Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (12 page)

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In large teams, not all team members have to be involved all the time—team members can be brought in for specific tasks.
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Now that you’ve built your team and populated it with a diverse group of members, your final challenge to keep it running at its full potential is not just to drive it to full productivity but to keep it running at that pace by minimizing its long-term losses.

F
ortunately, there is more than one path to team success. Fully armed with this knowledge, you should be able to find the team for you—as well as a leadership style that suits your personality and your organization’s culture.

Here again, research in the last decade has revealed some interesting discoveries. One of them is that the values instilled in a team at its formation will shape the way its members approach tasks and their social interactions, and that over time those attitudes will solidify as a feature of the group’s structure. That means that how your team begins will determine how it ends, and how it will perform during its existence.

Scientists have looked at these life cycles and found that:

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Group members who share egalitarian values form highly interdependent task structures and social patterns. They typically perform well.

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Group members who share meritocratic values tend to form fewer interdependent approaches and social patterns. They also can perform well.

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Groups with mixed values, by comparison, end up lacking consistent approaches to tasks and group processes. Compared with the egalitarian and meritocratic groups, they significantly underperform.
¹

These findings help explain the paradox of how different companies, with very different, even antithetical, cultures, can enjoy continuous, long-term success, while other companies with cultures in the “middle,” even featuring the best of the two extreme cases, are not as successful.

As we were writing this book, Rich sat in on a fascinating conversation between Jim Davis, a senior vice president and CMO at SAS, and the CEO of a start-up company who had once worked at Amazon. SAS, a private corporation, is regularly listed as one of the world’s best places to work. Employees enjoy a beautiful corporate campus, free child care, fabulous food, doctors on staff, salons, and so forth. Not surprisingly, it has 3 percent turnover per year.

Amazon, said the CEO and ex-Amazon employee, is the opposite. It “works the shit” out of its people and retains them for an average of one year. Yet, by any measure, Amazon is hugely successful—arguably even more successful than SAS.

If SAS is successful with a nourishing culture, and Amazon with a harshly meritocratic one, why do both work?

The answer is that both SAS and Amazon are clear about their culture. There is no confusion or dishonesty—but rather authenticity and trust—to both companies. SAS’s message is:
spend a career with us
. Amazon’s is:
challenge yourself with us
. By comparison, mediocre teams and companies don’t know what they are. They say one thing and then do another. They blow around like the wind, and they destroy authenticity and trust.

It all begins at the beginning. Effective leaders, in their own way, achieve three tasks at team launch:

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Clarify and give meaning to the team’s task

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Bound the team as one performing unit

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Establish norms of conduct

This helps explain why
both
independent and interdependent group work can be effective. Research shows that groups perform best when their task and outcomes are either purely the product of group work or purely the product of individual effort. Hybrid groups—once again, the in-between position, in which tasks and rewards have individual as well as group elements—inevitably struggle with interactions, group stability, and member satisfaction. In hybrid groups, cooperation norms are weak.
²

As usual, it comes down to leadership, with the biggest penalties going to team leaders who are neither decisive nor consistent. Michael Dell made a mistake common to successful tech entrepreneurs who find, after a run of great success, their growth flattening and their stock price falling back to earth. During the 1990s, Dell was the fastest-growing stock among more than 5,000 traded in the United States. One thousand dollars of Dell stock purchased in January 1990 was worth a million dollars by December 1999.

But this good fortune eventually led to a bad outcome. After the tech stock crash of 2000 and 2001, Dell’s stock never recovered to its all-time highs. Even though Dell’s revenues continued to grow for the next thirteen years, the company’s performance disappointed Wall Street. When Apple’s market value raced past Dell’s in 2006, Dell was seen as a loser, even though it was still growing and profitable. The effect on Dell’s culture and on Michael Dell himself was devastating. Leadership at Dell seemed almost to give up. It was neither consistent nor decisive.

Finally, in late 2013, the company did a leveraged buyout and
took itself off the NASDAQ stock exchange. The very day Dell went private, Michael Dell did something equally important. He dumped the employee forced-ranking system within Dell. The forced-ranking system, which pitted every employee against each other on a bell curve of performance, had turned good employees into politicians, bad employees into backstabbers, colleagues into enemies, and the entire Dell culture into a sort of
Lord of the Flies
drama. We exaggerate—but you get the point. More important, so did Michael Dell. In just a year of the company’s being private, Michael Dell brought deep cultural values and consistent, decisive leadership back to his company.

Often, poor team leaders tend to have control issues. They are either overcontrolling tyrants (not asking for or ignoring input from team members) or undercontrolling weaklings (so laissez-faire that team members end up with little clarity on how to operate). The very worst leaders manage to be both, unpredictably vacillating between the two extremes and in the process incapacitating team members from doing their work.
³

J. Richard Hackman, an esteemed expert on teams, summarizes the leadership challenge most aptly. He notes that you cannot guarantee team success but you can increase the probability of it by managing at the margins and setting up the right conditions.
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According to Hackman, these “right conditions” are:

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The team has a compelling direction: the team task is clear, challenging, and consequential.

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The team is bounded (it is clear who is and who is not on the team) and stable (the team’s membership is not constantly fluctuating), and its members are interdependent (that is, they interact with one another to accomplish the team’s work).

