Happy New Year! I hope the events of the first 10 days of this New Year and New Decade in your own lives bode well for the weeks and months to come.
I spent a chunk of the holiday break contemplating my own 2020. Reflecting on two decades of research into teams and collaboration, my big question was what – if anything – I might add to the collective conversation on teams and teamwork? There are already hundreds of books and thousands of academic research papers and consulting articles full of analyses and how-to’s. Is there anything that organizational leaders still don’t know?
After reflecting on three studies that have stamped themselves on my memory, I realize that there are three things that I know for sure about teams that aren’t talked about enough, either in the literature or in consultant training events.
1. No two teams are exactly alike.
In the studies that haunted me, I had access to multiple, near identical teams. In two of the studies, the teams were all in the same organization, in the same building, using the same technologies doing very similar work. In the third, the teams were from different organizations, sub-teams of a larger industry effort, but all were composed of seasoned electrical engineers working on the same project using the same productivity and collaboration tools. Yet, in all three studies, teams that should have performed about the same instead functioned quite differently.
2. “Team dynamics” are a product of the team’s environment, as well as its leadership and membership.
After reading the paragraph above, you might have been thinking, “Well, duh! – different leaders, different members – of course they performed differently.” But that’s just the thing. Most of the teams literature treats teams like predictable black boxes, like all teams are the same: if you get the right people on the team and teach leaders the right facilitation skills (the inputs), voila! Teamwork will be fun and everyone will sing “kumbya” (outputs). Membership and leadership are definitely important, but the teams I studied also taught me that task configuration, connection to the external environment, history, and the political winds in the organization also play HUGE roles in how teams operate and the quality of results they produce. We’ve got to look outside the team boundary to understand what’s happening inside the team.
3. Teamwork is challenging – even in the best of teams and the best of times.
I also believe teamwork can be very satisfying – some of my best work memories are of being a member of a well-functioning team. At the same time, in contemporary organizations requiring tight collaboration across disciplines to produce complex products, it can be very challenging to hear, understand, and integrate diverse perspectives into the design of a single product, policy, or marketing campaign. Pretending this isn’t the case or that members shouldn’t feel challenged by collaborating across boundaries only makes the experience worse.
So in Q1, I’m going to be talking about the internal and external factors that makes each team’s journey unique and how to both set your teams up for success and to adjust your own expectations about how each team should function. In those posts, I’ll be citing the research of the several great minds that have influenced my own thinking, including Richard Hackman, Ed Schein, Deborah Gladstein Ancona, Amy Edmondson, Michael O’Leary, Jonathan Cummings, and many, many others.
If you have questions or comments, please reach out to me at [email protected] or by phone at 512.387.2756.
Onward ho into an exciting New Year!
