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Three Big Wins

Team rewards are an essential component of all good teamwork. As we
mentioned earlier, we had spontaneous celebrations and we had official
parties. Along the way, Jerry McColgin often took members out for
a game of golf after the completion of an especially grueling project.
But the big award was, of course, the year-end bonus, and herein lay a
problem—how to calculate a fair bonus for an international team whose
members were usually paid under a variety of bonus structures. With the
help of the company COO, Jerry finally worked out a solution for the
first year’s bonus. But when the final bonus was to be paid, there was
such a generally critical and unpleasant attitude among other members
of management in the company that Jerry felt he should offer to forgo
his own bonus, not only to preserve others’ rewards but to maintain
team morale and focus. In the end, it all worked out, and Jerry received
his bonus too, but we have always felt that Jerry’s offer was proof of his
commitment to the team.
“One of the things we encouraged from the beginning,” Jerry
recounts, “was to celebrate failure. I’ll never forget the first time someone
said that his subteam had failed in a design task. My response was to say,
‘It’s great to discover this now and not once we’re in production.’” This
was part of Jerry’s way of building trust so that people were as open with
their failures as with their successes.
For Jerry, looking back after the team’s work was finished, this project
was the best job experience he had ever had. “I looked out on the horizon
and asked, ‘How can I top this?’” What Jerry learned, though, is that
there is no recipe. There are no hard-and-fast rules for a successful team
project. Each team is different in its makeup, in its goals, and in its leader.
If you change all the ingredients, you can’t use the same recipe. Putting
people first is essential. The deliverables will follow if the team is cohesive
and dedicated to the goals. In the case of the Global No-Frost team, it
was 10 months before a pervasive sense of unity took hold, so patience is
required. The team, with its diverse staff, its time pressures, and financial
limits, ended its project with a memorable triumph.
“We came in ahead of schedule, under budget on investment, and
with a lower product cost than promised,” Jerry recounts with justifiable
pride. The achievements of the team were, indeed, astounding.