Business consultants have pursued two approaches to team building: teaching common values and teaching self-discovery. Of the two, I prefer teaching self-discovery.
It is very difficult to teach common values to senior executives. Before the Great Recession, for example, a friend of mine, Susan, worked for a medical center that hired an ambitious young CEO, John, to move the center to the next level. John's philosophy was to "max out the credit card." He thought that great leaders are risk takers who dream up bold plans and borrow to the hilt to pay for them. John was aware of internal opposition to his philosophy, so he hired a consultant to teach his executives to take greater risks. They went on a retreat and listened to a multimedia display on "Who moved my cheese." Susan learned that when the cheese is gone, she should get up and look for more cheese rather than just mope around all day. The message was supposedly giving the executives the shared values of risk taking, initiative, and resilience.
The training was lost on Susan. Like many executives before the Great Recession, Susan thought the economy was unsound so she hoarded cash. Her tiny hospital unit amassed millions waiting for some economic event to happen. When the Great Recession came, Susan's unit was flush with cash. Meanwhile, the CEO had resigned to run some other hospital and max out their credit card.
This little example shows how hard it is to instill common values in an executive team. Susan thought the philosophy of "max out the credit card" was reckless. No retreat was going to change her mind.
Regina Hock, a business consultant based in Hamburg, Germany, is exploring a new approach to team building. She assesses the leadership team's deeply held values, needs, and fundamental motives. She then uses relationship self-discovery techniques to teach mutual respect. When team members deepen their mutual understanding of who everybody is, and especially how their personality relates to people with different values, they get along much better than when their relationships were governed by misunderstandings, rumor, and innuendo.
Hock isn't the first business consultant to build teams by teaching a group of executives to respect each other's personality and values. The Myers Briggs people had a similar idea many years ago. It was a good idea, too. What's new is that Hock teaches mutual understanding of fundamental motives and core values in addition to personality types.
People are individuals to a much greater extent than is commonly realized. One executive is a risk-taker, while another is cautious. One makes decisions and expects subordinates to carry them out, while another leads by consensus. One believes that ethics come first, while another believes in doing whatever it takes getting the job done. It is because of such differences in values that executives sometimes stop working as a team or worse even might oppose each other.
It is very difficult to impose a single set of values on an executive team. The values that are meaningful to one business executive, might seem meaningless to another, and vice versa, and even therapists can't readily change them. Because people don't change their values easily, team building needs to include a component that teaches people who they are and then teaches mutual respect. When business executives differ on whether or not to take risks, for example, the disagreement is partially a conflict in values. Business consultants who offer one size fits all advice for team building gloss over these personality differences and the team retains the seeds of dissension. In contrast, Regina Hock and her partners defuse value differences by teaching mutual understanding of who everybody on the team is. She points out the benefit each personality contributes to the overall success of the organization.
This is the third of a 14-part series on presentations at the second annual meeting of the World Society of Motivation Scientists and Professionals (www.motivationscience.org). The World Society provides forums for translational models of human needs theory. We explore the power for positive change of self-discovery. The third annual meeting of the World Society will be held in Vienna, Austria on October 5 and 6, 2011. Next up: Using Self-Discovery to Motivate Healthy Behavior. After tthat I will blog on "Logotherapy and Pioneering Work of Vicktor Frankl."
