June 2005
Vol. 2, No. 12
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From the Editor: For five years I have been hitting collegiate and other libraries monthly to review teamwork-related science, for writing and improving my SuddenTeams® Program. Two years ago this month, I realized it was stupid for me to be keeping it all to myself (and the people who heard my talks or read my articles). So I started this labor of love, TeamResearch News.
In a job interview last January, I was asked what my hobbies were. This newsletter popped out of my mouth first. How weird am I? But this is about the most fun I have, sitting in a Seattle coffee shop drinking a large chai and writing for my small but loyal and growing subscriber list. I rarely hear from you, but that's okay. In the journalism biz, an editor is far more likely to hear criticism than praise, so ironically, no news is good news. But there are occasional external rewards: the Canadian professor who writes to thank me for including one of his studies; the Dutch college student who uses a summary in her schoolwork and asks for guidance; or the subscription requests from as far away as Africa.
It makes my day to hear from you folks, but the internal rewards would be sufficient. Standing up as a voice of evidence and reason in a world where wishful thinking rules lets me play my favorite character, Cyrano de Bergerac, in real-life. (Cyrano was a multi-talented 16th-Century French swordsman immortalized in Edmond Rostand's 19th-Century play as a man who gave principle importance over life itself, making many enemies along the way.) For those willing to listen to that voice, I know it can reduce suffering in their workplaces and volunteer activities. More selfishly, I enjoy learning, and of course, I'm hoping this exposure will help me sell the "do-it-yourself" version of the SuddenTeams Program I will begin sending to publishers soon. Knowing you are out there has made TeamResearch News into a source of stability and therapy when my personal life was rocky. And once a month, if no more often, I get something far too many of you never get in your working life: My voice gets heard.
I am so grateful to each of you for listening. Thank you.
As the studies below show, creating and running a successful team isn't easy, and most team leaders don't do it right. But it can be a lot easier than most people make it. Contact me today to find out how.
Study: People experienced in their fields contribute significant knowledge when working in teams. When they work together repeatedly, they add efficiency. But the views of people new to a field are known to boost group creativity, and new pairings of experienced members can spur new thinking. Project team managers would no doubt love to know the best mix of old and new to optimize a team's performance.
The prestigious journal Science publishes articles from many fields, and therefore rarely cover teamwork research. So when it did so last month, that was big enough news to hit the regular newspapers. And this was a big study. Researchers looked at the teams that produced every article over the last 50 years in 14 scientific journals covering four very different sciences (economics to astronomy) . They also looked at the "creative teams"—writers, directors, designers, etc.—for every Broadway musical from 1877-1990. Each individual team member was categorized as a "newcomer," appearing for the first time, or "incumbent," someone whose name had appeared before. So any two people on a team made up one of four pair types:
By combining all the links, the researchers created a map for each field linking every person in the study. Over time, as you would guess, each field's map started as a bunch of disconnected clumps, then eventually people in two clumps would pair up, and so on until eventually at least half of the individuals (around 70% of the people in three of the fields) had worked with other experts more than once.
Next the authors looked at how these relationships affected quality. Scientific journals range widely in terms of how respected they are and how much impact they have on later research. In three of the four scientific fields, teams were able to publish in better journals if they had more incumbents overall, but fewer repeat pairings. "This suggests that teams publishing in high-impact journals perform a better sampling of the knowledge within a field and thus are able to more efficiently use the resources" of the larger network of experts, the authors write, while generating creativity by working with new people. The same was true for successful Broadway teams. The similarity of results in four of five very different fields indicates there may be an "optimal value" in the balance between experience and diversity for team performance.
Application: There's that concept I love, "optimal." This study tantalizes with the possibility that a there is a "best way" to mix experienced and new team members to make projects work. It is a strong endorsement of other research we've seen suggesting that diversity in employers and in same-company experience among team members can spur creative solutions without adding the wrong kinds of conflict, if those differences are properly managed.
