A Profound Change for Teams That is Pivotal to the Future of Organisations

Edgar H Schein, professor emeritus at MIT's Sloan School of Management has been one of the world's leading authorities on the link between culture and behaviour for over 50 years.

In his latest book Helping: How to Offer, Give and Receive Help, he talks about a topic that he believes is 'pivotal to the future of organisations', and which he summarised in a recent interview as follows

In most team cultures, bosses tend to act as authority figures who are there only to help subordinates, not to listen to and be helped by others... Better teamwork requires perpetual mutual helping, within and across hierarchical boundaries... - situations in which people can go outside the organisation's norms and practices and explicitly create this mutual helping relationship. (For example) people with the most authority and established knowledge must make the others feel psychologically safe so everyone will speak up freely when something is wrong. (Also) in any helping situation 'humble inquiry' is a key intervention to equilibriate the relationship between the person asking for help and the helper.

All this will demand that companies train their teams in the helping process. Most team training that I've seen is focused on making people feel good about one another. But what I'm talking about is something much more profound and essential; knowing how to work with one another as equal partners in an operational setting.

The idea that this can be a 'profound' adjustment for teams not used to operating this way is - in our experience - a fair conclusion, and while Schein's comments reflect 'what' these teams need to do, FranklinCovey's work in this area is to codify the new ways of thinking and new ways of working described - changing authority mindsets, seeking to inquire, building trust, developing interdependence, identifying 3rd alternatives, achieving synergies - so that teams understand 'how' these can be achieved and the performance benefits realised.