The New Science of Building Great Teamsby Alex Sandy Pentland If you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on. Why, then, did the manager at a major banks call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science. The truth is quite the opposite. At MITs Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identified the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing teamsthose blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them. Why Do Patterns of Communication Matter So Much? Looking for the It FactorWhen we set out to document the behavior of teams that click, we noticed we could sense a buzz in a team even if we didnt understand what the members were talking about. That suggested that the key to high performance lay not in the content of a teams discussions but in the manner in which it was communicating. Yet little of the research on team building had focused on communication. Suspecting it might be crucial, we decided to examine it more deeply. For our studies, we looked across a diverse set of industries to find workplaces that had similar teams with varying performance. Ultimately, our research included innovation teams, post-op wards in hospitals, customer-facing teams in banks, backroom operations teams, and call center teams, among others. We equipped all the members of those teams with electronic badges that collected data on their individual communication behaviortone of voice, body language, whom they talked to and how much, and more. With remarkable consistency, the data confirmed that communication indeed plays a critical role in building successful teams. In fact, weve found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a teams success. Not only that, but they are as significant as all the other factorsindividual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussionscombined. Patterns of communication, for example, explained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that banks call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric SolutionsTaemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a teams energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups. Drawing on that insight, we advised the centers manager to revise the employees coffee break schedule so that everyone on a team took a break at the same time. That would allow people more time to socialize with their teammates, away from their workstations. Though the suggestion flew in the face of standard efficiency practices, the manager was baffled and desperate, so he tried it. And it worked: AHT fell by more than 20% among lower-performing teams and decreased by 8% overall at the call center. Now the manager is changing the break schedule at all 10 of the banks call centers (which employ a total of 25,000 people) and is forecasting $15 million a year in productivity increases. He has also seen employee satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more than 10%. http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams The Discipline of Teamsby Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith It wont surprise anyone to find an article on teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith figuring into an issue devoted to high performance. While Peter Drucker may have been the first to point out that a team-based organization can be highly effective, Katzenbach and Smiths work made it possible for companies to implement the idea. In this groundbreaking 1993 article, the authors say that if managers want to make better decisions about teams, they must be clear about what a team is. They define a team as a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. That denition lays down the discipline that teams must share to be effective. Katzenbach and Smith discuss the four elementscommon commitment and purpose, performance goals, complementary skills, and mutual accountabilitythat make teams function. They also classify teams into three varietiesteams that recommend things, teams that make or do things, and teams that run thingsand describe how each type faces different challenges. Early in the 1980s, Bill Greenwood and a small band of rebel railroaders took on most of the top management of Burlington Northern and created a multibillion-dollar business in piggybacking rail services despite widespread resistance, even resentment, within the company. The Medical Products Group at Hewlett-Packard owes most of its leading performance to the remarkable efforts of Dean Morton, Lew Platt, Ben Holmes, Dick Alberding, and a handful of their colleagues who revitalized a health care business that most others had written off. At Knight Ridder, Jim Battens customer obsession vision took root at the Tallahassee Democrat when 14 frontline enthusiasts turned a charter to eliminate errors into a mission of major change and took the entire paper along with them. Such are the stories and the work of teamsreal teams that perform, not amorphous groups that we call teams because we think that the label is motivating and energizing. The difference between teams that perform and other groups that dont is a subject to which most of us pay far too little attention. Part of the problem is that team is a word and concept so familiar to everyone. (See the exhibit Not All Groups Are Teams: How to Tell the Difference.) Not All Groups Are Teams: How to Tell the Difference Or at least thats what we thought when we set out to do research for our book The Wisdom of Teams (HarperBusiness, 1993). We wanted to discover what differentiates various levels of team performance, where and how teams work best, and what top management can do to enhance their effectiveness. We talked with hundreds of people on more than 50 different teams in 30 companies and beyond, from Motorola and Hewlett-Packard to Operation Desert Storm and the Girl Scouts. We found that there is a basic discipline that makes teams work. We also found that teams and good performance are inseparable: You cannot have one without the other. But people use the word team so loosely that it gets in the way of learning and applying the discipline that leads to good performance. For managers to make better decisions about whether, when, or how to encourage and use teams, it is important to be more precise about what a team is and what it isnt. Most executives advocate teamwork. And they should. Teamwork represents a set of values that encourage listening and responding constructively to views expressed by others, giving others the benefit of the doubt, providing support, and recognizing the interests and achievements of others. Such values help teams perform, and they also promote individual performance as well as the performance of an entire organization. But teamwork values by themselves are not exclusive to teams, nor are they enough to ensure team performance. (See the sidebar