Posted: February 26th, 2023

Analysis Assignment on Teams-Week 3

  

Analysis Assignment on Teams

Write a paper, 1-2 pages and single-spaced, that addresses the following questions as it pertains to your personal and organizational situations, tying in specific course readings/videos(please see attached files/links). When doing so, please italicize specific concepts or terms used and cite the reading or website link (2 or more cites). Given that I am familiar with all references from this course you can simply put the title of the reading or website in parentheses to cite. 

1. What is the role of trust in your workplace? Give examples that not only address the existence, but also the absence of trust. Furthermore, let’s say you do not trust a colleague, how would that affect your actions? Lastly, in your opinion, what are trust generating actions in your organization?  

2. Give an example of an unsuccessful team you have been on. What were its dysfunctions? What could have been done to improve the team experience?

3. Give an example of a successful team you have been on. Describe how the team worked together. Why was the team so successful? 

4. What advice do you have for building great teams? Please touch on how to get all team members to communicate equally and openly and on building trust. 

5. Describe characteristics of good meetings you have had and not so good meetings. How could you improve those not so good meetings? 

Reading Links:(Along with below links please see attached files for readings)

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/rituals-at-work-teams-that-play-together-stay-together

Video Links:

https://youtu.be/-WAD_xBkZgE

https://hbr.org/video/5566537368001/the-explainer-how-management-teams-can-have-a-good-fight.

Analysis Assignment on Teams

Write a paper, 1-2 pages and single-spaced, that addresses the following questions as it pertains to your personal and organizational situations, tying in specific course readings/videos. When doing so, please italicize specific concepts or terms used and cite the reading or website link (2 or more cites). Given that I am familiar with all references from this course you can simply put the title of the reading or website in parentheses to cite.

1. What is the role of trust in your workplace? Give examples that not only address the existence, but also the absence of trust. Furthermore, let’s say you do not trust a colleague, how would that affect your actions? Lastly, in your opinion, what are trust generating actions in your organization?

2. Give an example of an unsuccessful team you have been on. What were its dysfunctions? What could have been done to improve the team experience?

3. Give an example of a successful team you have been on. Describe how the team worked together. Why was the team so successful?

4. What advice do you have for building great teams? Please touch on how to get all team members to communicate equally and openly and on building trust.

5. Describe characteristics of good meetings you have had and not so good meetings. How could you improve those not so good meetings?

1 | Page

MEETINGS

Plan a Better Meeting with Design Thinking by Maya Bernstein and Rae Ringel

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

DANIEL DAY/GETTY IMAGES

“Sometimes, when I sit in meetings, especially ones in which people don’t seem engaged, I

calculate the cost in staff time. I’ve estimated that one standard weekly meeting in my

bureau — 50 people sitting in a cookie-cutter conference room, looking both bored and

https://hbr.org/topic/meetings https://hbr.org/search?term=maya+bernstein https://hbr.org/search?term=rae+ringel https://hbr.org/

anxious — costs around $177,000 annually, and surely this scenario occurs throughout the

[organization] hundreds of times a day. It drains us, and it breeds cynicism. So many

meetings are lost opportunities.”

Do these sentiments — expressed by an applicant to the course on meeting facilitation we

teach at Georgetown University — sound familiar to you? They should, according

to these statistics on meetings:

Organizations hold more than 3 billion meetings each year.

Executives spend 40-50% of their working hours — or 23 hours per week — in meetings.

90% of meeting attendees admit to daydreaming in them.

73% acknowledge they do other work during meetings.

25% of meetings are spent discussing irrelevant issues.

At the same time, the right kind of meetings can be key to advancing a team or

organization’s agenda. So how do you ensure that the gatherings you host are productive,

not destructive?

By applying design thinking, a concept popularized by IDEO founder David Kelly and

Stanford’s d.school, which was first applied to the design of physical objects, then other

products, such as technological tools, and now to more complex challenges across a wide

variety of industries. The idea is to put the “user” at the center of the experience — an

approach that works with meeting design, too.

Start by putting your own expertise and agenda aside and thinking about the people who

will be affected by your meeting. Develop empathy for them by asking three sets of

questions:

1. Who is going to be in the room and what are

their needs?

2. Who won’t be in the room but will nevertheless be affected by the meeting and what are

https://ideas.ted.com/the-economic-impact-of-bad-meetings/

YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES

Meetings

their needs?

3. In what broader culture and environment are you operating and what are some of the

overarching challenges and opportunities?

Actively seek out individuals who will attend the meeting, or who will be affected by it, and

speak with them — ideally in person. Even if you run regular meetings with the same group

of people, these individual brief check-ins can help build trust, surfaces hidden issues and

ensures that participants feel more invested.

Next, set a frame for the meeting. Once you’ve attentively listened and observed, you’ll

want to suggest an overarching purpose for the meeting and articulate clear outcomes that

will connect to achieving it. We recommend that you ask yourself: If this meeting is wildly

successful, what will people feel, know, and do as a result? Include these desired outcomes

in your agenda, so that participants know why they’re attending and can gauge with you

whether or not the time has been productive. In our experience, people rarely spend enough

doing these things. Meetings are often put on the calendar without a particular goal in

mind — simply to hold the time — and, as a result, the cart often drives the horse; people

meet simply because they feel they must. Even — perhaps especially — short meetings

deserve a clear purpose and clearly articulated desired outcomes. This keeps people on task,

and ensures that people feel that their time is well spent.

The third step is to creatively design the

meeting. Once you know the core question to

address, and what success might look like,

you should create your agenda. People tend

to throw agendas together at the last minute,

if at all. We compare the design and execution

of meetings to the driving navigation app

Waze: what is the quickest, safest, most

effective way to get to your destination? The

The Seven Imperatives to Keeping Meetings on Track by Amy Gallo

How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting by Roger Schwarz

Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting? by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

first step, immersing yourself with people,

was about understanding where you need to

go (the beach? the city? the mountains?). The

second step was about identifying your

desired destination — your exact address and

location. This third step is all about the route.

Should you get there as fast as possible? Do

you need to take a detour? What is the most

scenic route? Are there roads that you’ve traveled so many times before that are perhaps

best to avoid? What might you need to watch out for — your team’s equivalent of potholes or

traffic jams? This is the phase where we encourage people to be playful, to put reality on

hold for a bit and push past their initial, “go-to” ideas. What would it look like for you to

infuse your meetings with a bit of fun? To begin and end in an unexpected way? To use film,

images, poetry, or music to spark ideas? To create an opportunity for personal sharing and

connection? While this might sound frivolous, it is actually extremely important. Meetings

are opportunities not simply to get things done, but also foster a positive team culture.

Finally, test-drive your plan, in the same way that a product designer would put an early

prototype into users’ hands. In a meeting context, this might be a draft agenda shared with

participants. Their responses will help you gain more empathy, frame new questions, get

even more creative in your meeting design, and increase your potential for success at the

actual gathering.

People who have applied this design process to their meetings tell us that it has radically

affected both the efficacy of those gatherings, and the attitude people in their organizations

have about them. Each phase has its benefits. Immersing helps people feel heard, and it

ensures that meeting leaders are connected to participants. Framing pushes the meeting

leaders to ensure that there are clear goals for each meeting. Imagining leads to more

https://hbr.org/2013/12/the-seven-imperatives-to-keeping-meetings-on-track/ https://hbr.org/2015/03/how-to-design-an-agenda-for-an-effective-meeting https://hbr.org/2015/03/do-you-really-need-to-hold-that-meeting

creativity and experimentation in the meeting design. Finally, prototyping—something as

simple as getting feedback on your plan from a few people — makes people feel valued, more

accountable in the meetings, and more invested in their success.

