The team is dead... long live the virtual team

The emerging team environment

In retrospect, our team was the product of an organizational environment that has long since disappeared. In the 1960 and 70's, belief in concepts such as jobs for life and corporate loyalty were accepted as the norm. In addition, many organisations provided a "corporate family" for their employees and, as documented by many management experts, the rules of the school were really simple. Look after your organisation and it will look after you.

As a result, there was a generally stable organisation structure and culture, which meant that long-term investment could be and was made in building the skills and knowledge of people and teams. In addition, the relative stability and security of employment meant that personnel turnover was low and when it did occur, it was well-planned.

In the 90's, the organisational environment is more complex, more turbulent and more chaotic. Again, as well documented by experts such as Peter Drucker, Charles Handy and many others, one of the side-effects of the new organisation environment is that corporate loyalty and careers for life are no longer accepted dogma.

An excellent example of the new corporate reality can be seen in one of our favourite magazines, Fast Company. In the August/September 1997 and December/January 1998 issues, Fast Company headlined two "state of the art" pieces. The first was from Tom Peters called "A Brand Called You". In a wonderful revision of the famous team statement "There is no I in team", Peters argues that "There is a You in team" and that the focus of people must be on their own career interests rather than that of others or of the organisation. In the December/January issue, Daniel Pink describes the concept of Free Agents or, in more conventional terms, corporate mercenaries. In Fast Company's terms, Free Agents are people who understand :

The old social contract didn't have a clause for introspection. It was much simpler than that. You gave loyalty [to the company]. You got security. But now that the old contract has been repealed, people are examining both its basic terms and its implicit conditions.

Nina Munk in an article entitled "The New Organisation Man" in Fortune parallels the conclusions reached in the Fast Company articles, quoting from a senior in a U.S. university:

"My dad worked for Sears for 19 years as a security guard, and he was laid off. I have to position myself so that I can constantly look out for myself. I have to be self-serving."

These views are typical of those of the members of the Virtual teams with which we are familiar.

These concepts are not new and, in fact, were first proposed in 1989 by Charles Handy in his seminal The Age of Unreason. In that book, Handy argued for people to adopt the concept of work, not as a upward and hierarchical career in one organisation, but rather, as a horizontal portfolio of different jobs for different organisations.

The new team environment also includes the additional factors of continuous re-structuring, outsourcing and dynamic planning driven by increasing competition and technological innovation.

The other major driving force for new team structures is the increasing sub-specialisation of business and information skills. Traditional project teams were based on a group of people who possessed the requisite skills to undertake the project work. Only a decade ago, the "typical" IT team would need access to a project manager, a systems analyst, a data modeler, a couple of COBOL programmers, a documentation expert and perhaps, a tester. Now, the range and complexity of technical issues, development platform concerns, higher business group participation, G.U.I. and prototyping requirements, business process redesign considerations, change management, complex network and data-base design, implementation factors and so on has vastly increased the range and sophistication of skills required for successful product and system development. As a result, few teams can permanently accommodate all skills required so, the flexibility of the Virtual team has given it an edge.

In other words, the new team environment must reflect the new values, beliefs and dynamics of the organisation. The challenge has become how to build teams when team members are encouraged by Peters and other experts in the following terms:

We are the CEOs of our own companies. Me Inc.

In addition, the challenge is to build teams on a shifting bedrock of low organisation loyalty, high staff turnover, sub-specialisation and increasing outsourcing.

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