Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (8 page)

MEASURING TEAMS IN REAL TIME

Teams these days are not just being studied statistically, or as part of isolated experiments, but in real life, and while they are in operation. And the results have often been revealing. For example, the old phrase “It is not what you say but how you say it” is now a mathematically proven statement.

Sociometrics

One finding is that
body language
(that fad of three decades ago) and other nonverbal forms of human communication really do matter. In fact, many of the ancient biological signaling patterns that humans used even before the development of language still dominate our lives.

Alex Pentland, the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, and his team have used “sociometers” to generate data on communication patterns and the productivity of teams in real organizations. Sociometers are wearable electronic sensors that measure patterns of communication—including the amount of face-to-face interaction, conversation time, physical proximity to other people, and physical activity levels—using social signals derived from vocal features, body motion, and relative location. They capture tone of voice, how one faces others in groups, and how much people listen and talk.

Crucial to the research is that sociometers are designed to capture the
nature
of human interaction, not its
content
; they capture
how
people communicate, not
what
they are talking about. Pentland and his team show that
how
team members communicate is just as important a predictor of team success as several other, highly prized, factors
combined
—including intelligence, personality, skill, and content of discussions.

For Pentland, great teams do the following:
⁸⁷

•
      
They communicate frequently: In a typical project team, a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour seem to be optimal for team performance.

•
      
Team members talk and listen in equal measure: Conversation is distributed equally among members. By comparison, low-performing teams suffer from teams within teams. They have members who talk or listen, but don’t do both.

•
      
They communicate informally: The best teams use half their time communicating outside the formal meetings or as a “side” during team meetings. Informal communications tend to increase team performance. In a study on call center teams, the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside its formal meetings. Those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among teams.

•
      
They look for ideas and information outside the group: The best teams consistently (if intermittently) connect with multiple outside sources—especially sources with skills or knowledge lacking among the team’s members. Team members then bring back what they’ve learned and share it with the team (that second part is just as important). Especially high-performing teams often feature what’s called a well-intentioned connector: a person who keeps track of these useful outside sources and who on the team knows them. Then when useful information is captured from those sources, this “connector” takes on the task of disseminating that information to integrate it into the expertise of the team.

•
      
They adjust their patterns of communication: Up to this point it may seem that communications within a team are essentially preset based on the natures of its members, a kind of biological determinism. But, in fact, successful teams employ malleable communications patterns—they learn to communicate and they communicate to learn. Patterns of communication that work best are empirically described, perfected, and then taught to the other members of the team.

Team Neurodynamics

There is another way of looking at teams in real time:
team neurodynamics
. This is the science of modeling teamwork through the measurement of members’ neurophysiologic indicators. In other words, wire the team up and send them back to work. The field of neurodynamics is based on the discovery that an individual’s brain rhythms become synchronized to the frequency of the stimulus presented to him or her.
⁸⁸

Neurodynamics was initially applied to individuals—showing, for example, how the brain synchronized to acoustic musical notes, and so forth. It wasn’t until 2009 that the science was applied to teams. This “team neurodynamics” began with the concept of
neurophysiologic synchronies
: the second-by-second coexpression of the same neurophysiologic (or cognitive) response to the same stimuli by multiple members of a team. It seems that while we may never be purely of one mind, our minds do sometimes dance to the same beat.

This process was first described for three-person teams engaged in scientific problem solving and then later applied to groups engaged in complex navigational tasks, including submarine piloting.
⁸⁹
Lately it has been studied with teams of different sizes, from two to six members, and using different types of disruptions and interruptions to detect different entropy levels among the individual
members—in other words, how quickly and intensely they react to this interference. The researchers have gone so far as to propose that organizations can do task-specific comparisons of the rhythms across teams—and in doing so, learn about the dynamics of underperforming teams.
⁹⁰
This opens the possibility of one day being able to assemble teams, test them in action, and then see if their individual and group responses indicate a team that will work well together. But that’s still in the future.

For now, let’s get out of the busy corridors of the brain and move up into the larger world of complete human beings and how they work in teams together.

C
ultures, armies, social organizations, and enterprises—all have long grappled with the challenge of team composition. That is, what is the best combination of team members that will achieve the greatest possible result—and not blow up in the process?

