Advanced Search

There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few we can solve by ourselves.

Facilitators are improvisers. They are instruments of the other people in the room. HoweverÂ…often facilitation is too conversation-driven, and occurs without shared space, without the capture and feedback mechanisms to amplify the effectiveness of the facilitation. But, facilitation is not enough for collaboration; you need to have shared spaces. You need to have media where the ideas can be captured and represented and those representations can be modified and played with.

Individuals become members of the executive team through a multiyear process of selection. While it is dangerous to generalize, those selected for executive teams in the companies we have observed tend to be high achievers and aggressive seekers of power. They also have histories of distinguishing themselves through individual achievement, rather than for their work with or through teams. Thus, in many United States-based companies, the executive team ends up composed of people who have been brought up and rewarded for their successes in the "rugged individualism" model of management, and they may be less prepared to either lead or participate in effective teams than would be the case for colleagues at lower levels.

Coming together is a beginning, Keeping together is progress & Working together is success.

Vastly superior team member intelligence, perhaps surprisingly, does not actually make a significant difference in how successful a team can be.

Since bioteaming is based on a distributed intelligence model, what really counts is the ability for the team to use its intellectual capabilities in a collective, collaborative and cooperative fashion. So while bioteams CAN easily accommodate highly intelligent team members, they do not generally require them

What is strategically important for operating as efficiently as a bioteam is the ability of team members to be able to self-select when to utilize personal "intelligence" and critical thinking and when to rely on team intelligence before acting.

Teams rarely manage to improve their performance wholly outside their active working environment, so short-term workshops, no matter how attractive the setting or how heart-felt and candid the members' exchanges may be, aren't likely to change their mode of working. Structured self-discovery and reflection must be combined with decision making and action in the real world; the constant interplay among these elements over time is what creates lasting change.

In many of the management teams I've studied, an unwillingness to disagree has proved a problem. This seems to be the general pattern. It's more difficult to draw people out than to control. Within a team there is a sort of natural policing that goes on which means excessive combativeness usually isn't tolerated. On the other hand there are no sanctions against someone who sits silently and doesn't disagree - and that sort of behaviour can go on for a long time.

Teams are a way of making groups more comfortable for men by adapting the language of sports. Groups were about collaboration and learning, but teams can be focused just on winning. This appeals to organizations focused on the bottom line, but the ability of people to make breakthroughs is compromised.

I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary, a collective creation of previously unimagined quality or beauty. But don’t count on it. Research consistently shows that teams underperform, despite all the extra resources they have. That’s because problems with coordination and motivation typically chip away at the benefits of collaboration. And even when you have a strong and cohesive team, it’s often in competition with other teams, and that dynamic can also get in the way of real progress. So you have two strikes against you right from the start, which is one reason why having a team is often worse than having no team at all.

People generally think that teams that work together harmoniously are better and more productive than teams that don’t. But in a study we conducted on symphonies, we actually found that grumpy orchestras played together slightly better than orchestras in which all the musicians were really quite happy.

That’s because the cause-and-effect is the reverse of what most people believe: When we’re productive and we’ve done something good together (and are recognized for it), we feel satisfied, not the other way around.

Another fallacy is that bigger teams are better than small ones because they have more resources to draw upon. A colleague and I once did some research showing that as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble. My rule of thumb is no double digits. That’s why having a huge senior leadership team—say, one that includes all the CEO’s direct reports—may be worse than having no team at all.

Perhaps the most common misperception about teams, though, is that at some point team members become so comfortable and familiar with one another that they start accepting one another’s foibles, and as a result performance falls off. Except for one special type of team, I have not been able to find a shred of evidence to support that premise. The problem almost always is not that a team gets stale but, rather, that it doesn’t have the chance to settle in.

…the things that happen the first time a group meets strongly affect how the group operates throughout its entire life. Indeed, the first few minutes of the start of any social system are the most important because they establish not only where the group is going but also what the relationship will be between the team leader and the group, and what basic norms of conduct will be expected and enforced.

Many people act as if being a team player is the ultimate measure of one’s worth, which it clearly is not. There are many things individuals can do better on their own, and they should not be penalized for it. The challenge for a leader, then, is to find a balance between individual autonomy and collective action. Either extreme is bad, though we are generally more aware of the downside of individualism in organizations, and we forget that teams can be just as destructive by being so strong and controlling that individual voices and contributions and learning are lost.

Michael Doyle, [who] invented the practice of “meeting facilitation” in the 1970s...saw that human beings did their best work in groups of seven to fifteen. Most corporate boards fit in that sweet spot. Unfortunately, he believed that most group problems arise from misapplying power, content, and process. Executive groups, he found, focus overwhelmingly on content (such as PowerPoint presentations and board books) and rarely on process (how the meetings happen). With a few exceptions, a CEO/chairman running the show is a perfect storm of bad group design: He controls the content, usually ignores the process, and has all the power. It’s remarkable that anything gets done well.

A simple rule of thumb is that a team of specialists or generalists doesn't really work, especially with messy, creative problems. You really need a mixture of specialists who see one part of the problem with a whole lot of depth and a generalist who can help integrate the views of the individual specialists.

Teams with too many overlaps in their social networks are less creative -- the team members all know the same stuff. Teams that aren't networked at all, however, aren't good at sharing what they do know. The most successful teams are those in which everyone knows one or two others but not everyone -- and not no one.

For that reason, organizations should subvert the "proximity principle," or people's tendency to create networks from those around them. The problem with the proximity principle is it tends to create homogeneous networks that lack diversity. To undo the proximity principle . . . locate people from different specialties in the same area rather than keeping all specialists located near each other. But be careful. Brand new people with their own well-established networks may not integrate easily into the existing team.

A real team, in my view, is something very specific. It differs from the more common “single-leader unit” in three important ways. First, all members of a real team have an equal level of emotional commitment to the team’s purpose and goals. Second, the leadership role shifts easily among the members based on the skills and experience they have and the challenges of the moment, rather than on any hierarchical positions. Third, the team members hold one another accountable for the quality of their collective work. Members of real teams subordinate their formal affiliations, personal prejudices, and loyalties to the team’s purpose and goals.

In the early 1900s, a thoughtful organizational thinker named Mary Parker Follett called out the critical difference between compromise and integration. A team that compromises has settled for the lowest common denominator: a solution, no matter how incomplete, to which all can easily agree, just to move things forward. Compromised solutions made in this way are more likely to break down.

A team that integrates, by contrast, is looking for the best possible solution — one that takes into account the best of all the perspectives of the people involved.

A committee is a group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.