The preceding section of this book explored six conditions that foster work team effectiveness. When those conditions are in place, chances improve that a team will successfully accomplish its mission and, in the process, facilitate learning by individual members and the team as a whole. The implications for team leaders would seem clear: Get your team properly designed and supported, and then do whatever you can to help members take full advantage of their favorable performance circumstances.
So take a moment and reflect on a team you lead or on which you serve. How does that team stand on each of the six conditions? They are summarized below, and shown in checklist form in Figure 10-1.1
1. The team is a real team: a bounded set of people who work together over some period of time to accomplish a common task, not an amorphous set of individuals who are a team in name only (Chapter 4).
2. The team’s purpose is challenging and consequential, with desired end states clearly specified but the means used to pursue those ends left mainly to the team (Chapter 5).
3. The team has the right number and mix of members—people who have the capabilities the work requires and who also are skilled in working collaboratively with others (Chapter 6).
4. The team has clear norms of conduct that promote both full utilization of members’ capabilities and active planning of the team’s performance strategy (Chapter 7).
5. The team’s organizational context provides the material, technical, and informational supports that the team needs to accomplish its work, as well as recognition and reinforcement of good team performance (Chapter 8).
FIGURE 10-1 Group Design Checklist
6. The team receives competent, well-timed coaching to help members work through problems and exploit emerging opportunities (Chapter 9).
If most of these conditions are in place for your team, it has a better-than-average chance of success. There is no guarantee, of course, since unexpected developments can derail even a team that is superbly designed and coached. But research has documented that teams for which the six conditions are present do outperform those for which they are not. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 3, the presence of the conditions has been found in some studies to control 50 percent or more of the variation in team effectiveness.
The imperative that leaders should create and sustain the six enabling conditions is far easier to assert than to accomplish, however. To understand what gets in leaders’ way—and what can be done to increase their leverage—we begin by examining how intelligence team leaders allocate their time in working with their teams.
In our study of teams in the U.S. intelligence community, Michael O’Connor and I asked members of 64 analytic teams across six intelligence agencies to rank the focus of their team leaders’ time and attention. As is seen in Figure 10-2, the leaders of those teams gave most of their attention to getting the work itself structured properly. Then came running external interference—making sure that the teams had the resources needed to carry out the work and removing roadblocks that could compromise team performance. Third came coaching individual team members. And then, last, came coaching the team as a team.
It may be that the team leaders we studied were too occupied with their many other responsibilities to give much attention to the handson coaching of their teams. Or perhaps their teams were already structured and supported reasonably well and therefore needed relatively little coaching by their leaders. Or perhaps the leaders assumed, as leaders often do, that their teams would work out the details of their performance processes and therefore did not need coaching assistance.
FIGURE 10-2 How Analytic Team Leaders Spend Their Time From Hackman & O’Connor (2004)
Whatever the reason, leaders’ inattention to team-focused coaching is not unique to the intelligence community: The time allocations of the chief executives who lead their organizations’ senior leadership teams are nearly identical to those of analytic team leaders.2
There is, however, one noteworthy exception to this general pattern. As is shown in Figure 10-3, the chiefs of both poorly performing and middling leadership teams exhibited the standard pattern, giving significantly more attention to external activities than to hands-on work with their teams. The leaders of outstanding teams did not do the opposite. Instead, they balanced their time and attention evenly between external and internal matters, neither ignoring hands-on coaching nor relying mainly upon it. They apparently recognized that both external and internal initiatives are needed to help a team succeed—working the context to provide supports, remove roadblocks, and open opportunities, but also making sure the team itself is set up right and coached well.3
When in a team’s life do leaders’ interventions have the greatest impact on team behavior and performance? Our research findings suggest that by the time members actually get down to work, the conditions that most powerfully shape team behavior and performance have already been established. It is what a leader does before team members even meet for the first time that often makes the greatest difference in how things go. What happens during the launch of a team is next most important. And what a leader does with the team while members are already at work, as important as that can be, comes in third.
FIGURE 10-3 Leaders of Outstanding Teams Have a Dual Focus: External and Internal Adapted from Wageman, Nunes, Burruss, & Hackman (2008, Chap. 7)
Let me make rough estimates of the size of these effects. I propose that 60 percent of the difference in how well a team eventually performs is determined by the quality of the prework the team leader does. Thirty percent is determined by how the initial launch of the team goes. And only 10 percent is determined by what the leader does after the team is already underway with its work.