This may seem onerous for every meeting but, with practice, you can learn to cycle through

these stages in less and less time, and you’ll find that small investment upfront saves

significant time in the long run. You’ll have fewer meetings, and those you do have will be

more productive — even sometimes fun.

Maya Bernstein is an independent consultant working in the areas of innovation,

leadership, and creativity. She is a faculty member at the Georgetown University Institute for

Transformational Leadership and co-director of the Executive Certificate in

Facilitation program.

Rae Ringel is the president of The Ringel Group, a leadership development

consultancy specializing in facilitation, coaching and training. She is a faculty member at the

Georgetown University Institute for Transformational Leadership and co-director of the

Executive Certificate in Facilitation program.

Related Topics: COLLABORATION | LEADING TEAMS

This article is about MEETINGS

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https://hbr.org/search?term=maya+bernstein https://scs.georgetown.edu/programs/415/certificate-in-facilitation/ https://hbr.org/search?term=rae+ringel http://www.ringelgroup.com/ https://scs.georgetown.edu/programs/415/certificate-in-facilitation/ https://hbr.org/topic/collaboration https://hbr.org/topic/leading-teams https://hbr.org/topic/meetings https://hbr.org/2018/02/plan-a-better-meeting-with-design-thinking#

Summer 2003 35

Virtually every executive staff I’ve ever come across believes in teamwork. At least they say they do. Sadly, a scarce few of them make teamwork a reality in their organizations; in fact, they often end up creating environments where

political infighting and departmental silos are the norm. And yet they continue to tout their belief in teamwork, as if that alone will somehow make it magically appear. I have found that only a small minority of companies truly understand and embrace teamwork, even though, according to their Web sites, more than one in three of the Fortune 500 publicly declare it to be a core value.

How can this be? How can intelligent, well-meaning executives who supposedly set out to foster cooperation and collaboration among their peers be left with organiza- tional dynamics that are anything but team-oriented? And why do they go on pro- moting a concept they are so often unable to deliver?

Well, it’s not because they’re secretly plotting to undermine teamwork among their peers.That would actually be easier to address.The problem is more straightforward— and more difficult to overcome. Most groups of executives fail to become cohesive teams because they drastically underestimate both the power teamwork ultimately unleashes and the painful steps required to make teamwork a reality. But before ex- ploring those steps, it is important to understand how the compulsory, politically cor- rect nature of teamwork makes all of this more difficult.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, teamwork is not a virtue in itself. It is merely a stra- tegic choice, not unlike adopting a specific sales model or a financial strategy. And cer- tainly,when properly understood and implemented, it is a powerful and beneficial tool. Unfortunately, management theorists and human resources professionals have made teamwork unconditionally desirable, something akin to being a good corporate citizen.

B Y P A T R I C K M . L E N C I O N I

The Trouble with

Teamwork

Leader to Leader36

As a result, many of today’s leaders champion teamwork reflexively without really understanding what it entails. Pump them full of truth serum and ask them why, and they’ll tell you they feel like they have to promote team- work, that anything less would be politically, socially, and organizationally incorrect.“What choice do I have? Imagine me standing up in front of a group of em- ployees and saying that teamwork isn’t really all that important here.”

Ironically, that would be better than what many—if not most—leaders do.By preaching teamwork and not demanding that their peo- ple live it, they are creating two big problems.

First, they are inducing a collective sense of hypocrisy among their staff members, who feel that teamwork has devolved into noth- ing more than an empty slogan. Second, and more dangerous still, they are confusing those staff members about how to act in the best interest of the company, so they wind up trying at once to be pragmatically self-interested and ideologically selfless.The combination of these factors evokes in- evitable and sometimes paralyzing feelings of dissonance and guilt.

Executives must understand that there is an alternative to teamwork, and it is actually more effective than being a faux team. Jeffrey Katzenbach, author of The Wisdom of Teams, calls it a “working group,” a group of executives who agree to work indepen- dently with few expectations for collaboration.The ad- vantage of a working group is clarity; members know exactly what they can, and more important, cannot ex- pect of one another, and so they focus on how to ac- complish goals without the distractions and costs that teamwork inevitably presents. (For guidance on decid-

ing whether teamwork is right for your organization, see sidebar,“To Be or Not to Be a Team.”)

Of course, none of this is to say that teamwork is not a worthy goal. There is no disputing that it is uniquely powerful, enabling groups of people to achieve more collectively than they could have imagined doing apart.

However, the requirements of real team- work cannot be underestimated.

The fact is,building a leadership team is hard. It demands substantial behavioral changes from people who are strong-willed and often set in their ways,having already accomplished great things in their careers.What follows is a realistic description of what a group of ex- ecutives must be ready to do if they under- take the nontrivial task of becoming a team, something that is not necessarily right for every group of leaders.

Vulnerability-Based Trust

The first and most important step in building a cohesive and functional team

is the establishment of trust.But not just any kind of trust.Teamwork must be built upon a solid foundation of vulnerability-based trust.

This means that members of a cohesive, func- tional team must learn to comfortably and quickly acknowledge, without provocation, their mistakes,weaknesses, failures, and needs

for help. They must also readily recognize the strengths of others, even when those strengths exceed their own.

In theory—or kindergarten—this does not seem terri- bly difficult. But when a leader is faced with a roomful of accomplished, proud, and talented staff members, get-

Patrick M. Lencioni is president of The Table Group, a management consulting and execu- tive coaching firm in the San Francisco

area. He is the author of three best-selling books, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,”“The Four Obsessions of an

Extraordinary Ex- ecutive,” and “The Five Temptations of a CEO.” He has

worked with hundreds of executive teams and CEOs to strengthen

teamwork. �

Summer 2003 37

ting them to let their guard down and risk loss of posi- tional power is an extremely difficult challenge.And the only way to initiate it is for the leader to go first.

Showing vulnerability is unnatural for many leaders,who were raised to project strength and confidence in the face of difficulty. And while that is certainly a noble be- havior in many circumstances, it must be tempered when

it comes to demonstrating vulnerability-based trust to hesitant team members who need their leader to strip naked and dive into the cold water first. Of course, this requires that a leader be confident enough, ironically, to admit to frailties and make it easy for others to follow suit. One particular CEO I worked with failed to build trust among his team and watched the company falter as a result. As it turns out, a big contributing factor was

To Be or Not to Be aTeam

So how do well-intentioned lead- ers go about deciding if teamwork is right for their staffs? They can start by recognizing that organiza- tional structure is not nearly as im- portant as behavioral willingness.

Most theorists will call for team- work in organizations that are structured functionally, but may not do so for those that are organized divisionally or geographically.

In other words, if the work can be organized in departments that op- erate largely independently (with regional territories, distinct prod- uct divisions, or separate subsid- iaries), then the executives at the top can follow suit and function as what Jeffrey Katzenbach, author of The Wisdom of Teams, describes as “working units.”These are groups made up of individuals who,

though friendly and cooperative at times, are not expected to make willing sacrifices to one another to achieve common goals that lead to joint rewards.

However, when executives run an organization that is made up of de- partments that have structural interdependencies, teamwork is usually presented as the only pos- sible approach for the leadership group. But although this is a sound and reasonable theory when all other factors are considered equal, it is not necessarily advisable in the messy and fallible world of real human beings. Before deciding that teamwork is the answer, ask these questions of yourself and your fellow team members.

• Can we keep our egos in check?

• Are we capable of admitting to mistakes, weaknesses, insuffi- cient knowledge?

• Can we speak up openly when we disagree?

• Will we confront behavioral problems directly?

• Can we put the success of the team or organization over our own?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is “probably not,” then a group of executives should think twice about declaring them- selves a team.Why? Because more than structure, it is the willingness of executives to change behav- ior—starting with the leader of the organization—that should de- termine whether teamwork is the right answer.

