Best Keys to Building Great Teams
Teamwork is more important than ever. Failures in teamwork
have caused accidents in nuclear power stations, planes to crash and businesses
to fail.
Many organisations are trying to do more with less by
relying on the efficiency of teams.
However, a collection of individuals doesn't become a team
just because it's a called 'a team'. There are a whole range of psychological
processes that need to be nurtured to form a group that functions well
together.
While all teams are different, there are some universals
that all teams need, or at least can benefit from. Here is what psychologists
have discovered over the decades:
A1.
Prioritise social skills
Surely if you want to build a fantastic group, you put the
smartest people in a room together?
Not necessarily. According to research conducted by Woolley
et al. (2010), highly performing groups need social sensitivity.
In their study 699 people were observed working in groups of
two to five. They found that the intelligence of the group is...
"...not strongly correlated with the average or maximum
individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average
social sensitivity of group members..."
And this finding is not an isolated one. The importance of
social skills emerges in the research again and again.
So it's not about putting all the biggest brains together,
it's thinking about the social dynamic. Who will listen to others? Who will
share criticism constructively? Who will have an open mind? Whose will back
other people up?
Great groups have great social skills.
A2. Mix
genders
Since women's social skills tend, on average, to be a little
stronger than men's, including women is one way of prioritising social skills.
Woolley et al.'s study reached the same conclusion: teams
which included women did better than men-only teams.
But that doesn't mean you should take it to the logical
extreme and build women-only teams: it's all about the mix. For example,
Hoogendoorn et al. (2011) found that teams with equal gender mixes outperformed
male-only and female-only groups in a business exercise.
Similarly, this Credit Suisse Research Institute report
found that companies with at least some female board members have better share
price performance than those that are men-only.
So, it makes sense to mix up the genders in the team.
A3.
Build trust
It's very hard for people to work together effectively if
they don't trust each other. They also have to appear trustworthy to others or
it may be difficult for them to do their job.
Teams that appear more trustworthy (hopefully because they
are!) have been shown to perform better when negotiating with other groups
(Naquin & Kurtzberg, 2009). After all, would you do business with a team
you don't trust? Not if you can avoid it.
The problem is that in groups people perceive the
trustworthiness of the group by assessing the least trustworthy member.
So, in terms of trustworthiness, one bad apple really can
spoil the bunch.
A4. Use
humour
If a group members don't seem to trust each other, then
perhaps it's humour that's missing. One study by Professor William Hampes has
found that people whose sense of humour is stronger are rated more trustworthy
by others (Hampes, 1999).
Similarly, when group dynamics are strong, people start
joking around together and will tend to talk to each other outside work. Humour
can be a signal that groups are getting along and can even help create that
buzz that makes some groups so great to work in.
Humour has all sorts of benefits including reducing stress,
boosting creativity, communication and team cohesiveness (Romero &
Pescosolido, 2008).
Some studies have even found that humour can increase
performance and the effectiveness of leadership.
It has to be the right type of humour though—not (all)
put-downs.
A5. Mix
introverts and extroverts
We tend to think of the extroverts as superior
'team-players': they mix better, pipe up more in meetings and generally seem to
be getting on with others more smoothly.
But introverts have their place as well. Introverts
certainly don't blow their own trumpets and aren't often noticed at the outset,
yet eventually the group comes to value them.
That's what Bendersky and Shah (2012) found in their study
of introverts and extroverts working together. In general, as the team evolves,
extroverts do worse than people expect and introverts do better.
The quiet ones can come through in the end.
A6.
Define goals and...
One of the greatest barriers to effective team performance
is pretty simple: they don't know what the goal is.
A study of 500 managers and professionals in 30 different
companies found that it was an unclear vision of the goal that was stopping
them performing effectively.
But not only must goals be defined...
A7.
...define roles
OK, everyone knows the goal, but do they know what they're
supposed to be doing to achieve this goal?
It seems like a pretty basic step, yet it's frequently
unclear to team-members exactly what their role is.
Unclear roles become particularly problematic when the
situation changes and the team has to adapt. If the roles aren't clear then
each person doesn't know what they're supposed to be doing. And that's a recipe
for disaster.
A8.
Spread the story
For people to work together effectively they need to know
what the story is in a more general sense.
Where have we come from and where are we going? It's about
more than just goals and roles, it's about the assumptions we are using and the
knowledge that we share (or don't).
Psychologists sometimes refer to these 'stories' as mental
models. We construct these mental models
of the world outside to help us navigate it and work out what to do next. When
the mental models of groups are better aligned, they perform better.
For example, Westli et al. (2010) found that when medical
staff at a trauma centre shared mental models their performance was better,
over and above specific teamwork skills.
People who share the same story are more likely to know what
to do automatically, almost without thinking about it. Psychologists call this
implicit coordination.
A9.
Concise communication
When teams make mistakes, one of the most common reasons is
that they failed to communicate effectively.
In complex environments, information will often be coming
from many different sources. We're all awash in information nowadays, or maybe
drowning is a better word; emails get cc'd to everyone, and who knows what's
important?
Teams that perform best clearly communicate the most
important information before they've even been asked for it and filter out the
junk.
A10.
Leadership
Teams invariably benefit from good leadership. Naturally
it's about motivation, structuring tasks, analysing what needs to be done,
allocating goals and so on, but it's more than that.
The best leaders are also trying to nurture their teams by
addressing some of the soft skills above. They are getting the mix of personnel
right, encouraging concise communication, spreading the group's story, using
humour and building trust.
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