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The team is set up with the right mix of members, who have norms of conduct that guide their behavior. Team members are different but not so different that they cannot work with each
other. Team members have the right set of skills and expertise for the team task.

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The team has a supportive organizational context that provides team members with access to resources, information, and training to help accomplish their task.

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The team receives coaching from experts, peers, and leaders.
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CUTTING YOUR LOSSES

In 1972, the social psychologist Ivan Steiner proposed the following, now widely cited, equation:

Actual group productivity = Potential productivity − Process losses

Where:

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Potential productivity
is what the team can theoretically achieve, given its resources.

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Process losses
are what the team loses through coordination and motivation problems.

Steiner went on to say that group size and group productivity are related to group tasks.
⁶
These tasks, he continued, can be differentiated based on three categories: component, focus, and interdependence.

Component
. This is the type of team task (“divisible”) that can be easily divided into subtasks that can be assigned to specific team members. Or it is the team task (“unitary”) that cannot be divided into subtasks and either all the team members must work together or one group member must complete the task while the others observe as bystanders.

Focus
. This is the direction of the team’s efforts. At the heart of focus is the question “Is the quantity or the quality of the team’s output most important?” When the team is focused on
quantity
, it is performing a maximizing task—team members are focused on producing as much as possible. When the team is focused on
quality
, it is performing an optimizing task, and the group members are seeking the optimal solution because high-quality performance is rewarded and poor-quality performance is penalized.

Interdependence
. The interdependence of team tasks refers to how the individual contributions of team members are combined or integrated. There are six types of task interdependence—and each produces its own type of process loss.

Additive tasks
are completed by combining individual contributions into the final team output. For example, a tug-of-war, an assembly line, and a relay race are additive tasks. In this type of task, process losses occur due to logistical problems, social loafing, and coordination issues. Productivity rises with group size at a decreasing rate because the number of functional links increases rapidly with group size:
n
(
n
− 1).

Disjunctive tasks
require the group to solve a single problem (for example, a crossword puzzle or a brain teaser) and perform at the level of its most competent member. A larger group size increases the likelihood of competent members being in the group, but it doesn’t guarantee it. Productivity also increases with group size up to a certain extent, after which process losses may creep in. Process losses are typically due to self-censorship, social loafing, group members not listening to the most competent people in the group, or the lack of a group process in which all voices are heard. These losses can be mitigated by selecting people with the right expertise, by fostering norms and shared beliefs that reduce self-censorship, and by fostering a nonthreatening interpersonal climate in which people are comfortable speaking up.
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Meanwhile, making the team’s task compelling and consequential can also help diminish social loafing.
⁸

Conjunctive tasks
require that all group members work to accomplish the team’s task. Now, unlike disjunctive tasks, the group performs conjunctive tasks (in terms of speed and quality of work) at the level of its least competent member (or its weakest link). Examples of groups working on a conjunctive task include a musical band and a rock-climbing team.

Because a few members can bring down the entire team in conjunctive tasks, the key is to assign team members tasks they enjoy. It is almost as important to increase interdependence and feedback within the team, because they strengthen the sense of personal contribution and social indispensability among team members, which in turn promotes team members’ efforts.
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Why does this work? The
Köhler effect
, first formulated in 1926, explains it: Weaker individuals in teams strive to keep up with other group members. They do not want to hold the group back, especially when the group is working on a conjunctive task.
¹⁰
Recently, experimental studies have found that, in comparison with working alone, team members show as much as a 50 percent increase in performance during teamwork because they do not want to let their teammates down.
¹¹
The effect is even stronger when team members are working on tasks they enjoy.
¹²

This finding underscores what most of us know from our own lives: being part of a team taking on a task in which our own participation makes an obvious contribution can bring out the best in us.

Compensatory tasks
feature group members who average their individual contributions. For example, consider a group task of estimating the value of a stock. Each member offers an estimate; and the group estimate is the average. Or, consider a process of selecting a job candidate in which everyone on a committee assigns a score to each candidate in the pool.

Here, the process losses occur from having any discussions before the decision. The biggest advantage of compensatory tasks is that systematic biases are corrected by the multiple contributions.
However, if the group engages in a discussion, or if the members try to influence one another, this advantage is lost. This can be compensated for by weighting voters based on their knowledge and expertise. Unfortunately, in real life other factors such as seniority or status or popularity are often used to weight individual estimates—which only makes things worse.

Rich recently interviewed a Navy Blue Angels jet formation instructor. The stakes in aerobatic formation flying are life-and-death. The pilots fly wingtip-to-wingtip, eighteen inches apart, at speeds of up to 400 miles per hour. Every pilot has to be at his top game, within team formations, all the time, or someone will die.

So how do the Blue Angels do it? They start by videotaping every performance and practice. Then they rigorously debrief the performance. To keep service rank, seniority, and popularity from skewing the debriefing, the pilots first walk into the debriefing room and remove their name tags and service rank. They begin with a team saying: “There are no perfect performances. We’re here to talk about what was imperfect.” Then they begin. What follows is almost like a twelve-step recovery meeting, with everyone saying what he or she could have done better.

Discretionary tasks
allow group members to determine how to integrate their individual contributions. In other words, the means by which the team will accomplish a group task is up to the discretion of the team itself. The result can be very successful, as the path to completion is customized by the individual members. But process losses, even failure, can occur when teams adopt an inappropriate performance strategy—as when members put their own motives and ambitions ahead of the team.