Hot Take #7 Teams aren’t always a good idea.

Apr 10, 2024

The modern workplace faces several challenges and criticisms, depending on the industry, company culture, and individual perspectives. Most common issues include collaborative open spaces, hybrid working, the efficiency of the meetings and I can go on like this forever.

But none of these challenges seem to compare to the challenge of turning teams into high-performing teams. Oh, teams! Or how Eric Barker calls them: “ Those glorious microcosms of corporate society, where people from different backgrounds, skill sets, and hygiene standards come together to accomplish the impossible: not murdering each other.”

So how do we improve teams at work?

In the modern workplace, assembling a team is the go-to solution for, well, everything. Teaming is now seen as the workplace equivalent of motherhood and apple pie — good all the time! So the question we should ask ourselves more often is: Do we really need a team for this?

Because guess what? Sometimes teams are a very bad idea.

While larger teams can usually complete tasks more quickly, these advantages associated with adding workers are often accompanied by various downsides. Research validates what all of us suspected: individuals become less productive once they’re part of a group. Teams inherently have, on average, a 40 % process loss (also known as a “collaborative inhibition”). That comes from all the wasted energy in emails, organizing, and logistics.

Is there an ideal time size?

The answer is, of course, NO. But if you have to form a team, the recommendation is that it should be as small as possible to get the job done. Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford University and author of “The Friction Project”, says that once you get past 5 people, quality starts declining.

“Once you get to six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven people, the percentage of time that people spend on coordination issues and maintaining good interpersonal relationships expands dramatically. That becomes the dominant problem in the group, instead of doing the work itself.
There is some evidence that if you think somebody is a lousy leader and they are in charge of a big team, try cutting it in half and see if your lousy leader becomes a competent leader.”

But how can you build, lead or be part of a team that is more efficient?

Believe it or not, 90% of a team’s performance is determined before they ever start working…

The Formula For A Great Team: The 60/30/10 Rule

60 % of a team’s success is “Who’s on the team?”, 30 % of it is how you set up your team. And 10 %, at most, is leadership. Hackman believes that 60% of a team’s success is decided by the skills of the people recruited into the team. 30 % of a team’s performance is determined by how the teammates interact with each other. So only 10 % is determined by what the leader does after the team is already underway with its work.

1 ) Who’s on the team

If the biggest factor influencing the team’s performance is who’s in it, let’s look at some unusual tips on how to build your team.

Look out for team social skills. A study from MIT found that the three factors are: the average social sensitivity of the members of the group, the extent to which the group’s conversations weren’t dominated by a few members, and the percentage of women in the group.
Not everyone on a team should be a classic “team player.” In a study of 78 European and American orchestras, Harvard’s Hackman found that the better an orchestra sounded, the more likely there was rivalry, quarrelling, and discord behind the scenes. The only times they were in harmony were onstage. So, yes, you need the non-team players to avoid your team becoming a ticking time bomb of unchallenged ideas.

2 ) How you set up your team

Clarifying who is going to do what seems to be of the most proven ways to increase the quality of teamwork. Dr. Eduardo Salas has devoted his life to understanding team-building and team-training processes, and he found out that the strategies that consistently deliver results are those focused on role clarification: who’s going to do what when the pressure gets intense?
Another secret to a team’s success lies in how the members feel about one another. How well do they need to get along? Remember the 5 to 1 ratio. It turned out that the high-performance teams averaged 5.6 positive interactions for every negative one.
A team is only as strong as its weakest link, so maybe you want to have a look at it. Research shows team trust is not determined by the average of the members; it’s at the level of the least trusted member. Findings demonstrate that perceptions of team trust are indeed lower than the average ratings of individual trust and are statistically equivalent to the least trusted member.

3 ) The Leadership of the team

If you want to be a good leader, remember these three things: develop your people skills, grow your network, and have a future vision that sets a course for the team.

Especially the “setting a course” part. “An essential leadership skill is creating a constructive environment that provides safety, vulnerability, and purpose.

