informal coalitions

Paying for performance at the Olympics?

I was dismayed to read in yesterday’s Sunday Times that the British Olympic Association (BOA) is drawing up plans to pay bonuses to athletes who win medals at the 2012 Olympic Games in London (Team GB to be rewarded with gold for gold).

This is not to say that our athletes don’t deserve recognition for their sporting achievements and a generous reward for their efforts. Far from it. But advocating a crude form of performance-related pay as part of the strategy for securing more medals seems to me to miss the point on several levels:

The roles of conversation and vision in team and organizational leadership

Nick Smith, in How to Set a Team on Fire, sets out some wide-ranging challenges to management orthodoxy in relation to various aspects of team and organizational performance, which are well worth reading. Two brief extracts give a flavour of this thoughts on the nature and roles of vision and conversation:

• On vision

"… I'd argue that shared visions are not all they're cracked up to be. If you think about it, the more diverse a team of people are, the less chance there is of arriving at a common vision. Diversity and a unified perspective are, to great extent, mutually exclusive. In anything but a small group, finding common purpose is nigh impossible unless you're going to select a team of me-too automatons."

Little Britain and the paradox of team working

If today's Mail on Sunday is to be believed, tensions have surfaced in the relationship between the two co-creators and presenters of award-winning BBC comedy Little Britain. Allegedly, Matt Lucas and David Walliams have disagreed on the future direction that the show should take and on how their partnership should develop. These disagreements have, the paper claims, extended to the question of who should be credited with the show's success.

Whether or not there is any truth in the specifics of this story is not the issue here. What this story highlights, though, is the paradoxical nature of all team-based relationships, which most conventional discussions of the subject ignore.