Evolutionary Teams: Part 1
Evolutionary Businesses rely on teams to fulfill their purpose. Teams lead to greater fulfillment and impact by matching humans' innate social operating systems with the goals of the business.
Humans are a social species and our evolution has been driven by collaboration and social mechanisms that allow us to collaborate to solve challenges and thrive in nature, unlike any other species. We live in community with others and are each able to contribute something important to the well-being of the whole. The give-and-take of support creates a fabric that allows for life itself to blossom. The team is the expression of human social evolution in business.
Healthy organizations are like social ecosystems that have smaller social systems that have their own purpose, culture, and structure. These smaller systems are teams. Evolutionary Businesses leverage the power of teams to create both greater fulfillment and long-term, sustainable success.
Team-based management is something that is relatively new. In the early phases of the industrial revolution (outside of agriculture) management took the perspective that humans were cogs on an assembly line and each job was a static, solo endeavor that produced a distinct component of work. This evolved with the advent of Socio-Technical systems theory that demonstrated that humans have social needs and are more effective when working as a unit rather than alone. This expanded over the course of thirty years, with the ‘80s being the zenith of team-based concepts and Toyota becoming famous for letting autonomous, intact teams “stop the line” any time an issue came up during the car manufacturing process. Team-building became the norm (and somewhat reviled) as the study of teams morphed into self-managing teams and Holacracy at the beginning of the 21st Century.
Holacracy is a highly directive version of self-organization that has fallen from grace in recent years, with Zappos’ sudden implementation being a public example of how even self-management can be autocratic and dogmatic leading to disastrous results. The principles of Holacracy which include autonomy, learning, and mutual leadership are still powerful and important. But like anything done in excess, must be applied with thoughtfulness and subtlety, acknowledging context and human change principles.
Evolutionary teams operate with meaning, autonomy, and continuous learning. Leaders that build evolutionary teams take a holistic approach from purpose to process to values and see the team itself as a unit of stewardship. They take the perspective that a team is like a healthy ecosystem that needs tending and balancing, generally able to function as a unit of wholeness unto itself in the right conditions. Teams provide the most fulfilling way for humans to work and the most effective way to solve complex problems. Years of evolution have primed us to leverage this model of a small community to add value to the planet.
This series will explore the nature of building and incorporating teams as a part of an Evolutionary Business.