Leader to Leader38

his inability to model vulnerability-based trust. As one of the executives who reported to him later explained to me, “No one on the team was ever allowed to be smarter than him in any area because he was the CEO.” As a result, team members would not open up to one another and admit their own weaknesses or mistakes.

What exactly does vulnerability-based trust look like in practice? It is evident among team members who say things to one another like “I screwed up,” “I was wrong,”“I need help,”“I’m sorry,” and “You’re better than I am at this.” Most important, they only make one of these statements when they mean it, and especially when they really don’t want to.

If all this sounds like mother- hood and apple pie, understand that there is a very practical rea- son why vulnerability-based trust is indispensable. Without it, a team will not, and probably should not, engage in unfiltered productive conflict.

Healthy Conflict

One of the greatest inhibi- tors of teamwork among executive teams is the

fear of conflict, which stems from two separate con- cerns. On one hand, many executives go to great lengths to avoid conflict among their teams because they worry that they will lose control of the group and that someone will have their pride damaged in the process. Others do so because they see conflict as a waste of time.They prefer to cut meetings and discus- sions short by jumping to the decision that they be- lieve will ultimately be adopted anyway, leaving more time for implementation and what they think of as “real work.”

Whatever the case, CEOs who go to great lengths to avoid conflict often do so believing that they are strength- ening their teams by avoiding destructive disagreement. This is ironic, because what they are really doing is sti- fling productive conflict and pushing important issues that need to be resolved under the carpet where they will fester. Eventually, those unresolved issues transform into uglier and more personal discord when executives grow frustrated at what they perceive to be repeated problems.

What CEOs and their teams must do is learn to identify artificial harmony when they see it, and incite produc-

tive conflict in its place.This is a messy process, one that takes time to master. But there is no avoiding it, because to do so makes it next to impossible for a team to make real commitment.

Unwavering Commitment

To become a cohesive team, a group of leaders must

learn to commit to decisions when there is less than perfect information available, and when no natural consensus develops.

And because perfect information and natural consensus rarely exist, the ability to commit becomes one of the most critical behaviors of a team.

But teams cannot learn to do this if they are not in the practice of engaging in productive and unguarded con- flict.That’s because it is only after team members pas- sionately and unguardedly debate with one another and speak their minds that the leader can feel confident of making a decision with the full benefit of the collective wisdom of the group. A simple example might help illustrate the costs of failing to truly commit.

�

Becoming a team

is not necessarily

right for every

group of leaders. �

Summer 2003 39

The CEO of a struggling pharmaceutical company de- cided to eliminate business and first class travel to cut costs. Everyone around the table nodded their heads in agreement, but within weeks, it became apparent that only half the room had really committed to the deci- sion. The others merely decided not to challenge the decision, but rather to ignore it.This created its own set of destructive conflict when angry employees from dif- ferent departments traveled together and found them- selves heading to different parts of the airplane.Needless to say, the travel policy was on the agenda again at the next meeting, wasting important time that should have been spent righting the com- pany’s financial situation.

Teams that fail to disagree and exchange unfiltered opinions are the ones that find themselves re- visiting the same issues again and again. All this is ironic, be- cause the teams that appear to an outside observer to be the most dysfunctional (the arguers) are usually the ones that can ar- rive at and stick with a difficult decision.

It’s worth repeating here that commitment and conflict are not possible without trust. If team members are concerned about protecting them- selves from their peers, they will not be able to disagree and commit. And that presents its own set of problems, not the least of which is the unwillingness to hold one another accountable.

Unapologetic Accountability

Great teams do not wait for the leader to remind members when they are not pulling their weight.

Because there is no lack of clarity about what they have

committed to do, they are comfortable calling one an- other on actions and behaviors that don’t contribute to the likelihood of success. Less effective teams typically resort to reporting unacceptable behavior to the leader of the group,or worse yet, to back-channel gossip.These behaviors are not only destructive to the morale of the team, they are inefficient and allow easily addressable issues to live longer than should be allowed.

Don’t let the simplicity of accountability hide the diffi- culty of making it a reality. It is not easy to teach strong leaders on a team to confront their peers about behav-

ioral issues that hurt the team. But when the goals of the team have been clearly delineated, the behaviors that jeopardize them become easier to call out.

Collective Orientation to Results

The ultimate goal of the team, and the only real

scorecard for measuring its suc- cess, is the achievement of tan- gible collective outcomes. And while most executive teams are certainly populated with lead-

ers who are driven to succeed, all too often the results they focus on are individual or departmental. Once the inevitable moment of truth comes, when executives must choose between the success of the entire team and their own, many are unable to resist the instinct to look out for themselves.This is understandable, but it is deadly to a team.

Leaders committed to building a team must have zero tolerance for individually focused behavior.This is eas- ier said than done when one considers the size of the egos assembled on a given leadership team. Which is

�

Identify artificial

harmony; incite

productive conflict

in its place. �

Leader to Leader40

perhaps why a leader trying to assemble a truly cohe- sive team would do well to select team members with small ones.

If all of this sounds obvious, that’s because it is. The problem with teamwork is not that it is difficult to understand, but rather that it is extremely difficult to achieve when the people involved are strong-willed,

independently successful leaders.The point here is not that teamwork is not worth the trouble, but rather that its rewards are both rare and costly. And as for those leaders who don’t have the courage to force team members to step up to the requirements of teamwork (see Figure 1, above), they would be wiser to avoid the concept altogether. Of course, that would require a dif- ferent kind of courage; the courage not to be a team. �

FIGURE 1. THE ROLE OF THE LEADER IN BUILDING TEAMS

Inattention to RESULTS

Avoidance of ACCOUNTABILITY

Lack of COMMITMENT

Fear of CONFLICT

Absence of TRUST

The Role of the Leader

Focus on outcomes.

Confront difficult issues.

Force clarity and closure.

Demand debate.

Be human.

The Five Dysfunctions of Teams

What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit. Or perhaps a fast-growing start-up. All she knew for certain was that she wanted to find a job that was more social. ‘‘I wanted to be part of a community, part of something people were building together,’’ she told me. She thought about various opportunities — Internet companies, a Ph.D. program — but nothing seemed exactly right. So in 2009, she chose the path that allowed her to put off making a decision: She applied to business schools and was accepted by the Yale School of Management.

When Rozovsky arrived on campus, she was assigned to a study group carefully engineered by the school to foster tight bonds. Study groups have become a rite of passage at M.B.A. programs, a way for students to practice working in teams and a reflection of the increasing demand for employees who can adroitly navigate group dynamics. A worker today might start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers, then send emails to colleagues marketing a new brand, then jump on a conference call planning an entirely different product line, while also juggling team meetings with accounting and the party-planning committee. To prepare students for that complex world, business schools around the country have revised their curriculums to emphasize team-focused learning.

Every day, between classes or after dinner, Rozovsky and her four teammates gathered to discuss homework assignments, compare spreadsheets and strategize for exams. Everyone was smart and curious, and they had a lot in common: They had gone to similar colleges and had worked at analogous firms. These shared experiences, Rozovsky hoped, would make it easy for them to work well together. But it didn’t turn out that way. ‘‘There are lots of people who say some of their best business-school friends come from their study groups,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It wasn’t like that for me.’’

Instead, Rozovsky’s study group was a source of stress. ‘‘I always felt like I had to prove myself,’’ she said. The team’s dynamics could put her on edge. When the group met, teammates sometimes jockeyed for the leadership position or criticized one another’s ideas. There were conflicts over who was in charge and who got to represent the group in class. ‘‘People would try to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around

them.’’

