Why Teams?

“Less is more.” —Mies Van Der Rohe

Teams are an obsession for me. I spend a lot of time studying what makes them work, why they struggle, and how I can help them work better.

But why?

My interest goes back 20 years to when I earned an MBA in sustainable management. Our core question in the program was how to harness the free market to make the world a better place.

Most of my classmates wanted to start “green” versions of existing businesses (like home improvement, clothing, events, or energy) or to work in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) at large companies.

I was attracted to both paths and worked on a green energy startup for a time, but I couldn’t stop feeling like I was missing something that lay just under the surface.

Then it hit me. Every business operates in essentially the same way: Bosses at the top making decisions and telling their subordinates what to do with the implicit threat of termination if they fail to follow orders.

I thought this top-down, fragmented design might be part of the reason businesses are so bad at taking care of people and the planet — and readily sacrifice both for profit.

Before grad school, I spent a decade in visual design and had become obsessed with Bauhaus and other minimalist design movements. Before that, I lived in Japan for several years where I’d become enamored with their aesthetic. And before that, I’d worked as a furniture maker where I’d focused on Shaker style.

Minimalist, Japanese, and Shaker style are all simple and functional. A phrase that sums up this aesthetic sense is “form follows function.” The idea is that something is beautiful if it works. It’s not decorative elements, but the thing doing what it’s supposed to do, that makes the design attractive.

Minimalist designers start with the function in mind. They watch how people move through space and imagine how an object, space, or tool is most easily used to deliver the value it’s trying to deliver, and then design the object, space, or tool to do what it’s supposed to do as elegantly as possible.

There’s an old story of a Shaker woman who was spinning cotton one day when she looked out the window and saw two Shaker men struggling with a two-man pit saw; saws known colloquially as “misery whips” to rip logs into planks — a task that is notoriously hard on relationships.

The woman watched the saw going back and forth, then glanced at her spinning wheel, then back at the saw, and then invented the circular saw. This is classic form-follows-function tool design.

In furniture design, form following function is illustrated well by Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair. This is a chair designed without cushions or adornment to simply hold your butt comfortably. I have one in my living room and my family tends to fight over who gets to sit in it to watch TV.

As I thought more about what I wanted to do after grad school and how I could harness business as a force for good in the world, I studied the design of organizations and realized that they were often not designed to be effective. In fact they were often barely designed at all. Leaders would just add people to the org chart, tell them who their boss was, and that was that.

Chaos, confusion, and inefficiency were the norm in most organizations I saw. And I knew that most companies I and my friends had ever worked for were inefficient and ineffective. We might have loved the product or our job, but meetings, bosses, policies, and practices were all pretty much hated.

I also noticed that the organizations with the most noble and inspiring missions were often the worst offenders. Have you ever tried to ask a non-profit boss for time off or a raise?

I realized that if form follows function, then function also follows form; and if we are going to actually make the world and our lives better, we need to rethink how we work together.

Ideally businesses provide value to all of their stakeholders — owners and workers, as well as the communities and ecosystems they impact.

So why do I focus on teams? Because teams are what organizations are made of and, if we’re really going to make the world a better place, we need to design organizations so teams work at their best.

It’s that simple.

— Bob Gower

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PS If you’re ready to improve the performance of your team, hit reply and let’s talk.

PPS I’m researching my next book on “Effective Teams.” If you lead a team, or know an inspiring leader you want to introduce me to, please hit reply and we can find a time to talk. I appreciate your help making the world a little bit better.