Building Team Performance.) Building Team Performance Nor is a team just any group working together. Committees, councils, and task forces are not necessarily teams. Groups do not become teams simply because that is what someone calls them. The entire workforce of any large and complex organization is never a team, but think about how often that platitude is offered up. To understand how teams deliver extra performance, we must distinguish between teams and other forms of working groups. That distinction turns on performance results. A working groups performance is a function of what its members do as individuals. A teams performance includes both individual results and what we call collective work products. A collective work product is what two or more members must work on together, such as interviews, sur-veys, or experiments. Whatever it is, a collective work product reflects the joint, real contribution of team members. Working groups are both prevalent and effective in large organizations where individual accountability is most important. The best working groups come together to share information, perspectives, and insights; to make decisions that help each person do his or her job better; and to reinforce individual performance standards. But the focus is always on individual goals and accountabilities. Working-group members dont take responsibility for results other than their own. Nor do they try to develop incremental performance contributions requiring the combined work of two or more members. http://hbr.org/2005/07/the-discipline-of-teams How to Make a Team Workby Maurice Hardaker and Bryan K. Ward Anyone who has ever run a business or organized a project has discovered how hard it can be to get the whole team on board to ensure that everyone knows where the enterprise is heading and agrees on what it will take to succeed. At IBM weve used a method for some years that helps managers do just this. The technique, which we call PQM or Process Quality Management, grew out of many studies with customers to determine their needs and from internal studies as part of IBMs business quality program. PQM has been used successfully by service companies, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, as well as manufacturers. In PQM, managers get back to the often overlooked basics of an endeavor. IBM has had many successes abroad by paying attention to such details. IBM Europes manufacturing arm relied heavily on PQM when it launched a series of changes including continuous-flow manufacturing. First the vice president of manufacturing and his team made sure they understood the task ahead. Then they focused on new priorities for the companys major materials-management processes. As a result of their decisions, changes cascaded through the manufacturing organizations work force, leading not only to better interplant logistics but also to smooth introduction of continuous-flow manufacturing among IBMs 15 European plants. As this happened, manufacturing cycle times and inventory levels improved, costs dropped, quality rose, and the company became more flexible in meeting customer demand. That may not be the end of the rainbow, but its not bad from a two-day PQM session. PQM has also been the starting point for many IBM customers of a host of management decisions in such areas as strategy formulation, funding, human resource management, marketing, and resource allocation for large, complex projects. Often a PQM study is undertaken because something has happenedsomeone sees a new opportunity, a new technology, or new competitors. But it is useful any time. PQM does not differ radically from other planning processes: we identify goals and the activities critical to their attainment, and we provide a way to measure success. But PQM demands an intensive one- or two-day session at which all the key managers concerned agree on what must be done and accept specific responsibility. Theres no guarantee that a unit will achieve its mission, of course. That requires competent follow-through by the entire organization. But PQM lays the groundwork for such success. And at least all the key players start off facing in the same direction. Gather the Team PQM begins with a person who is the leader of the management teamthe boss, the one whose job depends on getting the teams mission accomplished. He or she should then involve everyone on the immediate management team and no one elsenobody missing and no hitchhikers. At most there should be 12 people, since more than that is just too unwieldy. And if even one member of the team cannot attend the study, wait. PQM requires a buy-in from everyone not only to identify what is needed but also to commit to the process. http://hbr.org/1987/11/how-to-make-a-team-work Making Star Teams Out of Star Playersby Michael Mankins, Alan Bird, and James Root When it comes to an organizations scarcest resourcetalentthe difference between the best and the rest is enormous. In fields that involve repetitive, transactional tasks, top performers are typically two or three times as productive as others. Justo Thomas, the best fish butcher at Le Bernardin restaurant in New York, can portion as much fish in an hour as the average prep cook can manage in three hours. In highly specialized or creative work, the differential is likely to be a factor of six or more. Before becoming chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts prevailed in 25 of the 39 cases he argued before the Court. That record is almost nine times better than the average record of other winning attorneys (excluding solicitors general) who have argued before the Court since 1950. (For other examples of star productivity, see What A Players Bring to the Table.) Across all job types, we estimate, the best performers are roughly four times as productive as average performers. That holds in every industry, geographical region, and type of organization weve examined. What A Players Bring to the TableWhy, then, do companies so rarely bring together a team of star players to tackle a big challenge? The easy answerindeed, the conventional wisdomis that all-star teams just dont work. Egos will take over. The stars wont work well with one another. Theyll drive the team leader crazy. We think its time to reconsider that assumption. To be sure, managing a team of stars is not for the faint of heart. (The conventional wisdom is there for a reason.) But when the stakes are highwhen a business model needs to be reinvented, say, or a key new product designed, or a strategic problem solveddoesnt it seem foolish not to put your best people on the job, provided you can find a way to manage them effectively? We have seen all-star teams do extraordinary work. For example, it took just 600 Apple engineers less than two years to develop, debug, and deploy OS X, a revolutionary change in the companys operating