Safety: Alex Pentland at MIT says the critical thing is “belonging cues.” Pentland found they were the number one predictor of team performance, more predictive than intelligence, skill or leadership.
Vulnerability: Making ourselves vulnerable builds connection and trust. Research by Jeff Polzer at Harvard shows there’s a vital other side to that as well, how team members respond to vulnerability.
Purpose: Purpose-driven leadership means helping employees find personal meaning in their work and fostering a deeply committed workforce that thrives on shared goals and aspirations. Do that and it can be the difference between team spirit and feeling like a loose group forced together by bureaucracy.

If you want to learn more about what it takes to build, inspire, and motivate a team, well……continue to read this newsletter post ;)

💫 Inspo Corner

If you are a recurrent reader of this newsletter, this section may look new to you ! That’s because it is! It will not be included in all the editions, only from time to time - and its scope will be to explore together how inspiration from art, sports, and various other fields can turn into hot takes that would support us to improve our employees’ experiences. From learning teamwork from sports to drawing creativity from art, we hope this section will provide us with some food for thought.

What can we learn about teams from a self-directed symphonic orchestra?

Les Dissonances, founded by David Grimal, is to the moment the only classical music orchestra that plays works of the symphonic repertoire self-conducted (without a choirmaster), having absolute freedom of interpretation.

When asked about the principles that structure an orchestra that is self-conducted, David answered:

The basic principle lays in the accountability of musicians. At the rehearsals, I give them the musical direction, but that's it. They must listen to each other, be present and be aware that they will embody the musical piece, not a choirmaster. Which changes their point of view, in the sense that they become responsible for everything they do.
Another principle lays in how musicians interact with each other. The musicians no longer interact with the choirmaster, but with each other, so they are all interested in building the relationships and make their team work.

Similar to a self-directed orchestra, how can you create accountability between the members of your team, without having a leader intervening?

If you are curious about the other way around, read here what conducting an orchestra can teach you about team work.
What Formula 1 can teach us about successful teams? Read all about it here & here.
My personal takeaway was the “It doesn’t matter where you start, it’s where you finish” mindset. F1 races are known for exciting and unexpected turns of events whether it involves two cars colliding off the track, weather conditions, or an underdog begining from the back of the grid and ending up on pole position. These examples served as a reminder of the importance of a collective progress towards the ultimate goal, even when the chances don’t look too good for the team.

🧰 Tools & tips to play with

Use this worksheet to explore the level of Psychological Safety present in your team. Psychological Safety allows teams to innovate, be creative, and increase team effectiveness.
New ways of working only happen through practice and experimentation in your teams. There is no shortcut, no manual, no roadmap or a one-size-fits-all approach to copy and paste. However, these practices/tools/learnings are widely used in progressive org's and tend to be very helpful.
Want a team that communicates better? Want to put customers (internal or external) more at the center of what your team does? Are you unfamiliar with User Stories and why do high-performing teams leverage them?

📚️ Recommendations worth exploring

➡️ To read on your commute to work

High-performing teams aren’t just a collection of strong individual performers, although that certainly helps. They don’t leave great performance to luck or personality, they design for success. Here are 6 actionable attributes of high performing teams.
What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter.
While the benefits of psychological safety are well established, a new survey suggests how leaders, by developing specific skills, can create a safer and higher-performance work environment.
How can you assess whether a prospective employer offers psychological safety? In this article, the author outlines concrete strategies to help you screen for red flags
Too many employers pay too little heed to the needs of the lower earners in their company. Here’s why—and how—they should shift gears.

➡️ For the bookworms: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

➡️ Binge-eating while binge-watching

Business school professor Amy Edmondson studies "teaming," where people come together quickly (and often temporarily) to solve new, urgent or unusual problems. Recalling stories of teamwork on the fly, such as the incredible rescue of 33 miners trapped half a mile underground in Chile in 2010, Edmondson shares the elements needed to turn a group of strangers into a quick-thinking team that can nimbly respond to challenges.

➡️ For podcast lovers

Excerpt from the interview:

"In a self-managed team, even the most junior employee is empowered to make a meaningful decision that affects the team’s performance. They’re not dependent on management to make all the decisions. No winning team requires the coach to explain how to kick the ball; the coaching happens before and after the game.

Leadership’s job is to make the vision and the goals clear. In my one-on-one meetings, I always ask these questions from my reports: