Recently, Mr. Andoni Zubizarreta was in Guatemala giving a conference about team work, focused toward the sport teams. I was in that conference that, by the way, was full of fans of the teams in which he played. The conference naturally evolved, considering that He was technical director of one of the Europe most popular teams, giving him a great knowledge about the soccer teams. I am not a soccer fan, even thought, something called my attention, the conference was centered in “the specialists” and “the lonely players”. It caught my eye because is very common that two categories of “players” become one category at a business level.

Andoni centered his conference in the specialists from the scorer perspective, and in the lonely players from the gol keeper perspective. Both players are important and decisive in the soccer field. Even thought, the glory generally it’s taken by the scorer and the defeat by the gol keeper. This point is important because many times inside the organizations we have the scorer and he is rewarded in function of that. However, the scorer is the tip of the game chain. The scorer can’t score by itself. He needs the team. And the gol keeper is not completely responsible of the defeat; the whole team is responsible of that. An enemy ball do not arrive at the opposite field by itself, it needs a good offensive or an unaligned defense. This takes us from those who are praised until the undetected; the companies are like the soccer fields, each member of the team, from the first to the second division are important and every one must stay in the play and have the chance to win.

Most of the organizations talk about the “teamwork” and impose employees to fit in the “teamwork” culture or have the “teamwork” in their organizational values. However, is important to notice whether or not those goals are met and must be observed from the how companies promote the “teamwork”. If compensation isn’t focused to this value and is left in a frame on the wall and in a battle between management and staff, they will always be in a constant struggle against each other to protect their heads, as is common in the companies.

All this chat and analysis reminded me a case in which I worked recently. The organization did exactly that… they rewarded the sales team as scorers and for the customer service and risk evaluator teams (the gol keepers), there was no variable compensation, and indeed they had “frozen salaries”, a non adjustable fact to Guatemala’s situation. Which was the tangible result: The value chain was misaligned and the input volume was too big (even when it wasn’t enough for the institutional needs) for the process flux speed, therefore the output quantity didn’t aligned to the organizational goals. Complaints between areas were frequent and the battle inside the organization makes practically impossible the teamwork in a scheme where “stab by the back “could mean to preserve your head in the job.

Finally, something else that I liked about how Andoni drove the conference was the coaching perspective, because at the end, the organizations are formed by people, and mentoring is more subtle than imposing and it causes less resistance to change.

Laura Contreras Pivaral

laura.contreras@bicongroup.com