Here's how I would use all these results if I had a choice of team members:
These numbers are educated guesses, and depending on the size of your company, may be impossible to achieve. But if nothing else, they can give you ammunition if experienced pairs or project teams resist being "broken up" occasionally or taking on an intern. Ditto if senior management questions your decision to try a new mix.
Source: Guimera, R., et. Al (05), “Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance,” Science 308:697.
Article: When Richard Hackman of Harvard University publishes “A Theory of Team Coaching,” everyone interested in teams should take notice. Hackman has conducted many studies that other teamwork researchers mention in their work. Hackman says in this latest article that a lot of time is wasted trying to coach teams in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and/or in the wrong corporate setting.
The article was co-written with Ruth Wageman of Dartmouth College. The authors define team coaching as “direct interaction with a team intended to help members make coordinated and task-appropriate use of their collective resources in accomplishing the team’s work.” In a study they published last year, the duo found that for many team leaders, coaching is last in priority after leadership tasks such as structuring the team and “running external interference.” That may be because leaders underestimate coaching's importance. “More likely…" Hackman and Wageman write, is that "leaders do not coach their teams because they do not know how to do so, or they have ventured a coaching intervention or two that did not help and thereafter focused their behavior on seemingly more promising team leadership strategies.” The point to this article, they say, is to show which team coaching behaviors do work.
Most team coaching—including almost all “teambuilding” activities—focuses on improving relationships between team members. Although strong team performance and good relationships tend to go together, that does not mean good relations cause good performance. In fact, Hackman and Wageman cite four studies that showed neither causes the other, and two that found good performance caused good relations (instead of the other way around). So, they say, coaching should focus on giving teams the strategies, knowledge, and skills to complete their tasks rather than on relationship building.
Also, the timing of coaching matters. Hackman and Wageman say the research shows coaching is most effective at the beginning of a project, in a transition period most teams go through at the mid-point of a project (both project teams and permanent teams doing projects), and in the lessons-learned work at the end. In between those points, they say, coaching has little impact. The type of coaching matters also, they say. At the beginning, motivational coaching is the most effective (though that was primarily because teams resisted strategizing). At the middle, when frustrations and problems arise, coaching on how to deal with those problems is most effective. And at the end, of course, teaching the team formal lessons-learned processes that result in actions improving the next project is useful.
Coaching teamwork will have no value if the circumstances the team operates in are not conducive to teaming. As Hackman and Wageman write, team coaching will have little effect on group performance if any of the following are true:
In fact, a study by Wageman found that correct coaching only significantly helps teams for which all of those conditions are met. It doesn't the others, but doesn't help much. On the other hand, improper coaching hurts all teams, and really hurts those that are also missing these basic conditions for success.
Application: For the typical team leader, team coaching consists of a single kick-off meeting; a few general teambuilding exercises when they "can afford the downtime” (a term implying that teamwork improvement has no real value); one or more activities to address specific problems after they arise and the damage is done; and perhaps a lessons-learned brainstorming session at the end that rarely results in changes to processes. The first way to apply the advice of experts like Hackman and Wagemen is to rid yourself forever of the idea this approach to coaching is doing any good, much less an occasional teambuilding exercise or social night or one-time consulting intervention. At best these won’t improve performance enough to cover the costs, and they might even reduce performance. The fact that an activity was “fun” or seemed to improve attitudes for a while is not evidence that it was cost-effective.
More specifically, based on Hackman and Wageman’s conclusions:
In a moment of blatant marketing, I’ll use my SuddenTeams® Program as an example. The first section is an assessment of the company, team, and resources to determine what, if any, team-level training will be worth the client’s money. If not, I can advise the client on what needs to happen to get to that point. If so, most of the coaching then is spent in getting the team started in the right direction, with most of that focused on team structure, project planning, and process improvement. Three months to a year later (the mid-point of most projects), there’s an Evaluation Session to create strategies for addressing problems that have come up. Finally, I explain the need for formal project-closing activities including effective lessons-learned meetings. But I have to admit that based on this article, I now think the program is weak on the tail end, not providing enough specific instructions for those activities. I will correct that weakness in the next edition.
