TEAM SPIRIT IN OUR DNA

What is a team?

Consciousness is the first thing that makes a team different from any other group of people who just work together. Each team member knows his/her focus area, performs his/her tasks, and understands why some job needs to be done at a given time. A team has a leader, a plan, focus areas, and supporters. But most importantly, a team has a common goal, i.e. where it’s heading and what the result must look like.

We can distinguish a team from other groups by the level of coordination between its participants—by whether they do unnecessary things. Also, we can detect a team, judging by the result—on average, a team does better than just an unorganized group of people.

Let’s take a look at a basketball team. It has forwards, guards, and substitutes. It has a tactic: they can save some energy in the first quarter by playing defense, pick up the pace in the second quarter, or focus on three-point field goals if they understand that this is their opponent’s weak spot. It’s obvious that they know what to do—without further ado. If we talk about small and simple tasks, it’s generally better to perform them yourself. There is always a certain loss of efficiency when several people team up to perform a task. If I alone do some job that’s equal to 1, then a team of two people can only offer 0.9 + 0.9 = 1.8. Nevertheless, if a task requires 1.5, you can’t perform it alone, as 1<1.5, but it can be performed together, as 1.8> 1.5. Therefore, all complex tasks require teamwork. No matter how brilliant a person is, he/she won’t perform them on his/her own. No matter how strong the world weightlifting champion is, he/she won’t lift the bus over the head, but it can be done as a team. And the better it’s coordinated, the more efficient each member will be.

The golden rules of teamwork

Both the leader and the team member are guided by two most important rules: to realize the common global goal clearly and to show flexibility. Flexibility is about adapting to other people, sacrificing some of your ambitions for the common goal, and being able to perform a part of a task—pleasant or not—that the hive mind assigns you to.

For example, you need to resolve a claim from a partner. Someone has to go to a location and sort out the situation. Someone has to listen to the negative stuff and take it upon himself/herself. Someone will play a more pleasant role—to inform a partner about compensation for damage. Each team member has competencies in one area or another, but they don’t always match a task. And if it turns out that you perfectly fit an unpleasant task, you need to be flexible and accept this for the sake of the team and the result.

From the leader’s perspective, it’s vital to recruit the right team members and to offer everyone an individual approach, i.e. to be flexible too. The leader must distribute tasks the right way and make sure everyone understands that they’re distributed fairly. And if tasks are distributed unfairly, the leader must talk about this openly. Team members want to understand why this happens and why it’s needed.

Also, human relations between team members are important. During the quarantine, we faced the problem of adapting new employees. They can’t adapt remotely, as a new person can’t see anyone and can communicate with everyone only at online meetings. There isn’t enough ‘glue’, i.e. an element of personal communication in the kitchen. Human relations help interact and do the job more easily and efficiently. Therefore, we bring new employees to the office for several months to make sure they meet with their colleagues and establish personal contact.

We have another tool that helps improve teamwork—it’s team feedback. It helps reflect on how we performed a given task. Once it’s been performed, the team gathers again and thinks over what could have been done better: how the tasks would be distributed, what resources would be used according to the result, and what wasn’t sorted out or discussed in time. This is a kind of error analysis session that enables you to understand how to do better next time. We regularly use this extremely helpful and useful tool.

The team at Recycling Solutions

I believe that the team spirit at Recycling Solutions is top-class. The team approach to solving problems is in our DNA, so all of our team members are accustomed to this paradigm. We team up to perform almost all big tasks. For example, when we launched coal combustion products, our team consisted of several people. Dima Anufriev was the manager, Sergey Melnichenko and I were responsible for the commercial part, Zhenya Makarov did the analytics, Andrey Mozgovoy took the technical part, while Andrey Gorokhov helped communicate with high-level stakeholders. We got together, planned, distributed focus areas, and predicted different scenarios. By using teamwork only, we managed to develop this project, were given carte blanche from shareholders, came to an agreement with DTEK, and started active sales. This was the beginning of Recycling Solutions that’s still profitable.

At Recycling Solutions, every project has a dedicated team. If this is a project on entering a new market, it may be one team consisting mainly of salespeople. If this is a project on modernizing some equipment or producing some product, it’ll be a different team. But what they have in common is that we team up to discuss each issue and achieve the result together—we can’t imagine another workflow format.

If someone faces a problem or comes up with an idea, the first thing that person does is select the right team members and organize a kick-off meeting. At the meeting, he/she describes the idea, while everyone expresses their opinions, brainstorms, clarifies, improves, and gets tasks. We call it a working group. This is already an automatic process. When you come up with an idea, you don’t need to go to your leader who will pass it on to the director, the director will report to the director-general who—only after that—will order to create a team or a working group. Any employee just creates a working group as soon as he/she has an idea or a problem. The manager only receives implementation status updates. This is the key indicator showing that teamwork has already become an integral part of our life.