So Rozovsky started looking for other groups she could join. A classmate mentioned that some students were putting together teams for ‘‘case competitions,’’ contests in which participants proposed solutions to real-world business problems that were evaluated by judges, who awarded trophies and cash. The competitions were voluntary, but the work wasn’t all that different from what Rozovsky did with her study group: conducting lots of research and financial analyses, writing reports and giving presentations. The members of her case-competition team had a variety of professional experiences: Army officer, researcher at a think tank, director of a health-education nonprofit organization and consultant to a refugee program. Despite their disparate backgrounds, however, everyone clicked. They emailed one another dumb jokes and usually spent the first 10 minutes of each meeting chatting. When it came time to brainstorm, ‘‘we had lots of crazy ideas,’’ Rozovsky said.

One of her favorite competitions asked teams to come up with a new business to replace a student-run snack store on Yale’s campus. Rozovsky proposed a nap room and selling earplugs and eyeshades to make money. Someone else suggested filling the space with old video games. There were ideas about clothing swaps. Most of the proposals were impractical, but ‘‘we all felt like we could say anything to each other,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘No one worried that the rest of the team was judging them.’’ Eventually, the team settled on a plan for a micro​gym with a handful of exercise classes and a few weight machines. They won the competition. (The micro​gym — with two stationary bicycles and three treadmills — still exists.)

Rozovsky’s study group dissolved in her second semester (it was up to the students whether they wanted to continue). Her case team, however, stuck together for the two years she was at Yale.

It always struck Rozovsky as odd that her experiences with the two groups were dissimilar. Each was composed of people who were bright and outgoing. When she talked one on one with members of her study group, the exchanges were friendly and warm. It was only when they gathered as a team that things became fraught. By contrast, her case-competition team was always fun and easygoing. In some ways, the team’s members got along better as a group than as individual friends.

‘‘I couldn’t figure out why things had turned out so different,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It didn’t seem like it had to happen that way.’’

Our data-saturated age enables us to examine our work habits and office quirks with a

scrutiny that our cubicle-bound forebears could only dream of. Today, on corporate campuses and within university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns in order to figure out how to make employees into faster, better and more productive versions of themselves. ‘‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University who studies how people share information. ‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick apart the small choices that all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out why some people are so much more effective than everyone else.’’

Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and improving individual workers ​— a practice known as ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex, the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s day is spent communicating with colleagues.

In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within companies and conglomerates, as well as in government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of organization. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.

Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).

The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like

https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload

‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were true.’’

In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others soared. Dubey, a leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers. Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study people’s habits and tendencies. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.

Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies looking at how teams worked. Were the best teams made up of people with similar interests? Or did it matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same kinds of rewards? Based on those studies, the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? They drew diagrams showing which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their departments’ goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.

No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

Some groups that were ranked among Google’s most effective teams, for instance, were composed of friends who socialized outside work. Others were made up of people who were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups sought strong managers. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Most confounding of all, two teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically different levels of effectiveness. ‘‘At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘There weren’t strong patterns here.’’

As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her

colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound. Team members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.

Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected, looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the ‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.

After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?

Imagine you have been invited to join one of two groups.

Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in

which they are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. The meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can get back to their desks.

Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives.

Which group would you rather join?

In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College began to try to answer a question very much like this one. ‘‘Over the past century, psychologists made considerable progress in defining and systematically measuring intelligence in individuals,’’ the researchers wrote in the journal Science in 2010. ‘‘We have used the statistical approach they developed for individual intelligence to systematically measure the intelligence of groups.’’ Put differently, the researchers wanted to know if there is a collective I."Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single member.

To accomplish this, the researchers recruited 699 people, divided them into small groups and gave each a series of assignments that required different kinds of cooperation. One assignment, for instance, asked participants to brainstorm possible uses for a brick. Some teams came up with dozens of clever uses; others kept describing the same ideas in different words. Another had the groups plan a shopping trip and gave each teammate a different list of groceries. The only way to maximize the group’s score was for each person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for something the team needed. Some groups easily divvied up the buying; others couldn’t fill their shopping carts because no one was willing to compromise.

What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2

intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.

But what was confusing was that not all the good teams appeared to behave in the same ways. ‘‘Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly,’’ said Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author. ‘‘Other groups had pretty average members, but they came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths. Some groups had one strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a leadership role.’’

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free- flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.

In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual

observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.

Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well.

Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘‘And that made a lot of sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘I’d been on some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy from the group.’’ Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard. Whereas the norms of her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.

For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.

‘‘We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’’ Rozovsky told me. But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘‘People here are really busy,’’ she said. ‘‘We needed

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clear guidelines.’’

However, establishing psychological safety is, by its very nature, somewhat messy and difficult to implement. You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen to one another more. You can instruct employees to be sensitive to how their colleagues feel and to notice when someone seems upset. But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.

Rozovsky and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical. Now they had to find a way to make communication and empathy — the building blocks of forging real connections — into an algorithm they could easily scale.

Illustration by James Graham

In late 2014, Rozovsky and her fellow Project Aristotle number-crunchers began sharing their findings with select groups of Google’s 51,000 employees. By then, they had been collecting surveys, conducting interviews and analyzing statistics for almost three years. They hadn’t yet figured out how to make psychological safety easy, but they hoped that publicizing their research within Google would prompt employees to come up with some ideas of their own.

After Rozovsky gave one presentation, a trim, athletic man named Matt Sakaguchi approached the Project Aristotle researchers. Sakaguchi had an unusual background for a Google employee. Twenty years earlier, he was a member of a SWAT team in Walnut Creek, Calif., but left to become an electronics salesman and eventually landed at Google as a midlevel manager, where he has overseen teams of engineers who respond when the company’s websites or servers go down.

‘‘I might be the luckiest individual on earth,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘I’m not really an engineer. I didn’t study computers in college. Everyone who works for me is much smarter than I am.’’ But he is talented at managing technical workers, and as a result, Sakaguchi has thrived at Google. He and his wife, a teacher, have a home in San Francisco and a weekend house in the Sonoma Valley wine country. ‘‘Most days, I feel like I’ve won the lottery,’’ he said.

Sakaguchi was particularly interested in Project Aristotle because the team he previously oversaw at Google hadn’t jelled particularly well. ‘‘There was one senior engineer who would just talk and talk, and everyone was scared to disagree with him,’’ Sakaguchi said. ‘‘The hardest part was that everyone liked this guy outside the group setting, but

whenever they got together as a team, something happened that made the culture go wrong.’’

Sakaguchi had recently become the manager of a new team, and he wanted to make sure things went better this time. So he asked researchers at Project Aristotle if they could help. They provided him with a survey to gauge the group’s norms.

When Sakaguchi asked his new team to participate, he was greeted with skepticism. ‘‘It seemed like a total waste of time,’’ said Sean Laurent, an engineer. ‘‘But Matt was our new boss, and he was really into this questionnaire, and so we said, Sure, we’ll do it, whatever.’’

The team completed the survey, and a few weeks later, Sakaguchi received the results. He was surprised by what they revealed. He thought of the team as a strong unit. But the results indicated there were weaknesses: When asked to rate whether the role of the team was clearly understood and whether their work had impact, members of the team gave middling to poor scores. These responses troubled Sakaguchi, because he hadn’t picked up on this discontent. He wanted everyone to feel fulfilled by their work. He asked the team to gather, off site, to discuss the survey’s results. He began by asking everyone to share something personal about themselves. He went first.

‘‘I think one of the things most people don’t know about me,’’ he told the group, ‘‘is that I have Stage 4 cancer.’’ In 2001, he said, a doctor discovered a tumor in his kidney. By the time the cancer was detected, it had spread to his spine. For nearly half a decade, it had grown slowly as he underwent

treatment while working at Google. Recently, however, doctors had found a new, worrisome spot on a scan of his liver. That was far more serious, he explained.

