Ever noticed a similarity between Digital Transformation challenges and those challenges faced by leaders in the sports sector? Will Larcombe, Co-founder and Director, Stellarmann, has. In this feature, he talks about the similarities and has provided a few pointers to successful team management, along with some examples from the world of sport.
It will always be an advantage to have talented individuals in your team, but it doesn’t guarantee success. Ensuring the team works well together is often more important. I recently heard Sir David Brailsford sum up the importance of teamwork by saying, ‘a star team will always beat a team of stars’.
Sir David may have been referring to the world of sport, but it’s a lesson that is highly applicable to other walks of life – in particular, Digital Transformation projects. According to Boston Consulting Group, 70% of Digital Transformation projects fall short of their objectives. While there are many reasons why these projects fail, we can’t ignore the part that the performance of the delivery team plays.
The challenge for team leaders in this field is they are often pulling together disparate people, typically a mix of internal staff and expert external consultants – and they need them to gel quickly. That’s not always easy. But, in our conversations with sports professionals we’ve found that there are many transferrable lessons that can help project leaders manage this challenge.
Setting the culture
The first lesson is that culture is crucial when you are pulling together a group of people with different backgrounds and experiences. They will all be used to working in different ways. But as a manager your job is to lay down the rules right away to pre-empt any clashes between team members.
This applies to everything from working habits to methodology. If your outsourced talent is not prepared to align with your approach, it may be best to part company with them early. A ‘fit in or get out’ attitude may sound harsh, but you can waste months dealing with problems if you don’t set out clear lines.
Team spirit
Having set the ground rules, a manager will also need to create a sense of togetherness in a way that encourages team members to pull for each other. In a football team, new players are absorbed into the club culture as soon as they join – spending time with team mates in the gym, the canteen or on the training field with coaching staff. If you’re working with a hybrid team in a corporate world, however, this isn’t quite so straightforward. But it’s essential to the success of the project that teams can collaborate together.
You may not be able to get everyone in the same place very often, if at all, but you can set up regular calls and chat boards and encourage everyone in the delivery team to participate. If you are paying premium daily rates for consultants, it’s natural to feel that any time spent in non-essential conversation with team mates is an expensive extravagance, but these casual interactions are an important way of making people feel part of the team.
Achieving harmony
Another element of a happy team is ensuring that everyone’s role is clear. Sports coaches know that it’s vital for each player to understand not only their own position, but also that of their team mates. In transformation projects, this step is too often overlooked. Without an understanding of the specific role and pressures a colleague is facing, it’s easy for resentments to grow or impressions of unfair treatment to be harboured.
A RACI matrix covering every aspect of a project can go a long way to addressing this. By establishing who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who needs to be Consulted and who Informed, you can also avoid any confusion when decisions need to be made. To make this work effectively, however, it must be communicated clearly to all members of the team so that nobody is tempted to strike out in their own direction.
Delegation
If setting a culture, building team spirit and creating harmony all sound desirable but difficult to achieve, remember that you don’t have to do all this alone. In the sports world, a manager will be surrounded by a team of assistant coaches. In the Premier League, when clubs loan out players, they also provide a support package to help with the fitness monitoring, physical conditioning and mental preparedness of their player. Similar support is available in the business world.
A professional services provider should fulfil this assistant role for you by maintaining responsibility for the associates they are lending to your team. As well as holding regular meetings with each associate to monitor wellbeing, they should also provide training and coaching and act as a conduit for feedback in both directions. The closer the relationship you have with your provider, the more you will be able to delegate.
Goals
Our final tip from the sporting world is a simple one: make sure everyone in your team is aiming for the same goal. Sometimes this means taking more time to identify what the real goal is. In the world of Digital Transformation, we have a tendency to look at objectives in terms of technology; for example, ‘digitise our paper records’. We should instead be thinking in terms of why we are doing this, which might be to improve interactions with our customers.
For third party consultants you should always draw up a clear statement of work, which includes deliverables. But, if you want to keep the whole team motivated, every member needs to feel that progress is being made. So, set smaller milestones and invest time in celebrating as a team when you pass them – as this will also boost togetherness. In practical terms this means regular team updates and reviews of every stage.
Success
Getting the best from a group of highly talented people takes skill. No matter how brilliant each individual may be, it takes a high performing team to deliver a successful transformation – and achieving that requires strong leadership.
Building a coherent, high functioning unit to deliver a digital project is not always easy. But remember that, in many cases – especially when you are working with associates supplied by professional services providers – support will be there to help you achieve that success.
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