This 60-30-10 rule does not mean that team processes are unimportant. To the contrary, we have seen throughout this book that the quality of team work processes—specifically, how a team handles the management of effort, work strategy, and member knowledge and skill—are enormously consequential for its effectiveness. And the preceding chapter identified the types and timing of coaching interventions that are most helpful to teams in managing those processes. Such interventions make a difference mainly at the margin, however. It is a strained analogy, but once a rocket has lifted off the pad, it is on a mostly predetermined trajectory. All that those who launched it can do is make small corrections along the way or, if things turn really sour, blow the whole thing up. It is the same with a team. Once it is underway, the leader can facilitate team processes but cannot change its basic course without actually taking over the team, which, of course, would in effect destroy it.
The job of the team leader, then, is to do as much as can be done as early as it can be done to help the team get onto a good track—and then to facilitate the team’s work by providing well-timed, well-focused coaching. The next section describes the prework a leader can do to prepare for the launch of a new team. Then we turn to the launch itself and then, finally, to the impact of hands-on coaching once a team is underway.
The initial conditions that are in place when a system is created have more influence on its development than any other single factor. That is true for non-living systems (for example, the conditions present at the Big Bang when the universe began) and for the development of living organisms, as well as for the evolution of social systems such as work teams. That is why prework, getting favorable conditions in place, is the first term in the 60-30-10 rule for team development.
A leader’s initial choices about team purpose, composition, and design powerfully shape a team’s work processes and, eventually, its standing on all three criteria of effectiveness—how well the team achieves its purposes, whether it becomes increasingly competent as a performing unit, and how much individual team members learn in the process. It is ironic (and worrisome), therefore, that so many team leaders approach the initial meeting of a team having done absolutely nothing to increase the chances that it will get onto a positive trajectory.
The time before a team is formed gives leaders the opportunity for careful thought about just what needs to be accomplished. Such reflection often will sharpen what may have been a vague or ambiguous purpose—and also may raise questions about whether a team actually is the most efficient or appropriate way to accomplish that purpose. If the decision is to proceed with a team, several questions then present themselves. What type of team is needed? What roadblocks is the team likely to encounter, and what might be done in advance to remove or circumvent them? How can the team best be composed, structured, and organizationally supported? How can competent coaching be provided to the team once the work is underway? These, of course, are the matters that have been discussed throughout this book. Leaders who reflect on them before their team convenes often find ways to help the team get off to a faster and better start than otherwise would be the case.
There remains an additional question, one that is potentially of great consequence but that leaders rarely address: Are the people who will be on the team ready to work together? Are there teamwork difficulties that can be predicted in advance? Are some members likely to resent being on the team at all? Are there pairs or subgroups that have, shall we say, pre-existing conditions—histories that will make it hard for them to collaborate? If so, at least a few phone calls or visits prior to the first team meeting may be in order to address such issues and, one hopes, to increase members’ readiness to fully engage with their teammates.
A more substantial or radical intervention may be called for if the team task is extraordinarily important, or if the team will operate indefinitely into the future. One chief executive officer took his senior leadership team, which consisted of individuals who came from two competing organizations that recently had merged, on a week-long trek in the rain forests of Costa Rica. Another gave his team the more modest task of cooking a meal together. Still other team leaders engage consultants to take their teams through ropes courses, trust exercises (your teammates actually will catch you as you lean further and further back), or any of a vast array of other team development activities.
Although participants in such activities find them engaging, empirical evidence attesting to their impact on subsequent team performance is hard to find. Rather than adopt some pre-packaged team development program, therefore, the most creative team leaders figure out what is needed to prepare their own team members to work together, and then invent their own way of accomplishing that in their particular circumstances. To illustrate, consider how Kathy Delaney-Smith, whose day job is to coach the Harvard women’s basketball team, dealt with a seemingly impossible team development challenge. Kathy was invited to coach Team USA at the 2005 World University Games in Turkey. Although her team would consist of the best college players in the nation, she would have just four days of practice to get them ready. Worse, her twelve players, selected from over a hundred who tried out, would be in intense competition for starting positions—and many of them came from colleges that themselves were highly competitive in women’s basketball. How could she possibly meld those twelve talented individuals into a real team?
Kathy began to develop the team a month before the players arrived for their first practice. Using e-mail, she partitioned the team into dyads and triads, each of which consisted of players she thought might have uneasy relationships. The subgroups were given specific tasks that required members to work together cooperatively by telephone and e-mail before showing up for practice—for example, to identify the best museums in Turkey, or to summarize the recent history of the country, or to develop a pedagogy for teaching the Turkish alphabet to the rest of the team.
