Friday, February 18, 2005

Thoughts on DOI #5 - Team

And yet more explanation of the Declaration of Interdependence with the fifth statement focused on teams.

#5 - Team

• We boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness

Taylorism in the 20th Century was all about the cost accounting notion that you optimized the whole by focusing on efficiency at the individual level. With the DOI we are calling this out to be wrong. We’re taking a Peter Drucker / Michael Porter style view that business is done in a value chain. The optimal performance is where everyone in the value chain partners together and has a vested interest in the success of the whole chain. It is this notion which led us to the statement “shared responsibility for team effectiveness”.

“Group accountability” captures the notion of “personal safety”. Personal safety is the flip-side of courage. Why should you need to be courageous? Because you do not live in an environment of personal safety! Hence, group accountability says, “we are all in this together. Together we succeed or together we accept responsibility for our failure.” By creating an environment of personal safety, we believe that individuals are motivated to do the right thing for the optimal performance of the whole system and not take a local decision to protect themselves which is sub-optimal to the global performance.