The traditional approach is to look at particular teams and assess the overall level of particular traits. Or, conversely, to look at variations in those traits among the team’s members. But that approach has taken us only so far. So, lately, social scientists have taken a different, brain-based approach. This new approach examines how team members’ task-specific abilities complement each other in accomplishing particular group tasks. This underscores something we already know from real life: “dream teams” don’t always perform as well as teams composed of lesser players who exhibit great chemistry do.

Anita W. Woolley and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon
University pioneered this extension of cognitive neuroscience to groups.
¹
In particular, they’ve taken the recent discoveries about the coordination of systems in a single brain and mapped them into the multiple individual brains of team members.
²
In their model, each team member plays the part of a specific brain system—while team members working together resemble various brain systems functioning together in a single head.

Their conclusion? All effective teams include individuals who can function together as the “brain systems” required to achieve the group’s task.

Here’s how they reached this conclusion: In 2007, Woolley and her team formed one hundred two-person teams (think of them as pairs of brains) to examine how brain systems in different members’ heads functioned together.
³
They examined two independent subsystems—object memory ability and spatial ability—that reflect the operation of distinct neural systems in the brain.
⁴
The pair-teams were then given an assignment in which one member had to deliver on a spatial task (in this case, navigation through a virtual maze) and the other to accomplish an object-properties task (in this case, remembering repetitions of complex “greebles”—novel shapes used in facial identity research).

The result? Teams whose members exhibited the abilities required for the task in aggregate, and teams in which the members’ tasks matched their respective abilities, performed better than teams with mismatched assignments or teams that had members with the same abilities. That’s not unexpected, but what
is
surprising is that while verbal collaboration helped the underperforming teams compensate for poorly assigned roles, it did nothing to help teams with inadequate abilities. Remarkably, verbal collaboration actually
impaired
the performance of the homogenous teams. Apparently, talking things through only helps if your abilities are different.

The implications are stunning. It means that no matter how many players you add to a team and how closely they work together, the results will
never
improve if they are all inadequate to the task. On the other hand, if you team up top-talented people—even if you give them the wrong jobs—they will figure out a way to do a good job. Collaboration will not compensate for an inadequately endowed team. Of course, the most effective teams combine the required aggregate abilities, the proper role assignments, and a lot of talking.

Next, Professor Woolley and her team gave forty-one four-person teams an analytical task to solve.
⁵
This time, the most effective teams were those that had not only the relevant expertise but also engaged in collaborative planning. That is, the successful teams sat down together and explicitly identified strategies for best using their expertise.

Those strategy meetings were not ad hoc. In fact, research has shown that collaborative planning almost never happens spontaneously. Someone has to run the show; someone has to serve as team leader to foster this type of planning (otherwise, the team needs an outside administrator).
⁶

Researchers found that collaborative planning made teams more productive because those meetings led to the more effective integration of information. Team members were able to resolve critical questions early on. This in turn constrained the scope of what the team had to deal with later, and it also helped team members target their analytical resources more effectively. As a result, they weren’t overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information they had to deal with but could prioritize the various aspects of the overall task in the early stages of their work. In other words, by meeting and planning early, the team members knew the scope of the job and the talents of their team members, and could then divide up the work into reasonable assignments.

Researchers also found that collaborative planning proved especially effective when team members gave the task to the least skilled member of the team, which helped raise each team member’s awareness of his or her fellow members’ expertise and experience—thus helping the team structure and divide up the work appropriately.

A DIVE INSIDE THE HIVE

This is a good place to address the subject of “group minds” or what is called
transactive memory
. This notion has been picked up by popular culture, especially science fiction, as the equivalent in higher-order animals of the “hive mind” found in bees, termites, and other social insects (
Star Trek
’s Borg). In fact, transactive memory is a much more prosaic concept, but one with important possibilities.

First promulgated by the scientist Daniel Wegner in 1985 and elaborated on by other scientists in the years that followed, transactive memory is used by teams to benefit from a collective awareness of who knows what and therefore to both direct incoming knowledge to the appropriate group members and to retrieve vital information from within the group.
⁷
They do this not through some kind of mind-meld (though it can seem like that to outsiders) but because they communicate a lot. In the process, they gain a common understanding (a “metamemory”) of who knows what, and which member has a particular expertise or skill—as well as what the team
doesn’t
know. Once again, this process begins with collaborative strategy meetings, and, perfected over time, it can result in a team that can maneuver very quickly and not waste time searching for answers to questions or determining the right person for a job. Research confirms that teams with transactive memory perform better than their counterparts who lack it because
the group’s members efficiently identify and use relevant knowledge and generate higher-quality solutions.

Most successful large organizations exhibit this transactive memory, whether they know it or not. For example, there is always one person in the organization who knows the company’s early history, or how to fill out travel vouchers, or the policy on leaves of absence—and everyone in the company knows who that person is. As an outsider, if you want to find these people, one of the quickest ways is to track the company’s internal emails and phone traffic. Wherever they cluster, that person is likely a transactive memory node. Stupid companies will sometimes fire these key employees during layoffs—and then fail to understand why they are losing more productivity than people. Mess with your transactive memory employees at your peril. You’re better off giving them lifetime employment.

THE MAGICAL ENERGY OF COGNITIVE DIVERSITY

Confirming what most of us have long suspected, recent research has shown that people think differently from one another. But even if we accept that fact, few of us give it much consideration—sometimes to our regret—when we populate teams. As a result, everything can look good on paper, the team members’ talents dovetail neatly, and everyone gets along well, and yet, in action, the team just doesn’t work.

Why? Because it is not enough for résumés and personalities to match. In fact, doing so may be the worst thing you can do. Given the choice of a team that is a rainbow of races and cultures but whose members all went to the same Ivy League university, and a team entirely composed of African American women (or Asian men) of different ages, classes, educations, and personality types,
you are far more likely to have success with the latter. That is, if you can hold that team together.

When it comes to teams, traditional definitions of “diversity” are meaningless. Cognitive diversity—
how
people think—is all.

Cultural Perspectives

One common source of this cognitive diversity is cultural and is the result of different patterns of socialization. For example, in some cultures, people tend to be holistic thinkers, and in others people tend to be more analytical.

In 2001, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Takahiko Masuda conducted an experiment with American and Japanese participants.
⁸
They showed both groups twenty-second animated videos of underwater scenes. When asked what they had observed, the Americans focused on objects in the foreground (brightly colored fish). Meanwhile, the Japanese focused on the background and talked twice as much as the Americans about interdependencies between the foreground and background objects.

As you might imagine, this mix of perspectives can be problematic for a team if its members are assigned tasks without paying heed to their unique cognitive skills. On the other hand, if properly handled, this diversity can be an unequaled source of team strength, with some members focusing on the details and others on the big picture.

Another form of cognitive diversity can be found between
socially contextual
(context-dependent) and
independent
(context-independent) thinkers. This difference can be quickly and easily determined by team leaders by giving the team a simple test: Show your team members a slanted box frame (that is, a box shaped like a parallelogram), give them a rod, and then ask them to align the rod vertically in the box. If the result looks like this . . .

. . . your team member is context-dependent. If the result looks like this . . .

. . . your team member is context-independent.

Howard Weiss and James Shaw, in their 1979 study of eighty-eight male undergraduates, found that context-dependent people are more susceptible to social cues than context-independent people are.
⁹

Here’s the thing: a team needs both independent and socially attuned thinkers. But leaders also need to know the distribution of the different types of thinkers on the team and manage accordingly. So, go ahead and test potential team members for their thinking style—not to exclude one type or another but to include the right number of each type.

At this point, you may be thinking: Why do I want diversity in thinking styles? Why shouldn’t I go just for the independent thinkers—after all, aren’t they more creative than the conformists? Won’t that increase the likelihood of the team’s coming up with something radically new and valuable?

Actually, no. Research on radical-innovation teams shows that adding some conformity to a team may actually drive creativity.
In particular—and counterintuitively—the leavening addition of a conformist can dramatically increase a team’s radical innovations. Studies have found that the optimal balance of people on radical-innovation teams requires that 50 percent of the members have the following distribution of personality types:
¹⁰

•
      
Creative—20 to 30 percent. Teams with too many creative types struggle with implementation. That’s because (surprise!) creatives are not always practical, are not concerned with rules, and may initiate conflict.

•
      
Conformist—10 to 20 percent. Conformists are the backbone of the team; and their key role is to support the creatives. Conformists help boost cooperation and improve team confidence. They make teams predictable, in a good way.

•
      
Detail-oriented—As much as 10 percent. Detail-oriented people may often be risk-averse, but they help strengthen important team functions such as budgetary control. The detailers make sure that the team is still there each morning.