The players arrived at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs buzzing with energy. Each subgroup gave its presentation— in most cases highly humorous—to an audience consisting of their teammates, the coaches, and the entire Team USA staff. Subgroup members, Kathy reports, clearly had bonded with one another and the team got launched as a team much more quickly than otherwise would have been the case. And it worked: The team went 8-0 in Turkey and won the Gold Medal.
It is unlikely in the extreme that anyone would think it a good idea to give geography quizzes to subgroups of intelligence professionals who are about to come together on short notice to mount an operation in a denied area. But what can be done ahead of time to get members ready to work together? Even something that requires members to spend time in advance on activities that have no direct relevance to the team’s mission can save time in the longer term, reduce nonproductive conflict among members, and thereby improve the eventual quality of the team’s performance.
The second most potent influence on a team’s behavior and performance, the 30 in the 60-30-10 rule, is what happens when the team is launched, when a leader brings the team to life. Once launched, a team begins moving forward on the track that will guide its dynamics until around the midpoint of the work. At the midpoint, as noted in the previous chapter, the team is likely to experience a disruptive and reorienting transition that generates a new framework that will guide the second half of its work.
Because the launch is the first actual encounter between the leader and the team, it is consequential for the leader-team relationship as well as for the team’s own development. By the end of a successful launch, a team will have evolved from being just a list of names into a real, bounded team. Members will have begun to focus on the special knowledge and skills of their teammates rather than solely on what they themselves bring to the group, thereby increasing the chances that the team will draw upon the full complement of members’ resources (Chapter 7). The official task that the team was assigned will have been examined, assessed, and then redefined to become the slightly different task that the team actually carries out. And, finally, members will have begun developing and testing the norms of conduct that will guide team behavior.
Conducting a good team launch requires preparation. Developing objectives for the launch meeting and deciding how to lead that meeting cannot be done on the fly. Moreover, a good launch requires a reasonably well-designed team. If it is unclear who actually is on the team, or if team purposes are vague or unimportant, or if the team does not include people who have the skills needed to carry out the work, then even a leadership maestro cannot succeed in getting a team off to a good start.
A team launch is not a one-shot event—some cycling back to issues that the leader may have thought were already settled inevitably occurs later. In the course of a launch, for example, members typically test the leader’s statement of purpose. They may ask clarifying questions that have a confrontational undertone. And they almost always make at least small modifications of their assigned task. That is one reason why it is so important for a leader to be clear in his or her own mind about just what is needed from the team and to give thought beforehand to determining which aspects of the team purpose are negotiable and which are not.
Although a good launch sets a team off on a good track, there are no guarantees in group life. Even teams that have been designed right and launched well sometimes find themselves in an accelerating downward spiral of dysfunction. What does a leader do then? If the difficulties occur in the first half of the group’s life cycle, simply waiting for a while is an attractive option. Perhaps the midpoint transition, when and if it comes, will stop the slide and get the team back on track. But what if the midpoint transition does not occur, or if it actually makes things even worse? It happens. Then what?
That is roughly the situation faced by the senior leadership team of a global mining company.4 Despite the chief executive’s best efforts, his team kept cycling its analyses of the same set of issues without ever taking a position or making a decision. Eventually the CEO realized that he inadvertently had included on the team too many people from too many different levels and organizational functions. All the coaching in the world was not going to help that team reach consensus about anything. Even though he had full authority to recompose the team, the CEO decided to wait for the right moment to act—in this case, a new fiscal year that would provide a naturally occurring point of inflection.
Shortly before the start of the new year, the CEO announced that he had concluded that the senior team was not working and was unlikely to improve. Therefore, he said, he had decided to disband the team and start over with a new configuration of members, a new name, and a new meeting schedule. He then cut the team down to a handful of top executives who all had previously demonstrated the ability to work together collaboratively. By giving the new team a new name and preserving the original team for less frequent information-sharing meetings, he made the change more palatable to those who would not be members of the reconfigured team.
What that chief executive did was re-launch his team. Although relaunch is a fairly draconian action, it can be liberating to team leaders (and to members) once they understand that they do not have to live indefinitely with the frustrations and dysfunctions of a team that is neither working well nor responding to coaching interventions. Recall from the previous chapter that re-launch was one of the options Rhonda considered when her analytic team got bogged down. What might have happened if she had decided to disband and restart the team rather than accept its flawed dynamics and soldier on?
