Adventure of Strategy

A new year beckons! What do you plan to do in your firm, in 2007?

Are you contemplating going out into the market, to hire brilliant individuals away from your competitors, to let the magic of Dream Teams loose in your firm? If so, be certain that the magic that is released is not black magic! You may first want to read a piece by Geoffrey Colvin titled When Dream Teams Fail that was published in Fortune recently.

Dream Teams are a beguiling idea. Assemble a team made up of the very best brains and success will be assured, right.......?   All too often:  No, not really.

Think:   All-star movies that have ended up duds. (Recently: Oceans 12)

Think:   The United States failing to reach the semifinals of something called the 2006 World Baseball Classic, with a team that included Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Johnny Damon. (They lost games to Mexico, South Korea, and Canada.)

Think:   Enron's management team, and Eisner/Wells at Disney

Says Colvin:

"If someone tells you you're being recruited onto a dream team, maybe you should run. In our team-obsessed age, the concept of the dream team has become irresistible. But it's brutally clear that they often blow up. Why? Because they're not teams. They're just bunches of people."

Why is this so? What can be done to prevent a dream team from imploding?

Colvin lists five pitfalls:

Signing Up Too Many All-stars

Some of the very worst teams are those where everybody is a strong leader or star. Add to that the highly individualistic and self centred personality styles often encountered amongst top rate lawyers and other professionals, and the prognosis for teamwork or even tolerant cooperation is poor.

Failing to Build a Culture of Trust

Trust is the MOST fundamental element in a winning team. In dream teams, everybody is a champion and so there is little motivation or even opportunity for members to develop confidence in each others' competencies. Trust, by its nature, builds slowly. In reality, it may even be impossible amongst real high flyers, where the team size is greater than two or three. This is almost inevitable, in fact, when the dream team comprises mostly lateral hires from several other organizations.

Tolerating Competing Agendas

Professional service firms often gloss over competing agendas that exist between their star players, in the interests of preserving collegiality. In avoiding the sometimes difficult discussions that lead to common goals, though, personal agendas can become destructive. It takes exceptionally strong leadership to persuade high-flying members of dream teams to subordinate their own personal, competing agendas in the interests of a common firm-wide strategy.

Letting Conflicts Fester

Addressing conflict openly and honestly, bringing tensions out into the open and dealing with them so that team can move forward, is far more difficult in dream teams. All too often, dream team members indulge in a charade that tensions do not exist or can be easily resolved 'at a later stage.' The reality, all too often, is that this often allows tensions to build to the point where the team implodes when they finally burst out.

Hiding From the Real Issues

This is another result of maintaining an atmosphere of polite constraint that so often characterizes professional service firms, where the pursuit of collegiality is raised above honest debate about uncomfortable issues. Because they know that they are in demand anywhere in the market, this often leads to dream team members to deal with their personal discomfort by thinking about their own exit strategies. Issues will arise when a group of lateral hires is introduced and assembled into a team. It is inevitable. Avoiding them does nobody any favours.

Final Pitfalls: "Them (Dream Team) vs Us" Cultures Evolving

Other issues that I have observed over the years, that Colvin does not mention directly, involve not only issues within the teams but also the hugely disruptive influence that dream teams can have elsewhere in the firm, where a "them and us" culture often evolves. Manifestations of this may include one or more of the following:

• Mercenary behaviour, where the lateral hires in the dream teams have no allegiance to the firm beyond the agreed 'golden handcuffs' period is zero. This is especially true where a 'golden hello' is the main attractor.
  

• Bullying behaviour, where talented "900 lb gorillas" in the dream team believe that they do not need to adhere to the norms and values in the firm in their dealings with "lesser mortals."
  

• Those other professionals and staff that have built the firm up over the years feel that that they are being discriminated against, in favour of the new 'dream' recruits. (The previous remark about 'golden hellos' is equally valid here.)
  

• Two sets of standards evolving: one for dream teams and another for "others." For instance, atwo tier compensation system evolving, where one set of criteria applies to the 'dream team/s' and another to others in the firm. Alternatively, a single system evolving that is skewed either in favour of the 'dream team/s' (causing resentment elsewhere) or inadequately rewarding the dream teams (causing members of those teams to move elsewhere.) This may be either deliberate or unanticipated.
  

In summary:    Dream teams need to be approached with far more care than is often the case. Brilliant people injected into an existing firm will disrupt culture, systems and even structure, for better or for worse. There will be unanticipated consequences. It will be extremely difficult and it will require extraordinary leadership ability to make them work properly. None of which is to say that this is impossible, or that the results that could be achieved are not potentially extraordinary too.

Accept, though, that assembling dream teams is a passage strewn with wrecks of other vessels that have tried to pass that way before.

Says Colvin:   "Putting together a few talented people who will work honestly and rigorously for something greater than themselves - that's more than enough of a dream."

Hat tips to Dominic Basulto at Business Innovation Insider and to MBA Depot.