Reality Check: In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty.

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Today’s business teams are meeting, communicating, developing, storming, forming, and norming. Picking (if you’re fortunate) and developing a strong team is critical to meeting deadlines, scope, and budgets. Long-lasting relationships result from many team experiences. Participating on a winning team is contagious.
Volumes of literature have been written on team success – over 20,000 titles on teamwork are available in the business section of Amazon.com. As teams grow in size, keeping members coordinated becomes more difficult. With management of larger groups, communication can become inconsistent, covert resistance can grow, and the group can begin to fray around the edges.
What makes teams, especially larger ones, successful? Let’s shortcut a few books and condense to a statement learned from a careful study of history: “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity.” The earliest attribution of this wisdom is to St. Augustine of Hippo, who, along with many other clerics, kept a “team” together when it had every reason to fall apart over 1,500 years ago. Without the scholasticism and wit of Augustine and his colleagues, the spread of western culture throughout the world could have taken a different turn.
Focusing on the first two parts of Augustine’s statement, how has your team determined what is essential? Is everything essential? Does your team have room to breathe? Is your team running from one wind sprint to another? What’s the minimum amount of “essential” needed to have a cohesive team? One of the hardest tasks a team faces is the process of separating the essential “wheat” from the non-essential “chaff.” They may both be golden in color, but one is more essential than the other. Bottom line: Unite around what’s essentiall.
For the rest, market liberty. The freedom to think, breathe, practice and scrimmage as a team strengthens its condition. When was the last time you used the word “liberty” in a strategy statement? Empowerment buzzwords aside, can you find a case where extending more liberties (if the essentials are properly defined) is detrimental? What would a 10% increase in liberty mean to your company? (In light of the recent downturn, where we ratcheted up controls and procedures, maybe that increase should be 20%.) Can liberty be cultural? Could it create a sustainable competitive advantage for your company?
For share-owned companies, Augustine’s statement might read “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, profitability.” Your shareholders want more productivity and profitability. Your employees want to grow and explore. Reward both by adopting Augustine’s wisdom.
Jim Patterson is CEO & co-founder of Mobile Symmetry, a start-up created for carriers to solve the problems of an increasingly mobile-only society. He was most recently President – Wholesale Services for Sprint and has a career that spans over eighteen years in telecom and technology. He welcomes your comments at [email protected].