A re-launch does not release a leader from the obligation to get the team designed right in the first place, of course. But it does offer recourse to those leaders who find themselves coping with teams that are persistently ineffective. Sometimes a fresh start is just what is needed to break out of old patterns of behavior and see what can be done to get it right the second time around.
The third term in the 60-30-10 rule is hands-on team coaching. As was seen in the previous chapter, coaching can be extremely helpful to a team, especially when it is provided at those times in the team life cycle when members are ready to receive it. But it cannot compensate for a poor basic design or for a badly flawed team launch. That is why it comes last in the 60-30-10 rule.
This was vividly demonstrated in Ruth Wageman’s research on customer service teams. For each team she studied, Wageman obtained independent assessments of the team’s design, the coaching behaviors of its leader, the team’s level of self management, and its objective performance. She predicted that a team’s design features would make a larger difference in both team self-management and performance than would the leader’s coaching behaviors, and she was right. Design was four times as powerful as coaching in affecting a team’s level of self-management, and almost 40 times as powerful in affecting team performance.
Perhaps the most fascinating finding of the study was the comparison of “good” coaching (such as helping a team develop a task-appropriate performance strategy) with “bad” coaching (such as identifying a team’s problems and telling members exactly what they should do to fix them). Figure 10-4 shows the effects of both kinds of coaching on team self-management for both well- and poorly designed teams.5
Good coaching (the left-hand panel of the figure) significantly helped well-designed teams manage themselves well but made almost no difference for poorly designed teams. Teams with flawed designs may have been so distracted by built-in roadblocks that they were unable to take advantage of even highly competent coaching. Bad coaching (the right-hand panel of the figure), on the other hand, significantly compromised poorly designed teams’ ability to manage themselves, worsening an already difficult situation. But bad coaching did not much affect the self-management of well-designed teams. It was as if their favorable designs insulated them from the effects of poor coaching.
FIGURE 10-4 The Impact of Coaching Depends on the Quality of a Team’s Design Adapted from Wageman (2001)
We seem to have here yet another instance in which the rich get richer (well-designed teams are helped most by good coaching), and the poor get poorer (teams with flawed designs are hurt most by bad coaching). Great coaching can be enormously valuable to a team in exploiting the potential of a fundamentally sound performance situation, but cannot reverse the impact of poor direction, a flawed team structure, or an unsupportive organizational context. The key to effective team leadership, then, is first to ensure that the team’s performance situation is sound, then to conduct a launch that puts the team onto a good track, and only then to provide competent hands-on coaching to help members take the greatest possible advantage of their favorable circumstances.
The approach to team leadership laid out in this book is straightforward. There are no complex contingencies to remember—for example, that you are supposed to do this under these circumstances, but do that under those circumstances. Nor are there long lists of behavioral prescriptions to be memorized. All leaders need to remember, in fact, are two short lists.
1. The six conditions that increase the chances a team will perform well, addressed in the six middle chapters of this book: real team, compelling purpose, right people, clear norms of conduct, supportive context, and competent coaching.
2. The three processes that differentiate teams that are operating well from those that are not: a team’s level of effort; the appropriateness of its performance strategies; and the degree to which it is using the full complement of members’ knowledge, skills, and experience.
The job of the team leader is simply to get the six conditions in place, launch the team, and then track the three key processes to monitor how the team is doing at avoiding process losses and exploiting potential process gains. When there are signs that one or more of the enabling conditions is eroding, or that team processes are slipping, or that the team is missing opportunities for synergy, then the leader should do whatever needs to be done to get the team back on track.
That’s pretty much it. This way of thinking is known as the functional approach to leadership. From a functional perspective, effective team leaders are those who do, or who arrange to get done, whatever is critical for the team to accomplish its purposes.6 There is no one right way to go about that, no best leadership style, no particular need for either charisma or a command presence. Instead, team leaders can use their own preferred ways of operating to get done that which needs to be done. And if one approach does not work, they can invent and try out others. There are many different ways to get the enabling conditions in place, to get the team launched well, and to provide helpful team-focused coaching. Leading a team is not that hard.
But it’s also not that simple. Team leaders rarely have sufficient authority to establish all the enabling conditions—to specify team purposes, choose members, allocate resources, provide organizational supports, and so on. That means that a leader often will need to negotiate both upward in the organization and laterally across functional or departmental boundaries to provide a team what it needs to perform well. And that can require persistence, persuasion, and often the use of some fairly sophisticated political skills.
