group fightingIt’s increasingly likely that you will spend a good deal of your professional time working on temporary teams.  It’s also likely that you will experience a fair amount of frustration and even team failure along the way.

Most organizations have yet to meet a problem (or opportunity) that they won’t throw a team at to solve. Let’s face it, it’s tempting to assume that a group of motivated, diverse individuals will trump the lone soldier when it comes to creativity, problem-solving and planning.

Or, at least it’s comfortable to think so.

Harvard Professor, J. Richard Hackman, author of the outstanding book, Leading Teams, and Professor Leigh Thompson at Kellogg (Northwestern) and author of another outstanding book, Making the Team, offer their separate but similar insights on the world of teams and teaming. We are well served to consider their findings.

Professor Hackman in an interview in Harvard Business Review:  “I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary… But don’t count on it.”

and

“Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have.  That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration.”

In a similar vein, Professor Thompson offers in her book, Making the Team, “Teams are not always the answer- teams may provide insight, creativity, and knowledge in a way that a person working independently cannot but teamwork may also lead to confusion, delay, and poor decision-making.”

Fallacies and Challenges to Conventional Thinking About Teams:

Professor Hackman identifies some common fallacies, including:

  • More inclusion is better.  Art’s comments: Increased group size adds new complexities and the common practice of including people due to ego or politics breeds a whole set of dysfunctional issues.
  • Harmony is required for high team performance.  Art’s comments: There’s certainly a natural desire for people to work in an environment where the tension is low.  This is another area where research contradicts traditional thinking.  Teams with some tension may very well out-perform the more collegial groups.
  • Having a deviant in the group is bad.  Art’s comments: Interesting word choice.  This deviant…the person capable of standing up against the group-think of teams is similar to the character referenced in my post, Help Wanted-Leaders with Moral Courage, and similar to the Heretic referenced by management blogger (No Smoke and Mirrors) and frequent commenter at this site, Mark Allen Roberts.  The potential for massive decision-making errors in group settings is countered by ensuring someone is confident enough to challenge the conventional thinking at the right time.
  • Long-standing teams lose their edge as members grow to accept the shortcomings and foibles of others. Art’s comments: the research conducted by Hackman and others indicates just the opposite. Long-standing teams offer the potential for significantly improved quality and performance.

Professor Thompson challenges conventional thinking about teams with the following:

  • Conflict among team members is not always a bad thing-it may be necessary for effective decision making as it can foment accuracy, insight, understanding, trust and innovation.
  • Strong leadership is not always necessary for strong teams-a leader has two main functions: structure the team environment and coach the team members.
  • Good teams can still fail under the wrong circumstances.  To be successful in the long run, teams need ongoing resources and support.

And finally, a comment from Professor Thompson on that classic of all techniques to straighten out the dysfunctional team, the Retreat.

  • Retreats will not fix all conflicts between team members unless they address the structural and design problems that plague the team on a day-to-day basis in the work environment.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

It’s relatively easy to generate a saccharine-sweet list of things that we need to do to create effective teams.  We’ll get to the list of best practices right after we spend some time thinking about the pitfalls and obstacles that make effective team development a tough job.

There’s no doubt in my mind that it is increasingly critical for us to learn how to perform well on teams and how to create high performing teams.  It’s also important to recognize that for some issues, the reflex action to “put a team on it,” may be wrong.  Thanks to Professors Hackman and Thompson, you’ve got some research-backed food for thought as you consider how to improve team performance.

I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on the decision-making pitfalls of groups.  Yes, it turns out that we’ve got a lot of problems in this area as well.

Hey, this would be easy if it weren’t for the people…