Lessons for team work from observing kids soccer teams

It is one thing to watch adult sports like the world cup soccer; it is totally another thing to learn from observing the kids learn and play soccer. Having not played soccer myself, my eyes were wide open to observe and learn.

Over the past five years, I had the pleasure of watching my daughter participate in local youth soccer program. She started in her kinder garden days and has progressively developed her skills. I admire her passion and dedication; she also loves playing with her team a lot. Besides her team's work, I get to observe the girls from many teams who compete with my daughter's team on a weekly basis during the Fall season. Hats off to my daughter and her team for learning and growing their skills.

It is intriguing to observe that during the progression has followed these many steps:

1. Each with her own soccer ball and goal post: Each kid started with her own soccer ball and a goal post to kick the ball into. It is a luxury when there is no defense against the kid playing solo. Still in the early days (during kindergarten) the kids miss a lot of the attempts to convert the kick into goals.
2. Each with her own soccer ball, but shared goal post: Next the kids moved to a single shared goal post, but each one had their own soccer ball to play with. Here slowly the contention showed up for who can kick into the goal post at a given time. The kids adjusted to take turns to kick the ball using time division multiplexing :)
3. Shared soccer ball and shared goal post: Third the kids got to play together and shared a single soccer ball and soccer post. Initially the kids monopolized the ball - meaning whichever kid got the soccer ball, will run with it all the way to the goal by herself. Sharing was an afterthought. Certainly the kids tire themselves out and the other kids from the same team may steal the ball to hit at the goal post. Progressively they learned to pass the ball to each other to get the goals. Individuality starts giving room for more Sharing.
4. Shared soccer ball, shared goal post, and opposition: Even the team that had passes mastered in games are challenged when they face the defenses from opposing team. Chaos sets in the early days when the girls had tough time knowing to both share the ball and mark the opponent to avoid losing the possession of the ball. Slowly the team evolves ways to work through this problem. They learn standard techniques (square pass - pass the ball sideways to a partner) to make forward progress. And they learn / share tips on how to break through the defenses.

It is fascinating to observe how the individual progresses to be a productive team member. The same observations from soccer team are applicable for teamwork in many areas.

In many areas we bring ourselves as capable and competent individuals. Still it is important for us to learn what is the shared ball and what is the single goal post we are working towards. We need to know the opposition and challenges we face. We need to evolve shared understanding and working process for becoming the team that knows to pass the ball and work towards winning more goals. Some collection of people will become strong teams together provided they have mastered the art of teamwork before and nurture open and steady communication. Other collection of people may take long time if there is lack of clarity on the single goal or if they are still developing the skills for team work. Either way there is hope for folks to form strong teams, provided they set their mind (Attitude) for the same.

As mentioned in my prior post and written earlier in my Quora post, German team displayed fantastic team work and won spectacularly big at the world cup soccer event. Every weekend when I drive my daughter around for the soccer games I remind myself about the positive impact of the game on her growth to be a better team player. I also treasure the observations from watching  her soccer games and apply it at work as needed.

Motivation for excellent work; can also be applied for team work

Today I was speaking to a group of excellent engineers in my group. I have immense respect for their many years of professional software development - architecture, design, execution, and results. I am delighted to have this opportunity to work with them. Interestingly enough each had a healthy desire to gain more mastery and depth in their area. There is slowly an interest in collaboration and how to do the same. I am excited about the possibilities ahead for the team.

I was reminded of this animated video presenting a summary of ideas from Daniel Pink's Drive book. Daniel Pink does a fantastic job of explaining the motivation for what drives us to be excellent. For long time I had been a fan of the purpose being essential for work to be done. Purpose, often derived from Vision, provides the focal point for us to drive and achieve results. And everyone desires to gain more independence (Pink calls it the autonomy) and more depth (Pink calls it mastery). I believe the same three motivations can be used for gaining more collaboration results in the work groups.

In a collaborative setting:

• Purpose - strengthen team delivery by working together.
• Mastery - we gain more depth by sharing, caring, and working together.
• Autonomy - besides operating individually, as a team the organization can gain next levels of autonomy as well. So the dependability on the team goes up over time. And such teams achieve repeat success.

A great recent example of team work is the recently concluded FIFA Worldcup Soccer semi-final match between Brazil and Germany. As written earlier in my Quora post, German team displayed fantastic team work and won spectacularly big. If we go back and watch past game plays from Germany there are many repeat examples of team work.

 

A manifesto worth reading ... from pre-election India 2014

Today we heard about the election results in Indian Elections of 2014. It has been 67 years since India became independent. At no other time there has been such an emergence of the call for change. There can be intense need for change and decades long preparation for change. After a 30-year gap there has been a decisive victory for a single party. Now it is time for the change to begin. Change is a slow and steady process. There is a promise for transformed India to emerge.

It was encouraging to read the BJP manifesto. In particular I liked the starting statement

"To build modern India: the best foundation is our own culture; the best tool our own hands; and the best material our own aspirations." There is a lot more in this 52 page document. Read it at http://www.bjp.org/images/pdf_2014/full_manifesto_english_07.04.2014.pdf

 

Engage the heart to inspire action

Yesterday I was chatting with a colleague of mine about our new project. We both quickly agreed on the why the project is important and what a difference we can make by delivering on this new project. We also immediately noted that there is some deep disbelief in the organization of 200+ people if we can and will deliver on this project. There are many factors that drive the disbelief: clarity, commitment, collaboration required, meaning, etc. We knew that there is a great opportunity next week to pitch the project to the team at large. And felt that it is important to use that opportunity very well to engage the team.

