The hour hand on the clock seemed to fly past midnight as our research team worked frantically to put the finishing touches on our latest grant application. Our deadline was 2:00 A.M. We were both blessed and cursed to work for a research institute in Memphis, Tennessee, home of Federal Express. While other grant applicants around the country had to finish their work by early evening to make the deadline for overnight delivery, we could carry on until the big FedEx jets roared out at 3:00 A.M. from their Memphis hub carrying the early morning's sorted packages from all over the country for next-day delivery. By experience, we knew a mad dash to the airport would consume 30 minutes, leaving a final 30-minute window to get our package rushed out on the tarmac and delivered to one of the jets already preparing for departure.

This had become the standard routine for our research team, one that we went through several times each year. The grant applications were critical to our survival as most of our salaries were paid from grant funds, and all the money for carrying out our research program came from grant sources. We would begin working on the proposal several months before the deadline date, but it always seemed to come down to a mad dash to the airport, arriving just in time to entrust our precious package to a harried agent who nightly had to deal with frantic, last-minute arrivals. Even now, more than 20 years later, my stomach tightens as I recall the angst involved in making those early morning rendezvous at the Memphis airport.

Could there have been a better way to deal with these crucial deadlines, or is the maxim that the work will always swell to fill every minute of available time an immutable law? Today, I firmly believe that the frantic rush to meet our 2:00 A.M. deadline was not a necessary element of being part of a research team. However, at that time, and in some perverse way, it provided a shared adversity that triggered a leveling sense of emptiness that ultimately allowed our team to stumble into community, at least for a while [1]. But surely there is a better way to have achieved community, one that would have made us more productive and creative, while at the same time letting us spend that final evening at home, secure in the knowledge that we had produced a first-rate grant application. An application that had already arrived at its destination, not subject to last minute glitches that could have spelled disaster.

Ideally, once a decision is made to form a team of individuals with different skills and temperaments to undertake a particular task, considerable resources and time should be invested to facilitate the transformation of that group of diverse individuals into a coherent community. This is a different strategy from what is described above, where we managed to stumble into community through shared adversity and sheer panic over the rapidly approaching deadline. Yes, our research team did come together as a cohesive group, but only by chance. We could have just as easily ended up vowing never to work together again or creating grudges that would have forever blocked a productive work relationship. If we had made a conscious effort to come together as a team prior to embarking on the work of the group, it would have likely made for a more effective and satisfying experience, one that would have provided an optimal opportunity for a superior grant proposal, while allowing us to meet our deadline with far less anxiety.

The first step in becoming an effective team is to meet on a regular basis with a set agenda, writes Deborah Harrington-Mackin, author of The Team Building Tool Kit. This suggestion alone would have been a major help in the scenario described above. In my experience, the grant writing process is often a piecemeal affair in which a number of different investigators may be involved, but they may never sit down together in one place to discuss the overall strategy of the proposal or the work plan. The result is that each of the participants has a different view as to the objective of the proposal and their individual roles, a misunderstanding that may not come to light until the last minute, requiring a hasty round of negotiations and rewriting. Worse are situations where the participants misunderstand the overall project until after it is funded and work has already begun. Then it is likely that severe animosities may arise over misunderstandings that could have been dealt with easily if all the participants had simply gotten together, talked through their different views of the project, and worked out an agreement by consensus, which does not always mean 100 percent agreement. Some groups have used the "70 percent comfortable rule," notes Harrington-Mackin, meaning that consensus is reached if each member of the team is at least 70 percent comfortable with a decision.

Each team should have a leader, and what it means to be a productive and well-functioning team means different things depending upon one's perspective as the team leader or as a member of the team. Anthony Montebello, author of Work Teams That Work: Skills for Managing Across the Organization, writes that an effective team leader will have made the transition from one who "pushes his own agenda, squelches disagreement, and punishes mistakes" to one who works more as a coach, coordinating the overall work of the team. In this role, she will "help the team decide what it will achieve, keep people informed and involved, and let people know how they are doing." The effective team member will have made a transition from one who may "talk more than listen, argue, stick to his own position, blame, find fault, and put others down" to one who "freely shares information and resources, probes others' ideas, and uses conflict as a springboard to greater creativity." As a result, the team as a whole will determine what work must be done to meet the deadline, assign individual responsibility for each part of the work to be done, and keep each other fully informed regarding their progress and problems.

All of this team building takes time and is a messy business, especially from the viewpoint of a manager who may not be a member of the team, but who, especially in a nonacademic environment, may be responsible to higher management to see that the work of the team gets done. As a deadline looms and the team still seems to be in disarray, this manager may consider adding additional staff to the team in an effort to help, or she may even decide to move the deadline so the team has additional time to accomplish its goals. Both actions are likely to be counterproductive. Addition of new staff will likely damage the community-building process, pushing the team all the way back to chaos or even pseudocommunity. Then valuable time will be wasted as the team works its way back to community so that it can carry on with its task. Moving the deadline ignores the fact that often 90 percent of the work of the team is accomplished in 10 percent of the time, much of the time having been used to come together as a functioning, creative group that has the insight and skill necessary to accomplish the work. Moving the deadline may allow the group to continue to wallow in pseudocommunity or disintegrate into chaos instead of being forced to come together in community to complete the task.

A manager might also sincerely believe the team has made a second-best decision regarding some aspect of the work and be tempted to step in and countermand their decision by managerial fiat. This may also be a poor decision. "I'd rather have a second-best decision diligently pursued than a first-best decision lackadaisically pursued," wrote Tom Landry, in Tom Landry: An Autobiography. Landry, an expert on team dynamics as a former coach of the Dallas Cowboys football team, understood that a second-best decision reached by team consensus is much more likely to be pursued diligently than a first-best decision imposed by management.

So, what to do as the deadline looms? Hopefully, the design of the team membership has provided the necessary skills for the work to be done and sufficient time has been provided for the team to come together as a community. If so, then management should hold the deadline firm and should refrain from adding additional staff at the last minute. Then it is up to the team to come together and do whatever is necessary to meet the assigned deadline, even if it means a frantic trip through the middle of the night to deliver a precious package at the very last minute to a departing courier.