Be aware that Hackman and Wageman do not let you off the hook if you decide conditions aren’t right in your company for teamwork coaching: "If they are not, team leaders would be well advised to exercise influence with their own peers and supervisors to create those conditions, and thereby to make competent team coaching possible.”
Source: Hackman, J.R., and R. Wageman (05), “A Theory of Team Coaching,” Academy of Management Review 30(2):269.
Study: The degree to which team members see each other the same way the members see themselves—“warts and all”—affects how much they cooperate, Canadian and Texan researchers have found. This study was unusual in that it involved blue-collar workers not in factories, a group rarely studied, and that the performance measures included behaviors supervisors often focus on whether or not they really should.
Laurie Milton and James Westphal surveyed 261 government emergency and transportation construction workers. (Amazingly, only seven of the workers' peers refused to join in.) The researchers also interviewed some members and observed some teams at work. The surveys asked how the workers viewed themselves and each teammate on :
Each member also rated each other member on how much the two cooperated. To measure performance, supervisors rated each member on how much an individual:
Two people who viewed each other the same way they saw themselves cooperated more often. This was true for negative traits as well as positive ones, and was not more or less likely if the people had similar traits. In other words, mutual understanding was what mattered, not the content of that understanding. Any pair of people who were more understood by the rest of the group than were other pairs also cooperated more with each other
An individual who was better understood tended to be a better performer, and if a large subgroup of people within the team understood each other well, the members of that group were better performers. Similarity within each pair on gender, age, and tenure did not change the effects of mutual understanding. People similar in race cooperated more with each other, but the effects of understanding were not affected by race. To the credit of this group of supervisors, their level of mutual understanding with an individual did not seem to affect their ratings of the individual's performance. Similar to that, personal friendship between two people did not change the effect of mutual understanding in increasing cooperation.
The researchers analyzed the data to see if cooperation caused mutual understanding instead of the other way around, and concluded it do not. (They could not rule out that each raised the other at the same time, however.)
Application: The study suggests that managers and team members should try to improve everyone's understanding of how each member sees her- or himself. One suggestion the authors have is an outdoor teambuilding exercise, but as best I can recall, this is the only such suggestion I have found in more than 400 studies on the subject (see the opening quote on my TeamTrainers™ Consulting site, for example). But some of the other suggestions are often mentioned in the literature, and best of all, will cost a company little or nothing, as in this quotation from the authors:
“They can, for example, allow people to personalize their attire and work spaces and thus signal their identities to others. Or they may ask people to share their perceptions of their own strengths and weaknesses. Interviewees complained about not being able to express their identities at work. For example, several construction group members felt restricted by not being able to wear sport team T-shirts or shirts won in competitions. Members of emergency response groups complained about not being able to hang personal photos and other artifacts at their disks. They, in particular, described the effect of company policy as ‘being made to be anonymous.’”
The researchers point out that these policies reduce mutual understanding. Another approach is to involve team members in the hiring of new members, which the research indicates has many other benefits. And if you’re a team member, here’s a really simple way to get higher cooperation from someone: have lunch or coffee with them. Ask questions about them, and really listen. Then share similar information about yourself. It isn't that hard—really!
Source: Milton, L., and J. Westphal (05), “Identity Confirmation Networks and Cooperation in Work Groups,” Academy of Management Journal 48(2):191.
TeamResearch News summarizes the latest information from studies or articles on business teams, along with guidance on how to apply that research in your workplace. It is published the first full weekend of each month as a free service from TeamTrainersTM Consulting (www.suddenteams.com). Learn how to subscribe below and see the newsletter Web page for details about the newsletter, cautions about studies, and our privacy policy.
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