The following is another in a new series of columns that will provide answers to small business questions. The new question and answer column is written by Dr. Leonard Bertain, Ph.D., the president of The Bertain Consulting Group of Oakland, CA a consulting firm specializing in the improvement of business processes and business re-engineering. Dr. Bertain's book, "The New Turnaround", contains a fictionalized character known as "Dr. Elbie". Should you have a question regarding business management issues, write or fax them to Dr. Elbie, Bertain Consulting Group, 3758 Grand Ave., Suite 25, Oakland, CA 94611, phone (510) 653-6355 or lbertain@bertain.com Dear Dr. Elbie: I have been having a difficult time getting my Executive team to pull together. We meet, they agree to our goals of working together and then they leave our meetings and go back to in-fighting as usual. Any ideas about what I can do? Signed. Leader without followers. Comment: There has been an awful lot of material written recently about teams. In a recent book, Work in America, over 10 different types of business teams were discussed. There are problem-solving teams, special project teams, management teams, new product launch teams, vendor, dealer and customer quality teams and on and on. Interestingly, there are also many ways to coach teams. Vince Lombardi had his style (very much the man in control), John Wooden had his very successful style (he looked for people with character, taught the fundamentals and let the players do their thing) and there is the ever thoughtful coach of our own A's, Tony LaRussa. Whatever the coaching philosophy that you espouse, you have to get everybody on the team to agree on common goals and the measures of success have to be on the teams performance not on individual statistics. For instance, if Sandy Alderson had paid Jose Canseco to hit homeruns and even gave him a $1 Million bonus if he hit 50 homeruns, do you think he would be willing to lay a bunt down with a runner on third and no body out in a tie ball game at the bottom of the ninth. Probably not, unless he also sweetened the pot with a $2 Million bonus if they won the World Series. In this case, Jose would have to decide whether it was more important to win in order to get to the World Series or to hit the 50 homerun milestone. Either way, Sandy would have given a member of his team mixed signals about what was important. In your case, you may have done the same thing. You have to ask yourself as a leader of a team, "does everyone on this team have an incentive to be a team player?" By this I mean, have you given your team members goals and objectives which inhibit them from playing together on the team, which you think you have. For example, does the sales manager's goal encourage maximum sales shipments without consideration of the profit that they generate? If this is the case, then his goals may be in direct conflict with the goals of the production manager who has the goal of shipping goods profitably and on schedule. The sales manager doesn't care about the quality only the volume of shipments. This gives him high volume shipments and allows him to meet his goal at the expense of the production manager's goal. One way to deal with this problem, and it is a common one that we see, is to really make your management team, a team. Give them one set of goals that they have to meet together and their bonus is equally divided among the players. They are all in the game together. They are all equal players on the team. And their reward is divided equally. Common goals then take precedent over individual achievement. The goal is to win as a team. Let's be honest. Why do you want a team? For one thing, you may not. It requires you to learn new skills, like "coaching", like "leadership." These will stretch your capabilities of adjusting to a new style of management that has been shown to be very productive. In the case of the team mentioned above, if you rewarded all the players equally, you will find that they will suddenly find reasons to start working together because if they don't, they'll lose. We don't advocate teams because they are fun. We advocate them because they have demonstrated to be a most profitable way to run a business. Once the players understand the rules, they require less management and more leadership. They almost become self-managed but need your leadership. There are a whole range of leadership issues that you can provide: experience in the market, a vision of where the company is going, and what the customers are looking for in product quality and capabilities. It isn't easy being a coach. But experience tells me that it is more fun than being a manager and it is truly more profitable for your business. Good luck. Dr. Elbie's Corner is copyrighted by Leonard Bertain, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998. Dr. Elbie's Corner is a monthly article published by the Bertain Consulting Group, in the CEO University Website @ Bertain.com or CEOU.com. This article is reprinted from November 1993.