Too many team leaders operate too much by the seat of their pants, doing whatever seems to make sense at the time. That strategy is likely to prompt actions that focus more on correcting a team or its individual members than on creating conditions that make it possible for the team to correct itself. As has been seen throughout this book, research has identified the most important enabling conditions as well as the team processes that should be most closely monitored. Leaders who know those research findings will be less likely to take actions that may seem reasonable but that turn out to be unhelpful.
Yet it is not sufficient merely to know about the conditions for effectiveness and the key performance processes—a leader also needs to be skilled in creating those conditions and managing those processes. To identify those aspects of a team’s interaction, structure, or context for which one has the best chance of making a constructive difference requires skill in diagnosis. A leader with diagnostic skill is adept at extracting from the complexity of the performance situation those themes that are significant as opposed to those that are merely transient noise or that are of little real consequence. Only with a good diagnostic assessment in hand can a leader craft interventions that have a reasonable chance of narrowing the gap between what is happening in the team and what ought to be happening.
Effective team leaders also have a diverse portfolio of execution skills on which to draw in narrowing the gap between the real and the ideal. These include skill in persuasion and negotiation, as previously mentioned. Also valuable are skills in implementing change in a way that gains member commitment and minimizes the chance of backlash, and in helping teams develop the capacity to competently manage themselves.
Some team leaders in the intelligence community, for reasons that even they may not understand, seem invariably to do just the right thing at just the right time. Most of us, however, find it helpful to have a research-based checklist that we can consult to guide our diagnoses and interventions. With experience and practice, first-rate team leadership can become natural for us as well. But to achieve that level of excellence, to become a leader for whom intuition really is a trustworthy guide to practice, requires for most of us a career-long process of experiencing, experimenting, and learning.7
Even though it almost always is wise to make one person responsible for ensuring that team members’ contributions are well-coordinated and nothing of importance is overlooked, team leadership is not a solo activity. Team leader is singular, whereas team leadership can be, and usually should be, plural. The best team leaders actively encourage leadership contributions from the members of the teams being led. And it turns out that shared leadership is an extraordinarily valuable resource for accomplishing the full array of leadership functions needed for team effectiveness.
Shared leadership is assuredly not the same thing as “co-leadership,” in which two individuals equally share one leadership role. Except in a few special cases, a dominance competition develops between the coleaders, with one of them soon winding up on top and the other, usually, gone. The exception is those organizations in which co-leadership is a long-standing institutional feature and the specific responsibilities of the co-leaders are clearly delineated, as is the case in some military organizations that are co-led by an officer and a civilian. The iconic example of co-leadership that worked is the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, whereby J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves provided, respectively, scientific vision and political protection for the project.8
The power of shared leadership is seen in our study of analytic teams, described earlier. Real work teams scored significantly higher than coacting groups on almost all of the enabling conditions discussed in this book, and they also performed significantly better.9 But one particular factor unexpectedly turned out to be more powerfully associated with team effectiveness than anything else we assessed: peer coaching, the degree to which team members taught, helped, and learned from one another. And peer coaching, in turn, was seen far more often in real teams whose members were interdependent for collective outcomes than in coacting groups whose members worked mostly on their own. The apparent causal flow is shown in Figure 10-5. Members of well-designed interdependent teams experience stronger impulses to teach and assist one another than do members of coacting groups. And, at least in the intelligence agencies we studied, peer coaching contributes directly to a team’s eventual performance effectiveness.
FIGURE 10-5 Design, Coaching, and Performance
It is hard to overstate the benefits of peer coaching. For one thing, it provides a team with much more leadership than any single team leader, no matter how talented, can supply on his or her own. Analytic team members did report that the coaching provided by their leaders also was helpful, and we found it to be positively associated with team effectiveness. But, as noted earlier, most team leaders spent most of their time doing other things. Members may have realized that they did need some coaching—but that they themselves were going to have to provide it since their team leaders were otherwise occupied.
Moreover, peer coaching contributes not just to the accomplishment of the team’s mission but also to the other two dimensions of overall effectiveness—team and individual learning—that have been discussed throughout this book. Perhaps the most significant benefit of peer coaching, however, is that it can foster continuity in difficult times. Teams that are able to competently manage themselves are able to keep their work moving forward during the tenure of a less-than-competent formal leader, for example, or when new team leaders are flowing through at what can seem like a dizzying rate. And, finally, self-managing teams develop momentum—a quality that makes it possible for a team to remain on a positive trajectory even in the midst of political or organizational chaos that otherwise would disrupt competent work in this sometimes-fraught community.
