True Teamwork Proven Worth the Training Time

Most of my work and pretty much all of Teams Blog is based on a trio of assumptions:

• True teamwork is rare.
• True teamwork can be taught.
• True teamwork improves performance enough to justify the training costs.

I believe the first assumption because I have observed, read, or asked about teamwork in hundreds of companies and almost none take the time to fully leverage group dynamics. The last two are based on studies and what I have observed in my consulting. Still, I welcome proof. Regular readers of this blog know that often what we think is true about leadership has proven false when tested objectively. This week I can report on one such test. After 40 hours of classroom training on teamwork, when 92 newly formed teams of U.S. Air Force officers competed with each other on various tasks, the teams that had absorbed the most knowledge outperformed the rest by far.

Many details about the study captured my attention. First, the training was not "team building exercises" but a combination of lectures and reading with some team discussions. Another detail of interest was the size of the teams, 11 to 13 members each. This is much larger those in most studies and in the workplace, and are around the maximum team size I recommend. It is exciting to read that teams this large could apply new teamwork skills to tasks with as little as 15 minutes of planning time, as you'll see.

These teams also were self-directed. No one was designated as the official leader, and it appears from the study report in Journal of Applied Psychology that several people of the same military rank were on each team. The teams were about as diverse as they could be, except for being 83% male and fairly similar in age. The authors write, "Team assignments were determined by a computer model that considered variables such as participants' demographic characteristics, job classifications, military status, and rank."

The study was conducted by Robert Hirschfeld of the Univ. of Georgia; Mark Jordan of the United States Air Force Academy; and Hubert Feild, William Giles, and Achilles Armenakis of Auburn Univ. Jordan was in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, while the others were management researchers.

The team members were in an Air Force officer development program in which "5th- to 7th-year USAF officers step out of their specialties and acquire a transportable set of teamwork competencies," the article says. I find this intriguing because it means these were not people new to team leadership; they were the equivalent of middle managers in business, averaging age 31, who should already have known a lot about teamwork. Yet the training had a big impact on performance. The program was based on what the USAF considers to be a model of expert teamwork. Most organizations do not even have such a model, much less provide extensive training on it.

The Air Force program was an intense, five-week immersion. "Classroom activities totaled approximately 22 hr in Week 1 and 19 hr in Week 2, and assigned readings amounted to hundreds of pages," the authors write. "Classroom time was devoted mostly to lecture but included several sessions in which team members met with their entire team to review and discuss teamwork concepts and principles that were previously presented in readings, lecture, or both." At the end of Week 2, students took individual tests on what they had learned, providing the study with its teamwork knowledge measure. Performance was measured three ways:

• Pairs of teams competed in a "novel team sport," whatever that means.
• "Teams attempted to solve difficult problems representing realistic military scenarios (e.g., solving an enemy code by piecing together information given to each team member, while complying with specific parameters)."
• Teams had to complete 14 time-limited tasks over the course of the program. "An example exercise was a team given 15 min to plan and execute crossing a river, with all of its equipment, without touching the water," the article says. "The only physical resources available were a piece of rope and a board."

The results for each type of performance moderately correlated with the knowledge test results of the team members (ranging from +0.24 to +0.28 on a –1 to +1 scale) and more strongly with ratings of their teamwork behaviors by trained neutral observers (+0.32 to +0.53). The observers rated teams with higher knowledge results as better at teamwork (without knowing the knowledge results). Through both direct and indirect effects, the researchers say knowledge had a powerful link to observed teamwork of +0.37. This supports the conclusion of the researchers that higher teamwork knowledge caused the performance gains by improving teamwork. It is possible people who already had better teamwork skills had or absorbed more teamwork knowledge. But given that teamwork skills are rarely taught to the depth provided by this program, and most of the performance tests came after the classroom training, I think it likely that the knowledge gain caused the better teamwork skills—and in turn, better measurable performance.

We don't have enough data to monetize these findings, but there are hints. Assuming your organization provides two weeks of vacation, one week of team training is equal to 2% of the team's labor time in one year. At a correlation of 0.37 to greater competitive advantage, not much improvement would have to come in the first year to outweigh that cost. That's why I can guarantee my SuddenTeams™ Program, which only takes around 30 hours. And the performance gains would continue into subsequent years if your organization maintained a supportive environment. Of course, you don't have to do all that training at once like the Air Force does. At an hour a week, you could finish in less than a year.

True teamwork can be taught, and it improves a team's performance enough to justify the training costs. Because it is rare, gaining it will give you a competitive advantage. The longer you wait, the more money you lose.

Action Item: Start lobbying your boss this week for in-depth teamwork training for your team—not the usual "quick-fix" team building exercises.

Source: Hirschfeld, R., et al. (2006), "Becoming Team Players: Team Members' Mastery of Teamwork Knowledge as a Predictor of Team Task Proficiency and Observed Teamwork Effectiveness," Journal of Applied Psychology 91(2):467.