Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (10 page)

And so we find ourselves with what is, scientifically speaking, the central paradox of teams: the most successful teams exhibit diversity in their ranks, but heterogeneous (that is, diverse) teams face serious structural challenges regarding motivation, integration, and coordination.
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Thus it all comes down to the team leader. The more diverse a team, the more volatile it is likely to be. And often the only thing keeping such a team from exploding is the quality of its leadership. Great leaders create team genius by bringing together, and holding together, the most diverse and heterogeneous teams.

And that leadership is needed from the very start. Thus, leaders need to be mindful of how to “activate” the identities of new group members, especially when introducing the new team. And as we will see later in this book, that same quality of leadership is still needed, often years later, when the team is led through its retirement and dissolution. Great leaders make great teams because only
they
can manage them.

Based on those four decades and thousands of research reports, Williams and O’Reilly summarize the different types of diversity, and their distinct challenges, as follows:

•
      
Tenure diversity
is associated with low social integration, poor communication, and high turnover in groups—all processes that can impair group performance.

•
      
Functional diversity
improves creative ideas in groups—however, not necessarily the implementation of those ideas.

•
      
Age diversity
can increase turnover and withdrawal, especially of those individuals most different from the rest of the group.

•
      
Gender diversity
typically has negative effects on men. Men are less satisfied and less committed when in the minority—even though in female-dominated groups men are likely to be more accepted, less stereotyped, and less likely to be treated with hostility.

•
      
Racial/ethnic diversity
research is mostly on white-black dynamics, and the results are inconclusive.

GETTING THE BEST FROM DIVERSITY

That’s a pretty daunting list.

Is it really worth it? Why not instead just use all the other tools for team building and skip the diversity part? Or just pursue a lesser degree of diversity—one that may enhance the team without exploding it into a nightmare of cliques, accusations, and fights?

The answer lies, like most things, in your own cost-benefit analysis of the importance of the project, your confidence in how well you will recruit your team, and how much risk you are willing to take to achieve your goals.

The bottom line is that your greatest chance to create a successful, productive team involves a diverse membership—but the more diverse that membership becomes, the worse the odds are that the team will survive long enough to produce those results. So you need a strategy to mitigate the cost of that increased diversity. The scientific evidence suggests that this strategy should take two tracks.

First, diverse teams need to be
actively managed
.
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Abandon now any notion you have that you can build the most powerful team possible, wind it up, and let it run by itself. In fact, the more diverse the team, the more hands-on management it will need.

That means, with larger groups, that you must be very selective about the team leader you choose. You will need a pro, not just, say, someone selected from the team. You will also likely want to
relieve that leader of any duties that contribute to the operations of that group and reserve to them the job of full-time management. That, of course, will require increasing that team by one member, with a commensurate jump in the team’s budget. It also means that with small teams—that is, pairs and trios—you will not be able to, as usual, leave them be. Rather, an external manager will be required to provide regular oversight.
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Besides increasing the quality and participation of direct management, you will also need to be constantly vigilant against a number of threats to the team’s continued existence. These threats include the following:

Turnover

Turnover is a problem in groups in which the members perceive each other as too different. The added stress of dealing with the “other” will drive some people to seek the safety of being with people more like themselves in other teams. The best way to counter this centrifugal force is to foster
social identity
—that is, to cultivate the process by which a person’s self-concept becomes derived from his or her membership in the group. Social identities—team titles, stories, recognitions, shared adventures, and so forth—build members’ loyalty to the team and serve as social glue in groups that would otherwise explode. Experiments show that people who highly identify with their team express a stronger desire to remain in that team despite the presence of an attractive exit option.
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Framing

Framing is how a potential challenge or opportunity is presented to team members in relation to their overall project. Thus, how the challenge of workforce diversity is framed by the team leader will affect how team members manage diversity-related tensions
and whether this diversity will enhance or detract from the group’s functioning effectively. In 2001, the Harvard researchers Robin Ely and David Thomas studied three professional service firms and found that each dealt with diversity with a different way of framing the challenge:

•
      
The integration and learning perspective
—the first company framed diversity as a mechanism for helping teams enhance their capacity for adaptive change. (“Your differences in experience will help us to react quickly to a rapidly changing marketplace.”)

•
      
The access and legitimacy perspective
—the second company framed diversity as a way to better connect with an increasingly diverse marketplace. (“Your differences in cultural backgrounds will help us understand the global marketplace.”)

•
      
The discrimination and fairness perspective
—the third company framed diversity as a means to ensuring fair and equal treatment of all. (“Our differences ensure that there will be no bias against anyone.”)

According to Ely and Thomas, only the integration and learning perspective provided the necessary rationale and guidance for harnessing significant benefits from diversity. By comparison, the discrimination and fairness perspective, while sounding noble, had little effect on performance. And the access and legitimacy perspective actually proved to be destructive, by creating the perception of a status hierarchy. In other words, frame the value of your team’s diversity as a matter of staying competitive and emerging victorious. They are in it to win, not to feel better.