As we discussed further, we felt it is important to engage the hearts of the team members and not just mind. Often folks come looking for logical answers to satisfy the mind. That is just the first or the second layer. It is the heart that is the inner core that drives our emotional engagement that often drives unconscious behaviors. So it is important for leaders to strike a strong accord with the hearts of others to inspire action.

We both recalled watching Simon Sinek's Ted talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action. Simon says that inspired leaders communicate from the inside out sharing the 1) Why, 2) How, and 3) What, or what Simon calls the 'Golden Circle'. Simon takes a examples from individuals and organizations to illustrate his golden circle concept. For example, Apple used to say "we make computers" which is a 'what' statement. And their 'how' was "we make beautiful computers". However the core driver for this durable mission over many years has been the 'why' which is "Think Different. We challenge the status quo. We make different computers.". And indeed that 'why' has been a solid reason for Apple's transformation in the past 15+ years shifting from the erstwhile "Apple Computers" to "Apple Inc" producing blockbuster products on a repeat cadence. Simon's other examples include the story about Wright Brothers inventive success and Martin Luther King's long marches to more freedom.

It is fascinating to understand the context and how various individuals approach engagement. I strongly believe that we need passion, clarity in purpose, and persistent drive to create fantastic products. I also strongly believe that it is the same passion and purpose that can also engage people to collaborate and hence produce fantastic products. I had seen this work in my teams when I had repeatedly attempted to solidify the mission, create 6-8 word missions for my teams and continuously engage the hearts and minds of my team.

Coming to the story from yesterday. My colleague and I later ventured into our project leader's office and chatted with him more. We were delighted to know that he had conviction, belief and passion for our new problem. We were delighted that he wants to get us all engaged deeply. We shared our inputs about the people situation and indicated that we are glad to help in shaping the speech next week to engage the team at large. Next week will be a blast!

Values to guide in Project Leadership

In the past two decades of professional employment in the software industry, I had learnt a lot from working on various projects (mostly software projects in teams). I  hold three values and continued to invest in these: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Besides the project related values, I also hold high regard for some personal values: Integrity, Honesty, and Initiative. Finally, I like people values of: Trust, Respect, and Appreciation. Today I will discuss just the values related to projects.

Briefly the project values are:

•  Innovation - bringing new ideas to life - both on problem solving and process engineering to create product value. Innovation does not mean just a big bang effort like creating the next big electronic gadget or building the next big software development tool, though those are the things that I help with. Also there are numerous occasions where small innovations are very useful as well. 
•  Collaboration - working with people cross boundaries and cross-teams to solve problems. Bringing ideas to life is a big task. Attempting to doing it alone is not easy and sometimes can be just plain boring. Instead working with teams can be fun and rewarding experience. And for this collaboration to work, it is important to listen, communicate, clarify, and engage in joint sessions to solve problems.
•  Execution - is the art and science of completing the project on time and on budget. No idea has value unless it has been shaped and delivered for users to experience it. Execution includes rigorous focus on nuts and bolts details to ensure all parts of the project progress well. The 99% perspiration happens here: budget and tracking schedules, fixing bugs iterations, testing, etc.

Most times, I value the Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution on an even keel. On occasions, I modify the order in which I want to exercise these values depending on the type of project I am working on. Most times it is clarifying the teams I work with. Though some people may find it hard to adjust when we change the project and accordingly I update the values. In those occasions I resort to repeat education within the team about the rationale.

For instance, over the past year, I was doing a startup project to develop a novel set of ideas to market that had the potential to change our business moving forward. The effort required a lot of focus on shaping the new ideas and refining it deeply. For this project the order I used was: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Accordingly, we spent the first part of project schedule prototyping and defining the architecture. I formed teams and updated the teams 4 months later once we learnt more. I also found parts that I can borrow and reuse from elsewhere - hence I applied the collaboration aspects to discuss and leverage others solutions. The team also produced parts that are to be used by others; we delivered collaboratively to others. About half way thru the project I started emphasizing the Execution aspects more. Accordingly I focused the team on reduced times to deploy and test our software, improve customer feedback, fix bugs and reach zero bug bounce, etc. Net-net, the values did not change, the order helped us focus the efforts.

Three years back, I was asked to develop Windows Phone Application Store. There were several app stores in the market by 2010. So novelty was not high, but getting the store services out was definitely very important. And there was strong possibility to create small innovations along the way. The order I used was: Execution, Collaboration, and Innovation. Focusing on execution to build up a high quality app store with rapid progress to get the store for windows phones was critical. Certainly there were many teams to work with to reuse technology from. The team adopted collaboration as next step. Finally we found new ways to do things and new features (ex: build on Windows Azure, optimize app package for faster load, Personalized search for apps, etc.) with our focus on innovation. Net-net, I led three versions of the app store development using the same value priorities and helped us get the app store up and running well.

I had learnt that having a few values that I repeatedly use helps me focus in my work and lead the teams. I appreciate the guidance I received from many leaders I worked with for guiding me to develop and refine my values.