Preparing for the Emerging Team Culture
By Irving H. Buchen, Ph.D.

CEOs frequently lecture university presidents on the need to run their academic organizations more like businesses. Aside from the familiar disclaimers of being nonprofit and having to educate barbarians, universities might be more open to a model that has eluded them and perhaps business as well.

With few exceptions, academic interdisciplinary studies have failed to take hold or last. After an often-heady beginning, the tyranny of tenure specificity by specialization and department dooms the multiple range and commitment of academic professionals to team teaching. The status quo of separatist verticality is thus reaffirmed.

Universities generally lack what appears in abundance in business: the pervasive use of teams. Indeed, teaming is such a basic staple of business organizations that it has also become a permanent component of performance training and evaluation. In fact, because companies increasingly recognize that such work collaboratives work may not be a familiar or shared experience of recent hires and MBA graduates or bear the special company stamp, team training has been established as a priority right from the start—often taking place in orientation programs.

The training focuses on process, not content—on negotiation, conflict reduction and resolution, consensus building and team leadership. In other words, teaming is essentially perceived and presented as a process whose dynamics need to be known, tapped and mastered. The goal is to maximize or, ideally, optimize multiple talents and differences. In the process, the productivity of the team hopefully reflects that of the organization as a whole. Finally, teaming also has impacted leadership to such an extent that it has become the executive style of many current CEOs and their senior staff.

However, it now appears that teaming is increasingly at the nexus of a number of impacting trends that may dramatically shift its future direction and development. It may even provide an academic model. At least three factors seem to be driving the change:

• Increasing use of autonomous virtual teams and thus of greater and more flexible selection of disciplines and participants.
• Involvement of global cultures and the range of their learning diversity.
• Emergence of increasing multi-disciplinarity.

Although each of these factors is important and merits separate examination, the last is perhaps the most formidable. It is not easily defined or available, difficult to put in place and carry forward, bedeviling of instructional design, and finally, may require systemic review and overhaul. However, it offers the most future-driven yields and reshaping of the teaming culture.

Why is multi-disciplinarity so rare? What makes its acceptance and application so difficult? In short, what are the principal obstacles to such teaming and its associated training? Unfortunately, there are many, and they are deep-rooted. Indeed, typical of all significant challenges or innovations, multi-disciplinarity disturbs the universe and exposes its limited foundations.

The first and most obvious hurdle is that of formal education. We have been trained to be singular. After a series of hurried gestures toward the different disciplines of an undergraduate core, the race toward specialization takes place with such intense exclusivity that the main areas of study are repeated on every degree level. The MBA may facilitate hiring, but its singularity frustrates multi-disciplinary training.

Once inside the gate, virtually every HR function supports specialization. It begins with job descriptions, evolves into reward systems and finally concludes with specialist evaluations. Then too, even work environments and conversations take place and are contained by structural divisions whose territorial boundaries often reinforce specialization.

Current program training arrays and instructors generally support the singular focus. Even innovation training tends to emphasize the incremental rather than the convergent, and thus values the continuous gains of specialists, rather than the discontinuous advances of multiple disciplines.

Finally, the disciplinary range of CEOs is limited—the major advance being the general acceptance of transfer of leadership from one different industry to another or the emergence of the generic leader.

Does all this have to change to achieve multi-disciplinarity? Although it might be helpful and certainly beneficial, it is incredibly ambitious. It also would tend to be imposed or legislated from without, and given the present cultural preference for and dominance of specialization it might appear wrong-headed and even invite resistance. Besides, the overhaul might obscure some internal developments and experiments that, in seminal form, are already surfacing and may accomplish the task of change.

Most companies seldom examine and recognize the riches they already have. So the first step is to conduct an inventory of personnel and situations that are exceptions to the rule—those that reflect divergent and convergent thinking and problem-solving, Once identified and granted special recognition, these forerunners can in turn serve as internal change agents to bring about the more comprehensive structural alternations valued and noted above. The solution may already be alive and well—and available inside the gates.

Do not search for or attach importance to the rare few who already manifest multiple thinking. They often are eccentric and display impossible behaviors that preclude imitation. A purist approach, especially at these early stages of teaming evolution, would be counterproductive. Instead, we should look for both significant numbers and sufficient typicality to model emulation.

The inventory checklist list should start and stay with the generic in order to be persuasive that the future is not only already here, but also can be further developed with relatively little coaxing and coaching. The key orientation is thus not to be overbearingly prescriptive or perfectionist at the outset, but instead to trust in the momentum of example and in the motivation of meeting and anticipating future challenges and needs.

Heading the checklist would be project managers—often trained and nationally certified. These are generalist-specialists. Whatever their original specializations, they are the quintessentially 360-degree. Initially, they may have served as team divisional leaders but by talent and choice moved up to cross-divisional task forces. When such a developmental pattern is singled out by the organization as a key future multi-competence, it provides a key and familiar model for other team leaders and members to follow.

An equal and pervasive way of extending specialization that is often overlooked—especially in orientation programs—is for all new hires to acquire the company’s mainstream discipline. Thus, the extensive administrative and support staff of an electronics manufacturing or pharmaceutical company need to know the essentials of engineering and of pharmacology, respectively. If nothing else, it would reduce or eliminate the exasperated martyrdom of those insiders who have to work with non-experts. It might even endow their different take with insight. But most important, the company-wide acquisition of an additional common disciplinary competence would become a norm of the culture and could be especially valuable when the industry changes.

The next group to look for are those for whom need, preference and curiosity combine to move them beyond their specialized comfort zone. The linked disciplines may be cognate and thus constitute little and easy bridges to cross. Attention also should be paid to specialists who always have had a strong personal interest or early career option with another field—accountants interested in architecture, techies fascinated by marketing—and thus could model bigger bridges, a more ambitious range. But in all cases it requires both sympathetic observation and encouragement to find such disciplinary leanings and partnerships—no matter how tentative, partial and even lopsided they may be—and then to elevate them to the level of a new extended competence.

Perhaps the most important source of multi-disciplinary thinking and becoming will emerge out of the challenges and opportunities the company increasingly will face as it reinvents itself and its mission. In other words, in the final analysis the key ally of multi-disciplinarity will be vision. The focus on a discontinuous and even disruptive future where convergence rules and divergent thinking is a norm provides an anticipatory agenda. The difference of what lies ahead requires that we identify the difference of what will thrive there, and then turn it back on what may already be providing the present with cutting-edge survival and growth. Sometimes the exotic is not only close at hand, but also ready to take the lead if we just bring it to the fore and then get out of its way.

Fortunately, we do not have to totally re-create the wheel or go back to square one. We have at least three major ongoing developmental patterns going for us that can be tapped and aligned with new teaming:

• Natural evolution and extensions of disciplines (e.g., criminal justice to identity theft and bio-terrorism, and therefore biology).
• Team leaders and project managers.
• Outsourcing, but applied to specialist temps or adjunct staff (enhanced by virtual teams).

Reprinted from Workforce Performance Solutions magazine

Irving H. Buchen, Ph.D., is director of international programs for IMPAC University and senior research associate of Canis Learning Systems. He can be reached at ibuchen@wpsmag.com.