Part 2: Myth and reality of teams

Team work has also caught scientists’ attention. Diane Coutu’s article “Why Teams Don’t Work?” in Harvard Business Review May 2009 is based on interview of leading scientific thinker and expert on teams, Professor J Richard Hackman from Harvard University. Here are some highlights of the interview.

• Teams are often seen as safe places where people can be highly creative and productive. However, research consistently shows that teams underperform their great potential.
• Teams need to be set up carefully to ensure that they have a compelling direction. Small teams whose members stay together for long periods of time perform best.
• Perversely, organizations with the best human resource departments sometimes have less effective teams. That’s because HR tends to focus on improving individual rather than team behavior.
• Leading a team requires enormous courage because authority is always involved, which arouses great anxiety in the team. Great team leaders often encounter resistance so intense it can put their jobs at risk.

According to Hackman, people generally think that teams that work together harmoniously are better and more productive than teams that don’t. “But in a study we conducted on symphonies, we actually found that grumpy orchestras played together slightly better than orchestras in which all the musicians were really quite happy. That’s because the cause-and-effect is the reverse of what most people believe: When we’re productive and we’ve done something good together (and are recognized for it), we feel satisfied, not the other way around. In other words, the mood of the orchestra members after a performance says more about how well they did than the mood beforehand.”

People tend also believe that the more members are in the team, the better results will be achieved. This is also fallacy. Hackman continues: “A colleague and I once did some research showing that as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble. My rule of thumb is no double digits.”

But maybe the most typical problem with the team is that at some point team members become so comfortable and familiar with one another that they start accepting one another’s foibles. As a result performance decreases. Hackman says: ”Except for one special type of team, I have not been able to find a shred of evidence to support that premise. There is a study that shows that R&D teams do need an influx of new talent to maintain creativity and freshness – but only at the rate of one person every three to four years. The problem almost always is not that a team gets stale but, rather, that it doesn’t have the chance to settle in.”

Diane Coutu also asked how to prevent team from becoming complacent? Hackmans answer was: deviants. “Every team needs a deviant, someone who can help the team by challenging the tendency to want too much homogeneity, which can stifle creativity and learning. Deviants are the ones who stand back and say, “Well, wait a minute, why are we even doing this at all? What if we looked at the thing backwards or turned it inside out?”

As a conclusion Hackman sets out five basic conditions that leaders (in companies or other organizations) must fulfill in order to create and maintain effective teams:
1. Teams must be real. People have to know who is on the team and who is not. It’s the leader’s job to make that clear.
2. Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.
3. Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.
4. Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context – including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system – must facilitate teamwork.
5. Teams need expert coaching. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes – especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project.

References:

Coutu, Diane (2009). Why teams don’t work? Harvard Business Review, May 2009. http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/05/why-teams-dont-work/ar/1