Teams today must revert to Stone Age
Stumble It!In a Harvard Management Update Virtual Teams: Palaeolithic Insights About the Art of Cyber-Managing, the authors propose a delicious irony about today’s teams: to succeed we need to recover the long-forgotten instincts of our ancestors.
Three instincts in particular have to be excavated from our caveman days and brought back into our organizational teams:
- Purpose shapes function and structure
“Purpose is the campfire around which virtual team members gather.”
- Leadership rotates according to the task at hand
Palaeolithic societies pooled their human capital simply to survive.
- Constant communication fosters a sense of identity
Sometimes the technology makes it too easy for a new team member to find-out all the important team information without the need to invest in the human conversations to acquire it. What we gain in information efficiency we can more than lose in missed opportunity for trust building.
Without a good sense of purpose, mission and goals you may have a group but not a team.
The single leader model of teams will not meet the challenges of a modern high-pressure virtual team - distributed leadership is key.
So as we strive to make our team more effective by learning from natures best team's we should also try to examine and rekindle what our distant ancestors knew, but which modern society has forgotten, about what makes teams work.
Tags: cavemen, organizational teams
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Bioteams Books Reviews
Animal Instincts in the office
Just because we might have selfish genes it does not mean we have to behave selfishly; nature knows when to be nice as well as nasty and nepotism occurs in the biological world too with equal destructiveness as our world. This is according to Richard Conniff author of The Ape in the Corner Office and reviewed in the UK Guardian Newspaper (27 May).
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