No one knew what to say. The team had been working with Sakaguchi for 10 months. They all liked him, just as they all liked one another. No one suspected that he was dealing with anything like this.

‘‘To have Matt stand there and tell us that he’s sick and he’s not going to get better and, you know, what that means,’’ Laurent said. ‘‘It was a really hard, really special moment.’’

After Sakaguchi spoke, another teammate stood and described some health issues of her own. Then another discussed a difficult breakup. Eventually, the team shifted its focus to the survey. They found it easier to speak honestly about the things that had been bothering them, their small frictions and everyday annoyances. They agreed to adopt some new norms: From now on, Sakaguchi would make an extra effort to let the team members know how their work fit into Google’s larger mission; they agreed to try harder to notice when someone on the team was feeling excluded or down.

There was nothing in the survey that instructed Sakaguchi to share his illness with the group. There was nothing in Project Aristotle’s research that said that getting people to open up about their struggles was critical to discussing a group’s norms. But to Sakaguchi, it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were related. The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.

‘‘I think, until the off-site, I had separated things in my head into work life and life life,’’ Laurent told me. ‘‘But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work, then I’m not really living, am I?’’

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

Which isn’t to say that a team needs an ailing manager to come together. Any group can become Team B. Sakaguchi’s experiences underscore a core lesson of Google’s research into teamwork: By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle

has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel. ‘‘Googlers love data,’’ Sakaguchi told me. But it’s not only Google that loves numbers, or Silicon Valley that shies away from emotional conversations. Most work​places do. ‘‘By putting things like empathy and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.’’

Sakaguchi knows that the spread of his cancer means he may not have much time left. His wife has asked him why he doesn’t quit Google. At some point, he probably will. But right now, helping his team succeed ‘‘is the most meaningful work I’ve ever done,’’ he told me. He encourages the group to think about the way work and life mesh. Part of that, he says, is recognizing how fulfilling work can be. Project Aristotle ‘‘proves how much a great team matters,’’ he said. ‘‘Why would I walk away from that? Why wouldn’t I spend time with people who care about me?’’

The technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture. And at the core of Silicon Valley are certain self-mythologies and dictums: Everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are cleareyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.

The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

The fact that these insights aren’t wholly original doesn’t mean Google’s contributions aren’t valuable. In fact, in some ways, the ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ movement has given us a method for talking about our insecurities, fears and aspirations in more constructive ways. It also has given us the tools to quickly teach lessons that once took managers decades to absorb. Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.

‘‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’

Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s

sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized. Rozovsky herself was reminded of this midway through her work with the Project Aristotle team. ‘‘We were in a meeting where I made a mistake,’’ Rozovsky told me. She sent out a note afterward explaining how she was going to remedy the problem. ‘‘I got an email back from a team member that said, ‘Ouch,’"’’ she recalled. ‘‘It was like a punch to the gut. I was already upset about making this mistake, and this note totally played on my insecurities.’’

If this had happened earlier in Rozovsky’s life — if it had occurred while she was at Yale, for instance, in her study group — she probably wouldn’t have known how to deal with those feelings. The email wasn’t a big enough affront to justify a response. But all the same, it really bothered her. It was something she felt she needed to address.

And thanks to Project Aristotle, she now had a vocabulary for explaining to herself what she was feeling and why it was important. She had graphs and charts telling her that she shouldn’t just let it go. And so she typed a quick response: ‘‘Nothing like a good ‘Ouch!’ to destroy psych safety in the morning.’’ Her teammate replied: ‘‘Just testing your resilience.’’

‘‘That could have been the wrong thing to say to someone else, but he knew it was exactly what I needed to hear,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘With one 30-second interaction, we defused the tension.’’ She wanted to be listened to. She wanted her teammate to be sensitive to what she was feeling. ‘‘And I had research telling me that it was O.K. to follow my gut,’’ she said. ‘‘So that’s what I did. The data helped me feel safe enough to do what I thought was right.’’

Artwork Andy Gilmore, Chromatic, 2010 Digital drawingSpotlight

60  Harvard Business Review April 2012

SpotliGht on tHe secRets of gReat teams

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is a professor at MIT, the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and the chairman of Sociometric Solutions.

The New Science of Building Great Teams

The chemistry of high-performing groups is no longer a mystery. by Alex “Sandy” Pentland

Hbr.org

April 2012 Harvard business review 61

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

It seems almost absurd that how we communicate could be so much more important to success than what we communicate.

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 perfor- mance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center e� ciency). And the list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble � guring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seem- ingly 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 MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing teams—those 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.

Looking for the “It Factor” When we set out to document the behavior of teams that “click,” we noticed we could sense a buzz in a team even if we didn’t understand what the mem-

bers were talking about. That suggested that the key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was communicating. Yet little of the research on team building had focused on communication. Suspect- ing 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 simi- lar 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 behavior—tone of voice, body language, whom they talked to and how much, and more. With remarkable consistency, the data con� rmed that communication indeed plays a criti- cal role in building successful teams. In fact, we’ve found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a team’s success. Not only that, but they are as signi� cant as all the other fac- tors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined.

Patterns of communication, for example, ex- plained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meet- ings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.

Drawing on that insight, we advised the cen- ter’s manager to revise the employees’ co� ee 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 � ew in the face of standard efficiency practices, the manager was ba� ed 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 bank’s 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

Why Do Patterns of Communication Matter So Much? Yet if we look at our evolutionary history, we can see that language is a relatively recent develop- ment and was most likely layered upon older sig- nals that communicated dominance, interest, and emotions among humans. Today these ancient pat- terns of communication still shape how we make decisions and coordinate work among ourselves.

Consider how early man may have approached problem solving. One can imagine humans sitting around a campfi re (as a team) making suggestions, relating observations, and indicating interest or approval with head nods, gestures, or vocal signals. If some people failed to contribute or to signal their level of interest or approval, then the group mem- bers had less information and weaker judgment, and so were more likely to go hungry.

I IF YOU WERE I IF YOU WERE call center would be a good place to start. The skills Icall center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and Irequired for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy Ihire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor-Ito monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor- mance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, Imance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, Icustomer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center e� ciency). And Ithe golden standard of call center e� ciency). And the list goes on.Ithe list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call IWhy, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble � guring out why some of Icenter have such trouble � guring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seem-Ihis teams got excellent results, while other, seem- ingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the Iingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the Imetrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his Iperformance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a Iassumption that team building was an art, not a science. Iscience.

The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human IThe truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive IDynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing Igroup dynamics that characterize high-performing teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, Iteams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. Iand shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and IThese dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams Imeasurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them.Ican be taught how to strengthen them.

62  Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more than 10%.

Any company, no matter how large, has the po- tential to achieve this same kind of transformation. Firms now can obtain the tools and data they need to accurately dissect and engineer high performance. Building great teams has become a science. Here’s how it works.

Overcoming the Limits of Observation When we sense esprit de corps, that perception doesn’t come out of the blue; it’s the result of our in- nate ability to process the hundreds of complex com- munication cues that we constantly send and receive.

But until recently we had never been able to ob- jectively record such cues as data that we could then mine to understand why teams click. Mere observa- tion simply couldn’t capture every nuance of human behavior across an entire team. What we had, then, was only a strong sense of the things—good leader- ship and followership, palpable shared commit- ment, a terri� c brainstorming session—that made a team greater than the sum of its parts.

