Building the peloton
A team of teams
S PORT IS A popular—if not the most popular— analogy for teamwork in business. Much has been learned by drawing parallels between the two: the importance of well-defined roles, the relative benefits of specialist versus generalist, the need for a shared goal, and so on. It would be easy to conclude that there’s little left to be learned from sport. Unless, that is, we expand our view to cover the peloton —the team of teams that participates in a major cycling event such as the Tour de France: a collection of distinct teams simultaneously competing and working in concert against a common enemy, fatigue, toward a single destination, analogous to the way teams work in a modern organization. Each team works as an integrated unit, but so does the team of teams 1 — the firm, the business peloton —in the endless quest for productivity and opportunity in a complex and uncertain market. Whether through a deliberate effort to “keep pace with the challenges of a fluid, unpredictable world,” 2 or inadvertently as a result of efforts to
disrupt the edge, firms are building cross-cutting teams to address specific issues or drive innovation, transforming themselves into networks or ecosystems of teams. 3 Firms that do manage to adapt are establishing themselves as the market leaders. 4 New winners and losers are being created as we write. The question is then: What can leaders learn from this analogy to create high-performing teams and build their peloton ? In the pages that follow, we explore the changing nature of teams in today’s business environment, examining how the analogy of a cycling peloton can help us to better understand how teams function in a modern organization. We posit five conditions necessary for team effectiveness in a modern business peloton. Together, these conditions position teams to operate effectively with a workforce that covers a spectrum of worker types within a workplace that is no longer dictated by physical proximity to undertake work that may be automated and done by—and with—smart machines. 5
The analogy of a cycling peloton can help us to better understand how teams function in a modern organization.
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