Team performance is an emergent phenomenon. You can’t control it, and attempting to adjust it directly will likely have perverse effects and unintended consequences. As with any complex system, your best option for influencing it is by managing constraints. Instead of thinking about “What do I do to create high-performing teams?” shift to considering, “How do I foster the conditions in which teams are more likely to become high performing?”
What conditions matter? I tend to pay attention to six factors identified by researchers J. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman.[1] The first three are the essential conditions. They are so critical to team performance that if you cannot form a team within these constraints, you should consider not using a team at all. These three conditions are:
- A real team, rather than a team in name only
- A clear and compelling purpose for the team
- The right people who can have the right interactions needed for the work
Establishing a Real Team
Calling a random collection of people a team doesn’t make them one. Real teams have a shared identity, shared objectives, and interdependent work. The question of whether or not you need a team is essentially one of work design. Whenever people work together, there are losses in productivity. These losses come from the need to communicate and coordinate and other social phenomena. The purpose of teamwork is to offset – and outweigh – those process losses by creating something faster, at higher quality, or in greater quantity than if the individuals worked independently. If the work doesn’t require a team, don’t use one. But if you need a team, create a team.
One obstacle to having a real team is unclear team boundaries. When you don’t know who is and isn’t on the team, the teamwork practices needed to offset the coordination costs tend not to develop. Effective teams also have a stable enough membership to create and maintain good ways of working together. High-performing teams aren’t just highly productive; they also get better at working together over time. When the team boundaries are ambiguous and membership is changing too quickly, it is less likely that the team will perform at a high level.
Providing a Compelling Purpose
A team exists for a reason. That purpose should be clear to all its members, and it must be compelling. Teams are more likely to reach higher performance levels when their goals are meaningful to the team members. Google’s Project Aristotle research revealed that two of the top five factors most significant to the effectiveness of their teams were meaning (the work was personally important to team members) and impact (team members believed their work mattered and created change). Along the same lines, Daniel Pink has written about the often-overlooked but essential motivators of autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
A compelling purpose does three critical things for a team. First, it energizes the team members, which increases the effort they direct towards accomplishing the team’s goals. Second, it orients them toward their collective objective, which helps them to choose appropriate strategies for working together. Third, it challenges them by asking them to bring their full scope of knowledge and skills to the table. Launching a team without a compelling purpose harms the team’s chance of becoming high-performing. Many other critical team design decisions depend on this element. Before kicking off a team, spend the time to make sure that the reason you’re bringing the team together does all three of these things.
Gathering the Right People
A team is more than the sum of its parts; it is the product of its interactions. For a team to be effective, the right people must be in place to have the right interactions. Having the right people means looking at skills and numbers. High-performing teams have the right mix of people with task expertise – the knowledge and ability needed to do the work – and collaborative skills. Remember that teams produce results by performing interdependent work. If someone understands the work to be done but can’t work with other people to do it, they are not the right person to put on a team.
The right interactions don’t emerge when the team is too large. As group size increases, communication and coordination overhead increase non-linearly, becoming a drain on productivity. In addition, the problem of social loafing – the tendency for people to not “pull their own weight” in a group – becomes increasingly common as a team grows. Once a team reaches 8+ members, these performance losses are almost inevitable and often outweigh the benefits of having a team. Teams often get too big because of the perceived need to include at least one person with every organizational specialty or representing every department. One of my favorite suggestions for managing this challenge is to figure out how many people you believe you need to accomplish the work at hand and to staff the team with one or two fewer people than that. Set the expectation that the team members need to develop the missing skills, and then support them to do just that. Teams may need each of those capabilities, but they may not need experts in all of them.
The right interactions don’t emerge when the team membership is too uniform or too varied. A well-composed team has the right mix of people. They are neither so similar that they duplicate knowledge and perspectives, nor are they so dissimilar that they cannot communicate or coordinate well. Homogenous teams often have an easier time planning and coordinating, but they risk “business as usual” approaches and inattentional blindness. On the other hand, groups in which people think and act too differently from each other have difficulty drawing on the full range of their members’ knowledge, skill, and experience. The ideal situation includes a broad range of expertise and perspectives with enough commonalities that the team can find effective ways to work together.
Laying the Foundations for a High-Performing Team
Teams are complex adaptive systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. If you don’t have these right when the team starts up, they are much harder to fix once they are operating. It’s much easier to address issues with the foundation before you’ve built the rest of the house.
To see these elements in action, think back to the best team you’ve ever been part of. It should be a team that was not only highly productive but also got better at working together over time and helped each of its members to develop and grow.
Real Team
- Was it a real team with a shared identity, collective goals, and interdependent work?
- Did everyone agree on who was part of the team?
- Did team membership stay constant long enough to develop a shared identity and shared ways of working?
Compelling Purpose
- Was the team’s purpose personally meaningful to its members?
- Did it help the team choose strategies for working together?
- Did it encourage team members to bring their relevant skills and experience?
Right People
- Did the team members have the needed task expertise?
- Did they have the needed collaboration skills?
- Was the team small enough that communication and coordination costs didn’t dominate?
- Was the team small enough to discourage social loafing?
- Did the team have sufficient differences to avoid groupthink and overly narrow solutions?
- Did the team have sufficient similarities to find ways to communicate and coordinate?
In the same way you can use these questions to see what helped a past team succeed, you can use them to diagnose a current team or design a future one.
High performance starts with team design
The three essential conditions are structural factors you can address before launching the team. You don’t have to wait for a team to start working together – and you shouldn’t. Multiple studies suggest differences in these three factors can account for up to 50% of the variation in performance between teams. You cannot guarantee that a team will become high-performing. If you want to improve your odds, design a real team with a compelling purpose staffed with the right people.
Of course, once a team launches, there are other enabling conditions you need to attend to… which we’ll examine in Part 2.
[1] Hackman’s earlier work, including the classic Leading Teams, talks about five factors. His collaboration with Wageman and others resulted in splitting one of those factors into two separate ones, as described in Senior Leadership Teams and Collaborative Intelligence
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