Source: theHRDIRECTOR
Date: January 2007 

Dr Suresh Nagesh arrived in January of 2004 to lead Daimlerchrysler’s vehicle engineering and quality unit in Bangalore, India. Instead of a team, he found six individual engineers working essentially alone.

The engineers didn’t have a good rapport with Nagesh’s predecessor. The stress of a tough customer seemed to be taking its toll. Their desks were separated across several floors of the building. At lunchtime, each went his own way. Largely because of this disunity, and despite the long hours put in by the engineers, the work was not getting done on time. Poor performance put the entire centre under scrutiny from DaimlerChrysler executives.

“higher degree of professional collaboration”

Some of the remedies were quite basic. The team required better organisation of its processes and more engineers needed to be hired. But the gaping need was to strengthen the ties among the workgroup. Nagesh’s team needed to become better friends. One of the effective ways Suresh Nagesh fostered friendships amongst the Vehicle Engineering and Quality (VEQ) team in Bangalore was quite simple: he moved their work areas together. Although this also increased the amount of non-work topics people discussed, the higher degree of professional collaboration increased the speed of work.

The VEQ group ‘builds’ complex virtual components or complete vehicles that are prototypes of those to be built for real in the next few years. The work is specialised, complicated and not easy to learn. Members of the team said that there were many communication barriers that had to be broken down if the team were to function better. The veteran employees weren’t interacting very well between themselves. The size of the team doubled in roughly six months, so there was also a gap between the established employees and the new recruits. Nagesh decided he needed something to shake up the group and force them to depend on each other. Soon after arriving, he summoned all the VEQ unit employees for a routine team-building session. For a half-day, the meeting progressed predictably enough, with a facilitated session on the benefits of team cohesion and group discussion about ways to work better together.

Then Nagesh told everybody to get up and get ready to go white-water rafting. The announcement caught the engineers off guard. In fact, many of them didn’t know how to swim. For many of the team, it sounded like a good way to drown an engineer or two. A healthy dose of nervousness was precisely what he intended. “I wanted them to get into trouble and see how they could help each other,” he said. To test his life vest, Nagesh insisted he be thrown in first, and emphasised he was relying on the team to pull him out if he had problems. To force the issue, when he hit the water, he pretended not to know how to swim. His employees pulled him from the water. “It became clear to us that we had to work as a team,” says Keshavanand Prabhu. “When we used the paddles, we had to handle them as a team. It was amazing to see people believing in each other and jumping into the water. I think the ice broke there and we started realising that we could be very good friends.”

When they returned to the office the next day, something had changed. They were eager to take on more work. They had learned that they could rely on each other, and they had a memorable and positive experience that bought them closer together. The group now draws parallels between their rafting adventure and their reliance on each other in the office. “I know that I’m not going to be left alone and I’m not going to be blamed if anything goes wrong, because I will always have somebody to help me out, to take me out of the water if anything is wrong,” says Prabhu.

“improve both the work experience and the quality of their work”

Developing friendships takes time – often time that could be spent working. But the DaimlerChrysler group says the new bonds among them improve both the work experience and the quality of their work. As the group became better friends, the complaints that occupied Nagesh’s first days there subsided. Nagesh considers strong affiliations just one of the important factors in building an effective team. However strong friendships  may be, they cannot, for example, overcome concerns about job security or compensate for a lack of planning. Still, Nagesh says, “Friendships are definitely very important to people. But friendship does not happen
overnight. It takes a period of time for people to understand each other, to come together. It’s like a flower, it does not blossom overnight. But once it blossoms, it really blossoms, and it’s very, very important."
Adapted from “12: The Elements of Great Managing” (Gallup Press, Published December 2006)