Recent advances in wireless and sensor technology, though, have helped us over- come those limitations, allowing us to mea- sure that ineffable “It factor.” The badges developed at my lab at MIT are in their seventh version. They generate more than 100 data points a minute and work unobtrusively enough that we’re con� dent we’re capturing natural behavior. (We’ve documented a period of adjustment to the badges: Early on, people appear to be aware of them and act unnaturally, but the e� ect dissipates, usually within an hour.) We’ve deployed them in 21 organizations over the past seven years, measuring the commu- nication patterns of about 2,500 people, sometimes for six weeks at a time.

With the data we’ve collected, we’ve mapped the communication behaviors of large numbers of peo-

ple as they go about their lives, at an unprecedented level of detail. The badges produce “sociometrics,” or measures of how people interact—such as what tone of voice they use; whether they face one an- other; how much they gesture; how much they talk, listen, and interrupt; and even their levels of extro- version and empathy. By comparing data gathered from all the individuals on a team with performance data, we can identify the communication patterns that make for successful teamwork.

Those patterns vary little, regardless of the type of team and its goal—be it a call center team striv- ing for e� ciency, an innovation team at a pharma- ceutical company looking for new product ideas, or a senior management team hoping to improve its leadership. Productive teams have certain data sig- natures, and they’re so consistent that we can pre- dict a team’s success simply by looking at the data— without ever meeting its members.

We’ve been able to foretell, for example, which teams will win a business plan contest, solely on the basis of data collected from team members wearing badges at a cocktail reception. (See “Defend Your Research: We Can Measure the Power of Charisma,” HBR January–February 2010.) We’ve predicted the financial results that teams making investments would achieve, just on the basis of data collected dur- ing their negotiations. We can see in the data when team members will report that they’ve had a “pro- ductive” or “creative” day.

Idea in Brief What managers sense as an ineff able buzz or esprit de corps in a good team is actually observable, measur- able, and learnable.

In data collected by wearable electronic sensors that capture people’s tone of voice and body language, we can see the highly consistent patterns of

communication that are as- sociated with productive teams, regardless of what kind of work they do. The data do not take into account the substance of communication, only the patterns, but they show that those patterns are what matter most—more than skill, intel- ligence, and all other factors that go into building a team combined.

Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.

WHAT DATA THE SOCIOMETRIC BADGES COLLECT

HBR.OR

G

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 63

WHEN PEOPLE ARE TALKING AND THEIR TONE OF VOICE, BUT NOT WORDS

BODY POSITION RELATIVE TO OTHERS— WHETHER PEOPLE FACE EACH OTHER AND HOW THEY STAND IN A GROUP

BODY LANGUAGE, INCLUDING ARM AND HAND MOVEMENTS AND NODS, BUT NOT FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

A

Mapping Teamwork CONCERNED ABOUT UNEVEN PERFORMANCE across its branches, a bank in Prague outfi tted customer-facing teams with electronic sensors for six weeks. The fi rst two maps below display data col- lected from one team of nine people over the course of diff er- ent days, and the third illustrates data collected on interactions between management and all the

teams.

By looking at the data, we unearthed a divide between teams at the “Soviet era” branches of the bank and teams at more modern facilities. Interestingly, at the Soviet-era branches, where poor

team communication was the rule, communication outside teams was much higher, suggesting that those teams were desperately reaching out for answers to their problems. Teams at the modern facilities showed high energy and less need to explore outside. After seeing initial data, the bank’s management published these dashboard displays for all the teams to see and also reorganized the teams so that they contained a mix of members from old and new branches. According to the bank, those measures helped improve the working culture within all the teams.

Exploration HOW TEAMS COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER

Energy HOW TEAM MEMBERS CONTRIBUTE TO A TEAM AS A WHOLE

Engagement HOW TEAM MEMBERS COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER

C

A

B

D

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Clearly, these data come from a team at a branch with poor customer service. We can see that A, C, and E give off more informal energy than the rest of the team does. A, B, and C contribute a lot to the team, while the others contribute noth- ing. The pattern illustrated here is often associated with hierarchical teams in which a boss (C) issues commands while his lieutenants (A and B) reinforce his directions. The three are a “team within a team,” and it’s likely that the others feel they have no input. Often leaders are shocked and embarrassed to see how much they dominate a team and imme- diately try to change the pattern. Sharing such a map with the team can make it easier for less energetic individuals to talk about their sense of the team’s dys- function, because data are objective and elevate the discussion beyond attacks or complaints.

This diagram shows that the same team’s engagement skews heavily to the same three people (A, B, and C). G is making an eff ort to reach the decision makers, but the team within the team is where the engagement is. Those three people may be higher up the ladder or simply more extroverted, but that doesn’t matter. This pattern is associated with lower performance because the team is not getting ideas or information from many of its members. Leaders can use this map both to assess “invisible” team members (How can they get them more involved? Are they the right people for the project?) and to play the role of a

“charismatic connector” by bringing to- gether members who ought to be talking to one another and then helping those members share their thinking with the entire group.

This map shows that management is doing a lot of exploring. Although its internal team energy is relatively low, that is OK. Energy and engagement can- not be high when exploration is, because when you’re exploring you have less time to engage with your own team. In a high- functioning organization, however, there would be more exploration among all the teams, and you’d see an arc between, say, Teams 3 and 4, or Teams 5 and 9. A time lapse view of all the teams’ explora- tion would show whether teams were os- cillating between communication within their own group (shown by the yellow dots) and exploration with other teams (shown by the green arcs). If they’re not, it could mean silo busting is needed to encourage proper exploration.

IDEAL TEAM

ENERGY

AMOUNT OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS

AMOUNT OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN TEAMS

INTERNAL TEAM ENERGY

M AN

AG EM

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T

TE AM

2

TE AM

3

TE AM

4

TE AM

5

TE AM

6

TE AM

7

TE AM

8

TE AM

9

TE AM

1 0

TOTAL TEAM ENERGY (DOT’S POSITION REFLECTS WHO

CONTRIBUTES MOST)

TEAM MEMBER A AMOUNT OF INFORMAL ENERGY

AMOUNT OF ENERGY CONTRIBUTED TO TEAM

C B D EF G H I

COURTESY OF SOCIOMETRIC SOLUTIONS

64  Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

The data also reveal, at a higher level, that suc- cessful teams share several de� ning characteristics:

1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.

2. Members face one another, and their conversa- tions and gestures are energetic.

3. Members connect directly with one another— not just with the team leader.

4. Members carry on back-channel or side conver- sations within the team.

5. Members periodically break, go exploring out- side the team, and bring information back.

The data also establish another surprising fact: Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect. The best way to build a great team is not to select individu- als for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.

The Key Elements of Communication In our research we identi� ed three aspects of com- munication that a� ect team performance. The � rst is energy, which we measure by the number and the nature of exchanges among team mem- bers. A single exchange is de� ned as a com- ment and some acknowledgment—for example, a “yes” or a nod of the head. Normal conversations are often made up of many of these exchanges, and in a team setting more than one exchange may be go- ing on at a time.

The most valuable form of communication is face-to-face. The next most valuable is by phone or videoconference, but with a caveat: Those technolo- gies become less e� ective as more people participate in the call or conference. The least valuable forms of communication are e-mail and texting. (We col- lect data on those kinds of communication without using the badges. Still, the number of face-to-face exchanges alone provides a good rough measure of energy.) The number of exchanges engaged in, weighted for their value by type of communication, gives each team member an energy score, which is averaged with other members’ results to create a team score.

Energy levels within a team are not static. For in- stance, in my research group at MIT, we sometimes have meetings at which I update people on upcom-

ing events, rule changes, and other administrative details. These meetings are invariably low energy. But when someone announces a new discovery in the same group, excitement and energy skyrocket as all the members start talking to one another at once.

