“We don’t have time for a retrospective. We have ‘real work’ to do.”
How many times have you heard this? It comes up frequently in the classes I teach, I’ve heard it more times than I care to count. It frustrates me, and yet, I understand where it comes from. This issue isn’t limited to retrospectives. One of the challenges that managers, coaches, and consultants face is helping groups and teams to effectively balance productive work with work that builds and sustains their productivity. The key to that is understanding that working on the group’s functioning is also real work.
Understanding Task and Maintenance Work
More than seven decades ago, social scientists Kenneth Benne and Paul Sheets published their influential paper “Functional Roles of Group Members” in the Journal of Social Issues. From their studies of how people worked together at the National Training Laboratory for Group Development, they described different roles that they observed group members taking on to help a group succeed. Some of these were task roles, that is, jobs that helped the group to solve a problem or accomplish a task it was assigned. Others were maintenance roles. These activities built and maintained the group’s ability to work together.
Examples of task-oriented activities include:
- Making suggestions for ways to solve a problem
- Sharing facts or information relevant to the work at hand
- Coordinating activities among group members
- Applying skills, knowledge, procedures, or tools toward a solution
In contrast, examples of maintenance activities include:
- Commenting on the way the group is working together
- Mediating differences between group members
- Encouraging and acknowledging others’ contributions
- Offering suggestions for improving the group’s process for accomplishing its work
This latter group includes many of the types of things I’m used to seeing in retrospectives.
Since the publication of Benne and Sheets’ work in 1948, researchers have proposed alternatives to the eighteen group roles mentioned in the original paper. I have found the broad categories of work the paper suggests – task work and maintenance work – to be a valuable lens for observing how groups and teams operate. How much of their time and energy is spent fulfilling the group’s purpose vs. maintaining its health? Are they aware of how they balance the two? Does the group collectively possess skills in both areas? Do they value both?
Maintenance Work is Real Work
A key takeaway from this research is that maintenance work is no less real or meaningful than task work. It’s clear, however, why it doesn’t always seem that way. When task work falls off, it’s evident outside the group. Whoever depends on the group for that work will notice when it isn’t done. When maintenance work doesn’t happen, however, it’s less obvious. Its effect isn’t directly visible – at least not right away. Inside the group, things might seem “wrong” or feel “off,” but this is rarely noticeable from the outside.
Even within the group, task work tends to be labeled as “real work.” It visibly and directly contributes towards the group’s stated goals. If task work doesn’t get done, the group can’t succeed. Maintenance work’s contribution to the group’s success is indirect. Maintenance work aims to make task work easier – or sometimes, possible at all. Like deferring bridge maintenance and road repair, not attending to the group’s functioning can save time and energy in the short term. In the long term, however, neglecting it erodes the group’s ability to complete tasks. This insight is critical. Maintenance work isn’t just about group members “feeling good” about each other. It’s about supporting the group’s continued productivity.
Effective Groups Balance Task and Maintenance Work
To be effective over the long term, groups must do both types of work. High-performing teams are not just highly productive; they become better at working together over time. They do this by taking on an appropriate amount of maintenance work at the correct times.
How much and how often should a team or group be engaging in maintenance work? My experience has been that there are two answers to this: (1) A little bit all the time, and (2) enough to get back on track when trouble arises.
“A little bit all the time” is where regular reflective practices like retrospectives and continuous learning come in. The best time to build these skills is before you need them. Learning how you will talk about problems is best done when those problems are at the level of annoyance, irritation, and inconvenience. If a group waits until a crisis arises to determine how it will deal with problems, they’re unlikely to respond well to the challenge. Making a habit of improvement activities also builds the group’s capacity over time, making them better than when they started.
“Enough to get back on track when trouble arises” requires attention to how well the group completes its tasks. If that is proceeding smoothly, then deeper interventions aren’t required. When the group does encounter turbulence and disruption in task work, that’s a cue to dip into maintenance mode. A key here is to know what level of productivity they are trying to reach. As long as the group is operating below that threshold, it’s likely that more focus on how they work and work together is needed.
Avoiding Deferred Maintenance
Ironically, when task work starts to pile up, groups feel pressure to do less maintenance work rather than more. This makes sense. Most organizations emphasize productivity rather than the conditions that foster productivity. The indirect contribution of maintenance work to productivity makes it hard to see and value.
Given groups’ natural tendency to focus on tasks (or “real work” as they sometimes call it) when maintenance is needed, I recommend keeping Roger Harrison’s advice in mind. Don’t intervene deeper than needed to solve the problem at hand. When trying to get a team back on track, start with the simplest form of maintenance that could possibly work. Keep an eye on how well the group performs its task work. If it isn’t improving, then try intervening at a deeper level. If it is, stay with what you’re doing until the group returns to where they were before the disruption.
Remember, though, that figuring out how to work together is real work. It takes time and energy, just like task work does. People only have a limited amount of energy to devote to it. If you try to push a group to a deeper level of maintenance work than they can commit their energy to, it’s unlikely to help.
Help Groups Appreciate Both Types of Work
Sometimes the most helpful thing you can do for a group is to make them aware of these two types of work. I make it a point to share the idea of task and maintenance work with teams that I coach. In that role, I’m primarily focused on group maintenance. Unsurprisingly, I get frustrated when group members aren’t as aware of its importance – or even its existence – as I am. The more we can talk as a group about how they’re balancing the two types of work, the more likely they are to balance them well.
