Page 310 - leadership-experience-2008

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Leading Teams

It’s 5:45 a.m. and 50-year-old Charles Pope is bending and stretching along
with nearly 200 other Seagate Technology staff members in the dark of a
New Zealand park. It’s the start of another day at the sixth annual Eco
Seagate. The event, dreamed up by CEO Bill Watkins, is an intense week
of team-building that will be topped off by an adventure race in which
teams made up of people from a dozen or so countries will kayak, hike,
bike, swim, and rappel down a cliff. Eco Seagate is one way the company’s

leaders strive to break down barriers, boost confidence, and build a sense
of teamwork among Seagate’s 45,000 employees spread around the world.

People are chosen to reflect a mix of disciplines, hierarchical levels, coun-
tries, and ages.
After the morning stretch, the CEO or another top leader gives an un-
scripted talk about a key attribute of a strong team, such as trust, healthy

conflict, or shared responsibility. Then teams head out to learn the skills
they’ll need to compete in the fi nal race. They earn points for various activi-
ties that they can use on race day to buy better maps, skip a checkpoint, or
use a bridge over a frigid river. One of Pope’s team members with a fear of
heights won extra points for her team by volunteering to rappel off a bridge,
something she did because the team’s success became more important than
her own fear. Throughout the week, and particularly during the race itself,
people have to rely on one another and be willing to ask for and give help
as needed to accomplish the team’s mission. To get a head start, some teams
started their team-building before they ever arrived in New Zealand, by
e-mailing or calling back and forth to establish good communication and
bonds of trust.
Pope, who is chief fi nancial offi cer, once pooh-poohed Eco Seagate as a
waste of money—the 2006 event cost $1.8 million—until he attended one
and became a believer. “I consider this an investment,” Pope says, now indi-
cating it would be one of the last things he’d cut from the budget.
Despite the fun, Eco Seagate “isn’t a vacation,” Pope says, and leaders
follow up to ask employees what they learned from the event and how it has
made them do things differently. 1
From the classroom to the battlefi eld, from the assembly line to the
executive suite, and from giant corporations such as Seagate, the world’s
largest maker of hard drives, to small companies like plantscaping fi rm
Growing Green and non-profit organizations like Parkland Memorial Hospital,

teams are becoming the basic building block of organizations. The ability to
inspire and support teamwork is critical to effective leadership.
The use of teams has increased dramatically in response to new com-
petitive pressures, the need for greater flexibility and speed, and a desire to

give people more opportunities for involvement and decision making. Many
organizations have reported great success with teams, including increased
productivity, quality improvements, greater innovation, and higher employee
satisfaction. At Xerox, for example, production plants using teams reported
a 30 percent increase in productivity. Federal Express cut service problems
2
such as incorrect bills or lost packages by 13 percent by using teams. A
recent study of team-based organizations in Australia supports the idea that
teams provide benefits for both organizations and employees through higher

labor productivity, a flatter management structure, and lower employee
turnover. 3
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