Belief

Research has found that teams with prodiversity beliefs are better at harnessing the power of their own diversity. That is, if they
believe that their diversity is a competitive advantage, it will usually turn out to be so. Why this self-fulfilling prophecy? Because the believers are willing to engage in more sharing of information and perspectives—and that sharing ultimately pays off.
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In a test of this theory, multiple four-person teams (each composed of two men and two women) were persuaded of either the value of diversity or the value of similarity for group performance. They then were provided with either homogenous (every member got the same) information or heterogeneous (everyone got different) information. Each team was then tasked to generate, discuss, and select as many useful items for survival in the desert, based on the information and rules provided to them.

The result? The diversity beliefs of the teams did not affect their performance carrying homogenous information. However, for teams armed with heterogeneous information, those with prodiversity beliefs outperformed those with prosimilarity beliefs. In a rapidly changing global marketplace, which team would you prefer?

Tenure

It turns out that the longer you keep a team together, the fewer the negative effects of its diversity. The laboratory consensus is that more intragroup contact ultimately reduces the usual negative effects of social categorization, such as stereotyping and prejudices.
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Field research confirms this. Teams with high degrees of familiarity are better able to take advantage of diverse experiences among team members.
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Familiarity helps team members not only to coordinate their activities but also to carry over those communication skills from one project to the next. In addition, the more frequently team members work together, the better they become at innovation by integrating each other’s knowledge.

In a region known for rapid job-hopping and résumés showing a
score of positions at different companies over the course of a dozen years, the senior management of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) stands out as a true anomaly. In its more than three decades of existence, SVB has been led by five individuals: Roger Smith, Harry Kellogg, John Dean, Ken Wilcox, and Greg Becker. That’s not unusual; what
is
unusual is that all five men still remain in close contact and connected with the bank.

This enduring relationship at the top has had some important benefits for SVB. None of its CEO-level intellectual capital, its network of contacts and relationships, or its internal culture has been lost over the course of the bank’s entire history. This gives the current CEO, Becker, an enormous resource he can tap at any time to help with decision-making. The result? In 2011, the Export-Import Bank of the United States named SVB its bank of the year. Current deposits have now reached $40 billion.

Or consider San Antonio’s professional basketball team, the Spurs, which has been crazily successful for four decades. San Antonio is one of the National Basketball Association’s small-market teams. In a glamorous sport with glamorous players like LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, the members of the San Antonio team prefer relative anonymity. Yet their team’s organizational methods are remarkably similar to those suggested by the research in this book. The Spurs’ coach, Gregg Popovich, is in his middle sixties and has the longest tenure in a league whose rich owners like to fire coaches on a whim. The Spurs also have the greatest diversity of players in the league—both in terms of the nations they represent and in the range of their ages, from the late teens to the late thirties.

All of this is a good argument for not disbanding teams quickly. Instead, the best strategy is, if possible, to keep team members together through more than one project. That will give them a chance to learn about each other and to bond—and in the process, help mitigate the social categorization problems associated with diverse teams.

Congruence

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t understand the value of tenure to diversity. Instead, they disperse and reassemble teams under the mistaken assumption that such changes help “freshen up” teams. The truth appears to be that rather than freshening their teams, these organizations are essentially forcing their employees through the same learning curve over and over again—only to break their teams up before they can put their mature harmony to work. The scientific term for this harmony is
interpersonal congruence
—the degree to which team members view others in the group as those others view themselves. It is this interpersonal congruence that moderates the relationship between diversity and group effectiveness.

To understand the nature of interpersonal congruence, one longitudinal study looked at eighty-three work groups of four to six members from an MBA class.
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Members were assigned to teams in such a way as to maximize the within-team diversity by sex, country of origin, ethnicity, previous job experience (including function and industry), and concentration in their current graduate program.

The result? A powerful discovery. In groups with high interpersonal congruence, the diversity of members actually enhanced creative task performance. By contrast, in groups with low interpersonal congruence, the presence of diversity actually impaired performance. That means that if you can teach a diverse team, through the common goal of competitive success, a belief in the value of diversity, and an extended time working together, to see itself as a successful team, it can achieve superior performance.

Now, even better news: this improved performance can begin almost immediately. In the study of those MBA teams, the researchers decided to push the process. In certain teams, they had members prepare positive self-appraisals to be shared with the other
team members. Incredibly, in doing so, the teams achieved enough interpersonal congruence in the first ten minutes of the interaction to continue to benefit the group’s outcomes
four months
later.

Team members can harness the benefits of the group’s diversity by expressing rather than suppressing their unique characteristics. And leaders who encourage team members to seek congruent, self-verifying appraisals can see immediate, and enduring, positive results.

Integration

Even when they find a measure of harmony, teams still frequently fail to extract, organize, and integrate their members’ knowledge and expertise.
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Instead, they become overwhelmed with data and struggle to make sense of it.
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Or they fail to make the necessary connections that lead to original ideas.
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Or they omit pieces of critical information and focus too much on shared information.
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This is the best argument for having the unique “diversity” of one of your team members be that of a generalist (or at least someone with a wider-than-usual set of personal skills and experiences). Teams of specialists almost always benefit from members capable of translating discoveries among members with relatively narrow expertise. Without these translators, valuable information can fail to be integrated into the overall effort and be wasted.
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