked back. In today’s entry, I will share the three factors that led us to win.

1. Decisions are a dish best serve cold.

Your daily routine is filled with crossroads and moments where you have to pick a path among various -sometimes a few, sometimes several- choices. While some of these decisions are easy and quite straight forward, others are filled with huge responsibility, implications and a weight that can be compared to a ton of bricks. So how does one make the best out of making a decision? Be Cold.

As unbelievable as it may sound, one of the most interesting things I read as a teenager was the Driver’s License study book. I was particularly impressed of learning that “driving under influence of external factors”, did not necessarily meaning drugs, alcohol or cigars. A simple fight with your boy/girlfriend, a job demotion, or any situation that could affect you emotionally and upset you, can set you in the mood to drive under the influence. The text read:

“When driving, you have to be concentrated. If you have been upset for any reason, DO NOT drive your car. Instead, take a 30 minute walk, preferably by yourself, and let yourself blow the steam away until you feel more calm.“

This piece of advise has stuck with me through the years. Moreover, I have been able to extrapolate it to managerial decisions.

Information to make an educated decision normally arrives after a period of waiting. Before committing to anything, take your time to analyze and interpret the data / factors / variables you have, along with the alternatives and options available to you. Sometimes you have to bring colleagues, or people who report to you, or even your own managers, each one with an opinion of his own that will either enforce or weaken your resources on hand. However, even with all of this information, you still need to make sure that you are making the right call. The bottom line is: if the responsibility of making the decision is yours, then your mind must be clear and able to think straight.

During one of the shifts in my workshop, we found ourselves at a crossroads and were faced with a dilemma: our company had been focusing on an exclusive target market and our products were performing very well and bringing higher revenue than that brought by the other teams’ products. Three of the other teams who were more oriented on mass-production, began running deals between them to try to catch-up to us, so our team decided to develop and launch a new product into the market. At this point we were faced with two choices:

  • Option 1: launch the new product aimed for a large target market with minimal profit betting on mass production (which meant diversifying our business and sailing into new uncharted waters).
  • Option 2: launch the new product aimed for an exclusive target market with huge profit (which meant staying true to our core business).

The team split into both options and the initial healthy discussion was going on fine, until a arguments to reinforce option 1 ensued. After about forty minutes of a heated discussion, I had enough. I got up and did exactly what I remember reading on that driving test book. I told my teammates: “I’m going for a 30-minute walk and you should do the same. Let’s go out and clear our heads. When we get back, we’ll make a decision”.

And so we did. The end result: our revenue increased.

2. Make sure you put the right people on the right seat

I will paraphrase some of the Jim Collins’ Good to Great. A team in a work environment is like people riding on a bus on a very very long trip. You want everyone to be comfortable sitting on their seats. Moreover, you want them sitting in the right seat.

Assuming you already went over the “building the team” stage and you have your players, what comes next is most important part of building your team: placing a player in the position where he will perform at their best, and where they will perform best for the team. This means:

  • The player is good at the job.
  • The player likes his job.
  • The job brings the best out of the player.

I address being past the “building the team” stage first, because it allows me to justify that if you haven’t built a team yet, then you have to remove the stigma that you exclusively need the best player at its position in order to succeed. While it’s definetily a plus to have someone who excells at a specific job, sometimes you’ll won’t be able to find this person as handy as you would like. That is why it’s more important that the player is good at the job, likes his job and performs as well if not better than what is expected from him.

Take a look at your team and ask yourself if your HR, your S&M, your Operations and your Finance VPs are giving it the best they can and with the passion that is comparable to the quality of their work.

This is why there are ocassions in sports in which the so called “underdog” teams are able to win championships:

The 2002 Anaheim Angels (MLB)
The 2004 Detroit Pistons (NBA)
The 2003-04 Porto UEFA Champions League run and eventual championship defeating heavily favorite teams.

Those teams had players who were not on par to some of the top stars of their leagues. but they performed best individually and even performed better within the team. Which brings me to the third crucial key factor.

3. Synergy

The easiest way to explain synergy is the tale of two short guys who wanted to reach an apple, but weren’t tall enough to do it on their own. So they decided to team up: one hopped on the shoulders of the other one, and then they were tall enough to grab it.

I have had the privilege of working with a lot of accomplished people, and one thing that has always struck me is the question of whether there has been an ideal perfect team among the many people I have worked with. Let’s assume the answer is yes. If this is the case you reached a utopia. However, this isn’t always the case.

When you first meet your team, you are facing a bunch of strangers. Therefore the one of your first steps is to determine if they are connecting with each other. This is why one has to work on developing synergy among the group. Finding something to relate to your teammates will break the ice, and start to bring more smile and laughs that are necessary to initially feed the atmosphere with positive attitude, and create that initial synergy. Of course this is only the beginning. Next comes the process of growing synergy and solidifying it.

After transmitting that bond to the person who is next to you, make sure that they do the same to the person next to them, so that each member in the team is able to create a bond. Once this goal is met, then comes the icing on the cake, which is that special moment when one team member asks the other one: “How can your performance be enhanced by mine, and more importantly how can his/her (referring to a third team member) performance be improved by ours.”

The best example I can think of perfect synergy applied in practice is Germany’s crushing demolition of Brazil in the 2014 World Cup. If you analyze how each German goal was conceived, you will agree that their team effort they displayed is arguably the one of the top performances seen in soccer history.

A commentator summed it all up in four smart sentences:

“Brazil has Neymar
Argentina has Messi
Germany… has a team.”

That’s where success is. That is how we won our workshop.

HR