The Importance of a BHAG to Teamwork

It was Sunday morning this week and I entered the kids' playroom in our house. My heart sank - it looked like a hurricane had hit. There was not a single bin that had not been emptied, legos everywhere, balls, small doll clothes, you name it. And I really wanted to get a quick workout in on Exercise TV, my new craze. So I did what any self-respecting mother would do: yelled for the kids to come in and help clean up. The littlest one, Katie Rose, put away doll clothes, Ruth put away all the big-kid toys and Zach took on the legos and balls. Steve and I handled bigger things. In no time flat (under 5 minutes), we had the place cleaned up. That is the beauty of teamwork: you can accomplish more and more quickly than if you did it alone. I've cleaned that playroom more times than I can count and it usually takes at least 20 minutes. But not this time.

The basic premise of teamwork is that we need each other in order to accomplish great things. I know the American spirit is a can-do, rugged individualist and that has its role sometimes. But I would argue that we really need to utilize teams of collaborating and qualified individuals, each doing the right role at the right time, in order to accomplish more than we could alone. In their book Built to Last, Collins and Porras tell us about the BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal. I love this quote that prefaces the BHAG chapter and have used it many times:
"Of all the things I've done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them toward a certain goal." - Walter Elias Disney (the Disney founder)

If you want to do good thing, go alone. If you want to do great things, far beyond your imagination, assemble a team of gifted people and let them work together. And a BHAG is a great stimulus to do something together, because it provides a defined target for the team's aim. Without a big goal, teams will simply become bureaucratic turf-protecting committees at best and sites for infighting and power struggles at their very worst. A team must know the target and have a reasonable likelihood of either accomplishing it or failing miserably in order to stimulate their best input. This is true in for-profit or non-profit work.

Questions for thought and contemplation:
What teams are you a part of that need a really big, hairy audacious goal?
How can you go about providing peer-level leadership to see the team both develop and accomplish the target?
What impact would this have if you applied this concept to your family, to your community work, to your vocation?

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