The second important dimension of communi- cation is engagement, which re� ects the distribution of energy among team members. In a simple three- person team, engagement is a function of the av- erage amount of energy between A and B, A and C, and B and C. If all members of a team have rela- tively equal and reasonably high energy with all other members, engagement is extremely strong. Teams that have clusters of members who engage in high-energy communication while other members do not participate don’t perform as well. When we observed teams making investment decisions, for instance, the partially engaged teams made worse (less profitable) decisions than the fully engaged teams. This e� ect was particularly common in far- � ung teams that talked mostly by telephone.

The third critical dimension, exploration, in- volves communication that members engage in out- side their team. Exploration essentially is the energy between a team and the other teams it interacts with.

Higher-performing teams seek more outside con- nections, we’ve found. We’ve also seen that scoring well on exploration is most important for creative teams, such as those responsible for innovation, which need fresh perspectives.

To measure exploration, we have to deploy badges more widely in an organization. We’ve done so in many settings, including the MIT Media Lab and a multinational company’s marketing depart- ment, which comprised several teams dedicated to di� erent functions.

Our data also show that exploration and engage- ment, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because they require that the energy of team members be put to two di� erent uses. Energy is a � nite resource. The more that people devote to their own team (engage-

The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of The most valuable form of communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to-communication is face-to- face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are face. E-mail and texting are the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.the least valuable.

HBR.ORG

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 65

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGEMENT SUPPORTSALES CUSTOMER

SERVICE

ment), the less they have to use outside their team (exploration), and vice versa.

But they must do both. Successful teams, espe- cially successful creative teams, oscillate between exploration for discovery and engagement for inte- gration of the ideas gathered from outside sources. At the MIT Media Lab, this pattern accounted for almost half of the di� erences in creative output of research groups. And in one industrial research lab we studied, it distinguished teams with high creativ- ity from those with low creativity with almost 90% accuracy.

Beyond Conventional Wisdom A skeptic would argue that the points about energy, engagement, and exploration are blindingly obvious. But the data from our research improve on conven- tional wisdom. They add an unprecedented level of precision to our observations, quantify the key dy- namics, and make them measurable to an extraordi- nary degree.

For example, we now know that 35% of the varia- tion in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. We know as well that the

“right” number of exchanges in a team is as many as dozens per working hour, but that going beyond that ideal number decreases performance. We can also state with certainty that in a typical high- performance team, members are listening or speak- ing to the whole group only about half the time, and when addressing the whole group, each team mem- ber speaks for only his or her fair share of time, using brief, to-the-point statements. The other half of the time members are engaging in one-on-one conver- sations, which are usually quite short. It may seem illogical that all those side exchanges contribute to better performance, rather than distract a team, but the data prove otherwise.

The data we’ve collected on the importance of socializing not only build on conventional wisdom but sometimes upend it. Social time turns out to be deeply critical to team performance, often account- ing for more than 50% of positive changes in com- munication patterns, even in a setting as e� ciency- focused as a call center.

Without the data there’s simply no way to under- stand which dynamics drive successful teams. The managers of one young software company, for in- stance, thought they could promote better commu-

Mapping Communication over Time

THE MAPS BELOW DEPICT the communica- tion patterns in a German bank’s marketing department in the days leading up to and immediately following a major new product launch. The department had teams of four members each in customer service,

sales, support, development, and manage- ment. Besides collecting data on in-person interactions with sociometric badges, we gathered e-mail data to assess the balance between high-value face-to-face communi- cation and lower-value digital messages.

Most communication is via e-mail, not face-to-face. In an ideal situ- ation, the green arcs would be thicker than the gray ones, and there would be strong connec- tions among all teams.

Management is communicating face-to-face a little bit with every team except customer service, and most groups aren’t talking much to one another.

Customer service is the least con- nected to other

teams.

Only sales and support interact with each other a lot in person—most likely because they are prepping for the launch.

DAY 2 MANAGEMENT IS CLEARLY DOING MOST OF THE COMMUNICATING.

DAY 6 MANAGEMENT BY E-MAIL CONTINUES.

THICKNESS OF ARCS INDICATES THE AMOUNT OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN GROUPS

GRAY INDICATES COMMUNICATION VIA E-MAIL

GREEN INDICATES FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT

HOW TO READ THESE MAPS

66  Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

MANAGEMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER SERVICE

nication among employees by hosting “beer meets” and other events. But the badge data showed that these events had little or no e� ect. In contrast, the data revealed that making the tables in the compa- ny’s lunchroom longer, so that strangers sat together, had a huge impact.

A similarly refined view of exploration has emerged in the data. Using fresh perspectives to improve performance is hardly a surprising idea; it’s practically management canon. But our re- search shows that most companies don’t do it the right way. Many organizations we’ve studied seek outside counsel repeatedly from the same sources and only at certain times (when building a business case, say, or doing a postmortem on a project). The best-performing and most creative teams in our study, however, sought fresh perspectives con- stantly, from all other groups in (and some outside) the organization.

How to Apply the Data For management tasks that have long de� ed objec- tive analysis, like team building, data can now pro- vide a foundation on which to build better individual and team performance. This happens in three steps.

Step 1: Visualization. In raw form the data don’t mean much to the teams being measured. An energy score of 0.5 may be good for an individual, for exam- ple, but descriptions of team dynamics that rely on statistical output are not particularly user-friendly. However, using the formulas we developed to cal- culate energy, engagement, and exploration, we can create maps of how a team is doing on those dimen- sions, visualizations that clearly convey the data and are instantly accessible to anyone. The maps starkly highlight weaknesses that teams may not have rec- ognized. They identify low-energy, unengaged team members who, even in the visualization, look as if they’re being ignored. (For examples, see the exhibit

“Mapping Teamwork.”) When we spot such people, we dig down into

their individual badge data. Are they trying to con- tribute and being ignored or cut off? Do they cut others o� and not listen, thereby discouraging col- leagues from seeking their opinions? Do they com- municate only with one other team member? Do they face other people in meetings or tend to hide from the group physically? Do they speak loudly enough? Perhaps the leader of a team is too domi- nant; it may be that she is doing most of the talking

Mapping Communication over Time

Sales is now clearly engaging with development,

probably to learn the fi nal details of the product

off ering and understand its technical aspects.

The big jump in com- munication here might be a result of sales’ hammering develop- ment about why the product isn’t working and how it can be fi xed.

For the fi rst time, e-mail communication is lower than face-to-face com- munication. In a crisis people naturally start talking more in person.

We did not provide iterative feedback in this project, but if we had, by the end of week one, we would have pointed out three negative trends the group could have corrected: the invisibility of customer service, overreliance on e-mail, and highly

uneven communication among groups. If these issues had been addressed, the problems with the product might have surfaced much earlier, and the responses to them would probably have improved.

Customer service is still not involved.

DAY 15 AS THE LAUNCH APPROACHES, COMMUNICATION IS STARTLINGLY LOW.

DAY 23 TWO DAYS AFTER LAUNCH, TEAMS ARE FINALLY COMMUNICATING IN PERSON, AS THEY TRIAGE A DISASTROUS CAMPAIGN.

Customer service and support are locked in all- day meetings trying to patch the problems.

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER SERVICE DEVELOPMENT

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April 2012 Harvard Business Review 67

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

at meetings and needs to work on encouraging oth- ers to participate. Energy and engagement maps will make such problems clear. And once we know what they are, we can begin to � x them.

Exploration maps reveal patterns of communi- cation across organizations. They can expose, for instance, whether a department’s management is failing to engage with all its teams. Time-lapse views of engagement and exploration will show whether teams are e� ectively oscillating between those two activities. It’s also possible to layer more detail into the visualizations. We can create maps that break out di� erent types of communication among team members, to discover, for example, if teams are fall- ing into counterproductive patterns such as shooting o� e-mail when they need more face time. (For an example, see the exhibit “Mapping Communication over Time.”)

