3 Things to Consider if You Want to Create a Team of Teams

While preparing for a speech on agile organizations and new ways of working recently, I went through McChrystal’s Team of Teams again.

(Brief recap: in Team of Teams, General McChrystal describes how the military had to change its way of working/operating and become what in business is today called “agile” to be able to fight Al-Qaeda successfully.)

Many businesses are trying to become as agile and fast as McChrystal describes the military in Team of Teams but struggle to fully achieve the benefits, speed, and agility they were hoping for. Why is that?

What businesses usually do is: they form somewhat cross-functional teams, learn SCRUM or some other Agile methodology, management layers might even be eliminated, and then these teams are told to get to work…fast, nimble, with incredible success.

I believe you’re missing three crucial things here, ladies and gentlemen.

1. First, high-performance teams are the primary building block.

McChrystal created a very successful team of teams, but he had high-performance teams to start with. Think about the selection process and the years of training and collaboration these teams have to go through! It’s a matter of life and death to function as a real team! And these guys know their shit. They are experts in their field. Among the best of the best on the planet.

Now compare that to the average team in your company. Would you trust the colleague next to you with your life? Ok...let’s not exaggerate, trusting him with your life is probably not necessary, yet do you trust him at all? Do you even know him very well? I mean on a personal level? Do you know his strengths, weaknesses, work preferences? And do you guys really know your shit? I mean everybody on the team?

Lesson number 1: if you want to become an agile organization, start with creating high-performance teams who know their shit.

2. Second, McChrystal fostered radical transparency and open communication.

No holding-on-to-information-because-I-am-so-important bullshit. They had daily calls with up to 7000 people around the globe, sharing all the available intelligence information!!! I mean everything. Default to open instead of access on a need to know basis. You never know who actually needs to know.

How much information sharing from the executive board is there in your company? How much do you know from the team next to you? And what do they tell you? What do you share with them? Imagine the minutes from every meeting in your company being freely available…McChrystal, as the CEO in charge, if you like, even took all his calls in an open space, with his team sitting around him and listening to everything he said. (BTW: As everybody is jumping on MS Teams or Slack now: The default for creating a conversation in Slack is “open” —> that means EVERBODY can read and follow it! If you’re not prepared to do that, stay with email).

That level of transparency was necessary to create, what McChrystal calls, a “shared consciousness,” meaning everybody knows what is really going on and has the required information to put decisions in context.

Lesson number 2: if you want to become an agile organization, open communication and transparency is a must. Your teams need to develop that shared consciousness.

3. And then, and only then, can you start pushing decision making authority to your teams and let them loose to do their best work.

And that means no more approvals needed, no more asking for permission, just doing. Within the boundaries of what they are set up to do, of course, but free within these. For example, if you give a team a budget, let the team use the budget as it sees fit, and don’t require approval for every cent they want to spend.

BTW: McChrystal spent 1 year on the above mentioned weekly communication, before giving decision making authority to the teams.

Lesson number 3: if you want to become an agile organization, hand the reigns to your teams, but only after you’ve achieved a sound shared understanding of the context, your organization’s objectives, and every team’s mission/purpose.

If you’d like to discuss how your organization can become agile, get in touch right away.