system. By contrast, it took as many as 10,000 engineers more than five years to develop, debug, deploy, and eventually retract Microsofts Windows Vista. Common sense suggests that all-star teams would have two big advantages: Sheer firepower. If you have world-class talent of all kinds on a team, you multiply the productivity and performance advantages that stand-alone stars deliver. Consider auto-racing pit crews. Kyle Buschs six-man crew is widely considered the finest on the NASCAR circuit. And each member is the best for his positiongas man, jackman, tire carriers, and tire changers. Crew members train together year-round with one clear goal in mind: to get Buschs #18 racer in and out of the pit in the shortest possible time. The crew can execute a standard pit stop73 maneuvers, including refueling and a change of all four tiresin 12.12 seconds. Add just one average player to Buschs crewsay, an ordinary tire changerand that time nearly doubles, to 23.09 seconds. Add two average team members to the mix, and it climbs to well over half a minute. Synergy. Putting the best thinkers together can spur creativity and ideas that no one member of the team would have developed alone. The blockbuster movie Toy Storythe top-grossing film of 1995wasnt the product of one visionary filmmaker. Rather, it was the result of an often prickly but ultimately productive collaboration among Pixars top artists and animators, Disneys veteran executives (including Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of the film division), and Steve Jobs. The Pixar team originally presented Disney with what Katzenberg deemed an uninspiring tale. A major revisionfar more edgy, at Katzenbergs insistencelacked the cheeriness essential to a family movie. Finally the all-star group came up with something that satisfied everyone on the teamand that would later be dubbed by Time magazine the years most inventive comedy. To do their best, alpha teams need leaders and support staff who are all-stars too. Extremely talented people have often never worked for someone they can learn a lot from; in our experience, most relish the opportunity and pull out all the stops. And high-caliber subordinates allow team members to accomplish more. A gifted administrative assistant, for example, requires less direction and competently shoulders many routine tasks, so the other team members can focus on what they do best. http://hbr.org/2013/01/making-star-teams-out-of-star-players Getting the Most Out of Your Teamby Nancy Katz As companies depend more and more on teams to accomplish key tasks, optimizing each members performance becomes a critical challenge. Team members with weak skills can compromise overall productivity or place unfair burdens on high performers, breeding hostility and resentment. So what can managers do to improve the performance of less-skilled team members? For one thing, they must instill in them not only the desire to improve but also the belief that they can. Furthermore, managers must find ways to increase the likelihood that people with greater skills will help their teammates become more proficient. One practical way to promote both goals is through the design of team compensation structures. To test how pay schemes affect the ability gap in teams, I conducted a study of 100 participants in an interactive simulation exercise called Bolo, which has been used by U.S. Army Research Institute psychologists, among others, to study collaboration and team behavior patterns. In this study, the participants were separated into 35 three- or four-member teams, each of which was pitted against a computer-guided enemy. Each team operated under one of five different compensation structures, but all had the same goal: to beat the enemy by capturing as many refueling bases as possible. The game provided opportunities for team members to both co-operate with and compete against one another. For example, participants could type secret or open messages to some or all of their teammates. Although the simulation did not re-create a management setting per se, it did involve many of the conditions that characterize one: dispersed information, time pressures, easily evaluated performance, and the need for collaboration. The five compensation structures I tested were pay equality (each member of the team received the same pay), pay equity (each member was compensated according to individual performance), and three hybrid models that borrowed elements from both the equality and equity approaches. The first hybrid scheme involved a group threshold: After the team as a whole reached a certain target, members pay rates rose relative to their individual performance. The second hybrid scheme involved an individual threshold: Once every member of the team hit an established target, pay rates for each would rise according to their individual performance. The third scheme involved a relative ratio: Team members were paid for individual performance, but once the highest paid earned twice as much as the lowest paid, some of the high performers subsequent earnings would be transferred to the low performers to reduce the gap. The hybrid schemes proved to be more effective than the pure pay equity and equality structures at encouraging certain behaviors that could help maximize a teams performance. The two threshold schemes were better at keeping high performers motivated than the equality scheme and were better than the equity scheme at encouraging high performers to teach and share information with less-gifted performers. (While the group threshold scheme was most effective at encouraging high performers to share knowledge, the individual threshold scheme had the added benefit of generating a strong drive among low performers to improve.) The ratio scheme was the least effective of the hybrids, most likely because it placed a cap on performance rewards and made teammates constantly concerned about their performance relative to one another. Consequently, intense competition occurred under this scheme, and teammates often stole resources or withheld information. The hybrid compensation schemes Ive described make sense in certain situations: when a teams work results in a quantifiable, tangible outcome; when members roles are not highly differentiated, so its easy to compare individual performance levels; when high-skilled workers cannot simply carry the rest of the team; and when there is enough time for highly skilled members to teach their less-skilled counterparts. In the right situation, such schemes can simultaneously encourage low-performing team members to improve their skills and encourage more highly skilled members to help them in this effort, thereby reaping the benefits of two fundamentally different approaches to structuring compensationequality and equity. http://hbr.org/2001/09/getting-the-most-out-of-your-team