It’s Tour de France season – which is an exciting time of the year for a man with calves and varicose veins like mine. Road cycling remains a minority interest in the British Isles but, perhaps stimulated by the UK’s stunning success in track cycling in Beijing, I’m seeing unusually high levels of awareness and enthusiasm for the TdF this year. This is good – it means I may not have to move to Belgium (although their beer is a compelling proposition).
What has this to do with BPM? Bear with me… one of the unusual aspects of this year’s tour is that the Astana team (banned last year because of a historical association with performance enhancing substances) is back, and with at least three cyclists capable of winning the Tour. Lance Armstrong has won seven times, and looks sharp enough to make it eight. Alberto Contador was the 2007 winner, and, but for the ban, might be shooting for 3 titles, and Levi Leipheimer has been a top flight rider for several years with a wicked time-trial performance. Most teams would be happy to have any one of them, but here they all are simultaneously trying to win the tournament themselves, ensure that someone from the Astana team wins the individual event, and ensure that Astana wins the team trophy.
The press are falling over themselves trying to stoke up the internal rivalry and generate as much excitement, controversy and debate as they can. But, hang on, isn’t this just another day at the office? In any organisation today people are balancing their own personal craving for success, their desire to be a team player, and their (enlightened self-interested) wish to see the team/dept/company succeed. It’s not an odd thing – it’s the norm, or at least it should be unless you’ve been crazy enough to hire one good guy and a bunch of lazy and indifferent people.
How far should the business enable or encourage this complicated dynamic? Is it actually a really positive thing rather than a problem? Every business should want the strongest team they can afford; but this only makes sense if they can actually unleash the full potential of those people, and reward them accordingly, and that requires certain criteria to be fulfilled:
1. Each player’s overall contribution is fully recognised and rewarded
2. Each player’s particular strengths are identified, exploited and celebrated
3. If there a single outstanding performer, it should be possible to identify them quickly and align
the whole team behind them
Ok, I asked for your forbearance… for many of you, this team dynamic is perhaps not an issue – you work in small fluid teams and you have the chance to shine, or support, with visibility. But this is not so for the vast majority of people in work today. Their issue closure rate, their customer satisfaction rating, their low defect rates, their creativity, are all invisible, uncelebrated, unsupported. Not only are we not encouraging healthy competition between them to be the best individual and/or team performers, we may well be encouraging them to coast. So this is a plea for Business Activity Monitoring – knowing enough about your teams and who is delivering value and in what ways so that you can do what Astana need to do today. Establishing and enabling processes is good – but make sure as you do it, that you’re getting the data back out of the processes , not just about the overall result, but also about the Contadors, Armstrongs and Leipheimers, to drive up the performance of the entire team… er business.
About the Author: Paul Moorhead is the Product Manager at Singularity.
Author : Paul O’Neill