Step 2: Training. With maps of the data in hand, we can help teams improve performance through it- erative visual feedback.

Work we did with a multicultural design team composed of both Japanese and American members o� ers a good example. (Visual data are especially ef- fective at helping far-� ung and multilingual groups, which face special communication challenges.) The team’s maps (see the exhibit “Mapping Communica- tion Improvement”) showed that its communication was far too uneven. They highlighted that the Japa- nese members were initially reluctant to speak up, leaving the team both low energy and unengaged.

Every day for a week, we provided team mem- bers a visualization of that day’s work, with some light interpretation of what we saw. (Keep in mind that we didn’t know the substance of their work, just how they were interacting.) We also told them that the ideal visualization would show members con- tributing equally and more overall contributions. By day seven, the maps showed, the team’s energy and engagement had improved vastly, especially for the two Japanese members, one of whom had become a driving force.

The notion that visual feedback helps people improve quickly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has ever had a golf swing analyzed on video or watched himself deliver a speech. Now we have the visual tools to likewise improve teamwork through objective analysis.

Step 3: Fine-tuning performance. We have seen that by using visualizations as a training tool, teams can quickly improve their patterns of com-

munication. But does that translate to improved performance? Yes. The third and � nal step in using the badge data is to map energy and engagement against performance metrics. In the case of the Japanese-American team, for example, we mapped the improved communication patterns against the team’s self-reported daily productivity. The closer the patterns came to those of our high-performance ideal, the higher productivity rose.

We’ve duplicated this result several times over, running similar feedback loops with teams aiming to be more creative and with executive teams look- ing for more cohesiveness. In every case the self- reporting on e� ectiveness mapped to the improved patterns of communication.

Through such maps, we often make important discoveries. One of the best examples comes from the bank’s call center. For each team there, we mapped energy and engagement against average handling time (AHT), which we indicated with color. (See the exhibit “Mapping Communication Against Performance.”) That map clearly showed that the most e� cient work was done by high-energy, high- engagement teams. But surprisingly, it also showed that low-energy, low-engagement teams could out- perform teams that were unbalanced—teams that had high energy and low engagement, or low energy and high engagement. The maps revealed that the manager needed to keep energy and engagement in balance as he worked to strengthen them.

If a hard metric like AHT isn’t available, we can map patterns against subjective measures. We have asked teams to rate their days on a scale of “creativ- ity” or “frustration,” for example, and then seen which patterns are associated with highly creative or frustrating days. Teams often describe this feedback as “a revelation.”

Successful tactics. The obvious question at this point is, Once I recognize I need to improve energy and engagement, how do I go about doing it? What are the best techniques for moving those measurements?

Simple approaches such as reorganizing office space and seating are effective. So is setting a per- sonal example—when a manager himself actively encourages even participation and conducts more face-to-face communication. Policy changes can im- prove teams, too. Eschewing Robert’s Rules of Order, for example, is a great way to promote change. In some cases, switching out team members and bring- ing in new blood may be the best way to improve the

Our data show that far- fl ung and mixed-language teams often struggle to gel. Distance plays a role: Electronic communication doesn’t create the same energy and engagement that face-to-face communication does. Cultural norms play a role too. Visual feedback on communication patterns can help.

For one week we gathered data on a team composed of Japanese and Americans that were brainstorming a new design together in Japan. Each day the team was shown maps of its communication patterns and given simple guidance about what makes good communication (active but equal participation).

MAPPING COMMUNICATION IMPROVEMENT

DAY 1 The two Japanese team members (bottom and lower left) are not engaged, and a team within a team seems to have formed around the member at the top right.

DAY 7 The team has im- proved remarkably. Not only are the Japanese members contributing more to energy and engagement (with the one at the bottom becom- ing a high-energy, highly engaged team member) but some of the Day 1 “domina- tors” (on the lower right, for example) have distributed their energy better.

68  Harvard Business Review April 2012

HBR.ORG SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

energy and engagement of the team, though we’ve found that this is often unnecessary. Most people, given feedback, can learn to interrupt less, say, or to face other people, or to listen more actively. Lead- ers should use the data to force change within their teams.

The ideal team player. We can also measure individuals against an ideal. In both productivity- focused and creativity-focused teams, we have dis- covered the data signature of what we consider the best type of team member. Some might call these individuals “natural leaders.” We call them “char- ismatic connectors.” Badge data show that these people circulate actively, engaging people in short, high-energy conversations. They are democratic with their time—communicating with everyone

equally and making sure all team members get a chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extro- verts, although they feel comfortable approaching other people. They listen as much as or more than they talk and are usually very engaged with whom- ever they’re listening to. We call it “energized but focused listening.”

The best team players also connect their team- mates with one another and spread ideas around. And they are appropriately exploratory, seeking ideas from outside the group but not at the expense of group engagement. In a study of executives attend- ing an intensive one-week executive education class at MIT, we found that the more of these charismatic connectors a team had, the more successful it was.

TEAM BUILDING is indeed a science, but it’s young and evolving. Now that we’ve established patterns of communication as the single most important thing to measure when gauging the effectiveness of a group, we can begin to re� ne the data and processes to create more-sophisticated measurements, dig deeper into the analysis, and develop new tools that sharpen our view of team member types and team types.

The sensors that enable this science are evolv- ing as well. As they enter their seventh generation, they’re becoming as small and unobtrusive as tra- ditional ID badges, while the amount and types of data they can collect are increasing. We’ve begun to experiment with apps that present teams and their leaders with real-time feedback on group communi- cations. And the applications for the sensors are ex- panding beyond the team to include an ever-broader set of situations.

We imagine a company’s entire staff wearing badges over an extended period of time, creating

“big data” in which we’d � nd the patterns for every- thing from team building to leadership to negotia- tions to performance reviews. We imagine changing the nature of the space we work in, and maybe even the tools we use to communicate, on the basis of the data. We believe we can vastly improve long- distance work and cross-cultural teams, which are so crucial in a global economy, by learning their pat- terns and adjusting them. We are beginning to create what I call the “God’s-eye view” of the organization. But spiritual as that may sound, this view is rooted in evidence and data. It is an amazing view, and it will change how organizations work.

HBR Reprint R1204C

VISUALIZATIONS CAN BE USED to compare energy and engagement with estab- lished performance metrics. The map below plots the energy and engagement levels of several teams at a bank call center against the center’s metric of effi ciency, average handling time (AHT).

The expected team effi ciency is based on a statistical analysis of actual team AHT scores over six weeks. Blue indicates high effi ciency; red low ef- fi ciency. High-energy, high-engagement teams are the most effi cient, the map shows. But it also indicates that low-energy, low-engagement teams outper- form teams that are out of balance, with high energy and low engagement, or low energy and high engagement. This means the call center manager can pull more than one lever to improve performance. Points and are equally effi cient, for example, but refl ect diff erent combinations of energy and engagement.

The manager wanted to raise energy and engagement in lockstep. We sug- gested instituting a common coff ee break for each team at the call center. This increased the number of interactions, especially informal ones, and raised the teams’ energy levels. And because all team members took a break at once, interactions were evenly distributed, increasing engagement. When we mapped energy and engagement against AHT afterward, the results were clear: Effi ciency in the center increased by 8%, on average, and by as much as 20% for the worst-performing teams.

Mapping Communication Against Performance

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ONCE A COMMON COFFEE BREAK WAS INSTITUTED, EFFICIENCY AMONG THE TEAMS INCREASED BY

8%

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and are are

70  Harvard Business Review April 2012

HBR.ORG

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