For the last three years, I’ve taught a class at a local university called The Changing Workplace. A reasonable chunk of the student’s grades are determined by group projects, and I give all students in each workgroup the same grade for the project they are on. Which freaks the students out, and I understand why. Their point is that in any group there are unequal contributions from individual team members. My point is “welcome to the real world.”
In the real world, things get done in teams. Senior management likes to focus on individual productivity. And they tend to equate/confuse individual productivity with physical presence in the office. I’ve worked for CEOs who had a habit of counting the numbers of cars in the parking lot at 8 am and 5:3o pm. (Have they ever heard of the internet)?
But even more rational approaches to measuring individual productivity seem flawed to me. People in business like to say “what gets measured gets done.” Whenever I hear that I think, but what if we are measuring the wrong things? I’ve worked in many organizations with very smart people who were incredibly productive. Not all of those organizations were successful.
I’ve come to believe that group performance, and especially small group performance, is much more correlated to organizational success than individual productivity. I will admit that much of this belief comes from personal observation and analysis. Think about innovation. While one person may have a brilliant idea, actually bringing that innovation to market always requires outstanding small group performance. The world is just too complicated for individual people to execute complex projects on their own. In the world of software development, during my career the focus shifted from individual rock-star programming performance to small agile development teams that rock.
So, what drives great small group performance? I believe there are three main factors:
- How People in the Group Treat Each Other
In 2012 Google embarked on a study they called Project Aristotle to look at how exceptional teams work ( Google Quest for the Perfect Team). What they found was common sense on one level – how people on the team treat each other really matters. But it was also counter-intuitive on other levels. It turns out that the most efficient teams – those that just got down to business without much small talk, those that ran themselves in an orderly and structured fashion- were not actually the best teams at problem solving. Free-flowing, even chaotic discussions that frequently went off on tangents led to better results than well-ordered meetings. Teams where everyone got a chance to talk, which the geeks at Google referred to as “equality in the distribution of conversational turn-taking,” did better than teams dominated by a few individuals.
Google concluded that the key factor in great team performance was psychological safety. The more people were sensitive to each other, the more group members allowed each other to talk, the better the group performed when it came to solving complicated problems.
The best teams I’ve ever worked on were fun to work on; they were teams where humor was a major part of the equation. Now I understand why. Humor, or perhaps I should say appropriate humor, reduces everyone’s tension. It makes things more real. And, when people believe that they will be heard and treated with respect, they are more willing to work hard and share their point-of-view. Which leads to better results.
2.How Leaders Focus the Team
Have you ever worked on a team where the leader tasked the team, but everyone in the room felt that the leader already knew the answer? I have. Nothing causes the team to just go through the motions faster than this scenario. If you feel like you are being manipulated so that there is just the pretense of buy-in, why would you put much energy into the workgroup?
Workgroups are only useful when the “decision maker” knows that they need help, because the problem is too complicated to solve on their own. And what the team needs from the leader is NOTa description of how to solve the problem. After all, if the leader already knows how to solve the problem, why the heck are we taking time to form a workgroup? What the team needs from the leader is an explanation of WHYthe problem is worth solving. The Why generates positive energy for the team; the How command diffuses energy.
I wouldn’t spend so many words making this point – except that even otherwise-good leaders seem to make this mistake nearly every day.
3. How Decisions Get Made
I once met several people who worked for a famous, well-known, respected leader who had built an immensely successful business. So, I asked the simple question, “what is this guy like to work for?”
I got an equally simple response, which profoundly changed how I thought about leadership and group dynamics. Everyone who worked for this guy said something very close to, “Well, we would have ferocious disagreements about what to do. And that was expected. But once we decided something, we just executed the decision and there was no second-guessing.”
I’ve thought about this a lot since, and I’ve realized that it’s also a great description of the best teams I ever worked on. We would argue honestly and openly and vehemently about what to do, but it was never personal. The arguments were genuine and honest, and sometimes even enjoyable and funny. But we all knew it was safe to argue. We also knew that once we decided to do something, we were going to walk out of the room as a team and support the decision.
This is harder to do than it sounds because, guess what, the implementation of all hard decisions runs into rough patches. And when those rough patches occur, nothing is more destructive to an organization than a senior leader who says, “Well, I never really agreed that was a good idea in the first place.” At that point, you are pretty much doomed.
To avoid this sorry scenario, the leader of the group especially needs to actively cultivate dissent while the decision is being made, and before you go about implementing it. I learned to ask the following question to the group right at the time when I thought we had agreed on a decision, “Does anyone have any questions or doubts about what we are going to do?” The response nearly always stunned me; just when I thought we were done talking and problem-solving, I would get a list of twenty or so questions and doubts. But I found that if the team worked through these issues before we announced a decision to anyone (including ourselves), then I could be sure that we actually had a decision that would be supported.
Organizations that are genuinely successful are comprised of small groups that work together exceptionally well. No matter how smart the people that you hire are, you should not assume that these people know how to work effectively in groups. Education still focuses largely on individual knowledge accumulation, individual productivity and individual assessment. But it is group performance that makes or breaks your organization.
Treating people with respect, arming teams with Why they are working on something, and being careful about how decisions are made and supported may sound like mundane topics. But since they are so often ignored and we spend so much of our time in organizations working in groups, the topic is far from mundane.
The culture of an organization is so often about the culture of these group dynamics. Organizations that treat these issues with care are the places where people want to keep coming to work every day and keep giving it their best shot.
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