Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations (27 page)

The open-ended era that follows the retirement of a team might be called the
aftermath phase
. These are the months and years that follow the end of a team’s existence, during which each member, the company, and sometimes even the world put their experience with that team into perspective. Needless to say, many teams exist for such a short duration or take on such minor tasks that the members’ memories of them are insignificant or even nonexistent. Rather, in this discussion we are talking about teams working together for an extended period on a common task.

In the next few sections we’ll look at each of those phases in turn.

THE FORMATION PHASE

One reason that so many teams fail is that they are doomed from the start.

As we’ve shown, an enormous amount of research has been conducted over the last fifteen years into the dynamics of teams—how they should be composed, how they should operate, what types of individuals they should employ, and how those members should interact over the course of the team’s life. Unfortunately, few of these findings have been put to use in any systematic way—much less in combination with each other—but here are four key lessons we hope leaders will use for team recruitment:

•
      
Diversity: Look past surface differences such as race and gender, and focus instead on real differences in culture, life experiences, skills, and thought processes. The larger the mix you have of these qualities—as long as the members can build a team culture that will keep them together—the greater the chance the team will be successful.

•
      
Proximity: Teams work better the closer the members are to each other. That’s true even in the age of virtual work teams. So if you can’t put the members in the same room, then find communication tools to close the gap.

•
      
Size: Bigger isn’t better for teams; in fact, it usually makes them worse. Determine the smallest-size team for the task at hand and recruit for that size, or a size not much larger.

•
      
Hierarchy: Layers of management increase efficiency but not necessarily productivity. Keep the leadership of the team to the smallest number of managers and the fewest layers of control. The best teams have few leaders and a flat organization with little hierarchy. Eschew titles.

Finally, resist the desire of team members to recruit their friends to the team. Even if those friends are talented, their presence will almost inevitably reduce the diversity of the team.

In recruiting a team leader, look for someone who has been part of a successful and healthy team in the recent past. Or choose a proven leader coming off a “successful failure.” As much as it sounds like the right thing to do, resist the strategy of letting the team leader select his or her own team, as those choices will almost always lack the necessary diversity needed for true team genius.

The number two person in the team should also be, if possible, someone coming from a successful team. Also recruit that one person, even if he or she is not an expert in the subject at hand, for his or her transactional skills—that is, for the ability to maintain
records, become the team’s memory, act as the interface among all the other members, and be the unofficial contact to the outside world.

Now build out your team and prepare to fire them up.

THE ESTABLISHMENT PHASE

At the heart of the establishment phase is a process as old as humankind. It is the creation of a sacred space.

There is a reason we open school days, troop meetings, church services, graduations, city council meetings, sporting events, trials, and the United States Congress with a series of rituals—a flag ceremony, the pledge of allegiance, the stating of oaths, a prayer. All serve to emotionally and psychologically separate the participants from what came before (everyday life) and launch them into a different reality, a different plane of heightened experience.

Over time we tend to become jaded about these rituals. We go through the motions. But remember what it was like when you were young and you encountered these rituals for the first time—or even now when you find yourself in a different institution or culture and in the midst of a ceremony that is alien to you. You cannot help feeling different—intimidated, exalted, confused. Whatever the response, you can’t help but feel yourself in a different place, one in which your concentration is more focused and your senses heightened. If you are a member of the institution in question, you feel unleashed and part of something larger than yourself; and if you are not a member, no matter how much you know about these rituals and no matter how much you have been welcomed into the group, you can’t help but feel like an outsider.

These are not shallow emotions, but rather emotions that go right to the heart of being a social creature. Many species of social animals, if forced out of the pack or herd, will die from loneliness
and isolation. By comparison, being part of a team gives us an identity, a bigger purpose, and a way of interacting trustfully with other team members without the wariness and fear we experience with strangers.

Thus, the rituals that are established at the formation of a team, and regularly repeated in an abbreviated form thereafter, establish a threshold through which we depart the vast and dangerous real world and enter into a smaller, sacred space where we are safe and surrounded by others who accept us and whom we can trust.

Put simply, teams need an official beginning as much as they need an official ending—an event to mark the official start of the team’s endeavor, to establish the team’s culture, and to initiate mechanisms for ongoing communication.

It doesn’t have to be an elaborate ceremony—though sometimes that’s not a bad idea. For two people who have been paired up on a project of comparatively short duration, the official beginning may be a casual lunch or drinks after work to get to know each other, to talk about their lives and aspirations, to scope out the task ahead, to swap email addresses and phone numbers, and to establish times and locations for regular meetings.

At the other end of the scale are the elaborate ceremonies, gatherings, and investitures that mark our entry into established and exclusive groups—freshman orientation, fraternity and sorority initiations, Eagle Scout Courts of Honor and Order of the Arrow ordeals, Little League opening-day ceremonies, the first day of boot camp, professional society ceremonies, secret investitures into fraternal organizations. All of these have a highly ritualized atmosphere, often as the result of years, even centuries, of accumulated experience, and are usually intentionally strange, even frightening, so as to create an indelible shared memory among all the members, new and old. In the case of the military, those nightmarish first days of “boot” are also designed to be an equalizer—to strip the new recruit of whatever prejudices and attitudes he or she may
have from civilian life in order to create a tabula rasa upon which the service can write its own rules of conduct.

For most teams, such rituals will fall somewhere between these two extremes. But whatever form the kickoff event takes, they all share common goals:

  
1.
   
Set an Official Start.
Without an official starting time (“We begin tomorrow morning at eight a.m., so get a good night’s sleep”), human nature will lead some team members to jump the gun for advantage, start late to show their independence, and so forth. An official start, even if it is pretty much arbitrary, synchronizes the team from the outset—and reminds them that they will begin together, work together, and end together.

  
2.
   
Establish Relations.
Team success depends on reducing the barriers to communication among team members. And that starts on day one. Time spent on name tags, introductions, sharing details about oneself, distributing phone numbers and email addresses, and even small-group exercises and brainstorming sessions—all of these activities serve the important purpose of establishing rapport and connection among all members of the team. Sometimes we may cut these efforts short (or even roll our eyes when we see them noted on the agenda), but don’t underestimate the positive effect they can have in the long run.

  
3.
   
Set Rules.
When it comes to rules of behavior, establishing them early and clearly is paramount. Setting the rules at the start and sticking to them for everyone, including yourself, is both democratizing and (unless you are a controlling martinet) liberating, because everyone knows what the rules are and appreciates that they are shared by everyone on the team—no one gets special favors. By the way: Announce those rules, keep them simple, and write them down to be distributed to everyone. That will minimize disputes.

  
4.
   
Seed the Culture.
Like it or not, the cultural life of the team begins at that kickoff event. Every member of the team leaves that meeting with a gut feeling about the quality of the team and its likelihood of success. They will have already formed opinions about other individuals on the team. As team leader—and even more so if you are the more senior team creator—it is incumbent on you to plumb the feelings of the team members about their new team as quickly as possible. That’s why well-run teams typically feature a round of interviews with each member immediately after that kickoff event. Ostensibly, these interviews are about the member’s skills and potential contribution to the team, but they are also about gaining insight into the initial impressions and expectations of the group. Everything you do will affect the overall culture of the team, so design the kickoff meeting so that it showcases the kind of culture you want the team to have.

  
5.
   
Set Attitudes.
Natural leaders instinctively understand that they have the power to shape the tone and attitude of the team through the force of their own personalities. That’s why they continuously project a persona that will color the team in the way they want it to behave: loose or intense, playful or serious, big thinking or detail-oriented. Great leaders, like George Washington (as his youthful notes to himself about public behavior underscore), live this persona so completely that eventually they
become
it.

Unfortunately, many leaders make the mistake of allowing a team to find its own attitude and “style,” which in reality means that the most strong-willed members dominate and even emotionally hijack the team. Even worse, some leaders allow their own negative emotions and moods to infect the team. We recommend when recruiting a team leader that you do not leave this process of attitude creation entirely up to that individual, but rather that you
demand an
explicit plan
as to how that leader will manage that task, including the rituals, beginning from the first gathering and carrying through the entire life span of the team. Giving that person a little training in dress and presentation wouldn’t hurt either.

  
6.
   
Establish Communications.
As research shows, and as great leaders know, healthy and frequent communications ensure that team members and the team’s work are synchronized, which, in turn, allows the team to adapt quickly to difficulties and to calm rough waters. It starts at that all-important first meeting and should continue at every regular team gathering, whether these meetings are in person or are virtual, asynchronous exchanges. Having clear expectations and “rules of engagement” is even more important when teams work across geographies and time zones. We recommend establishing clear but flexible routines that will reinforce intrateam communications. Keep these meetings short, purposeful, and tightly managed.

The lesson is: Set the personality and the attitude of the team early, and you will spare yourself a lot of frustration and misery later. And you’ll improve the team’s odds of being successful in the process.

THE OPERATIONAL PHASE

Among the most tragic types of teams might be those called “process teams.” We’ve encountered only a few in our careers, and we’ve always come away both stunned that people would actually participate in such a surreal situation, and appalled at the waste of time, talent, and treasure these teams represent.

These process teams tend to take one of two forms, one obvious
and the other dangerously subtle. The former is a team so dysfunctional that it devotes all of its time and energy just to keeping the group together and trying to get the members on task. These teams are obviously destined to fail, and the best solution is to follow the advice from earlier in this book and break them up immediately. They will never right themselves—and if by some miracle they do, it’ll probably be long after it is too late to get the job done.

The second type of process team is much more difficult to identify. It is important to look closely at supposedly healthy teams that have nevertheless failed in their task to make sure they really represent “good failures.” Sometimes the reason for the failure is that the team spent too much of its time in a group kumbaya and not enough on the task at hand, or, worse, that it created only a simulacrum, a Kabuki play of a real team, and merely went through the motions. Management—that is,
you—
never noticed, because the team seemed to be doing so well; it had “great chemistry.”

The best way to prevent this kind of fiasco—and it will be one, embarrassing everyone involved, especially you, and leaving the company desperately behind the competition—is to force yourself to look beyond the morale of the team and to set some early and precise milestones for the team to reach. Demand that the leader convey those milestones to the entire team (a good leader will want to do so anyway). You can loosen up later if the team is both humming along
and
productive. If the team doesn’t hit those early milestones—no matter what its explanation—consider breaking it up. At the very least, set even tighter and more explicit milestones. If the team fails to reach those, remove its leader, no matter how beloved by the team. Don’t be unreasonable in your targets—almost every new team has growing pains—but don’t accept excuses either. Do
not
buy into their self-delusion; do
not
become their advocate—your job is to be the sane, even ruthless, adult. If the team can’t do the job at the beginning, it is unlikely to do so at the end.