On September 7, 2015 the Boston Red Sox were playing the Philadelphia Phillies on a beautiful sunny afternoon at historic Fenway Park. In the top of the fourth inning, with the Sox leading 6 to 1, rookie Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez threw a fastball on the outer half of the plate to Phillies first baseman Darin Ruf. Ruf swung and hit the baseball, hard. The ball launched off Ruf’s bat at over 100 mph, headed toward the deepest part of Fenway Park in right center field, a tricky area known as the Triangle, where the bullpen wall juts out precipitously into the field. Five-tenths of a second after the ball left Ruf’s bat, Red Sox center fielder Mookie Betts broke into a run, accelerating to a top speed of over 18 miles per hour in 4.3 seconds, and reached up over the edge of the wall, snatching the ball out of the air at the last moment to save a homerun. Red Sox announcers Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy described Betts’s basket-style catch as a great individual play, showing “great courage” and “great skill.”
Although this appeared to be just a great individual play, a closer look (toward the end of this chapter) reveals how the play was actually the culmination of a series of team-related elements. This is often the case in work settings as well. We should care about teamwork because most business successes involve contributions from various people working together effectively—even when it might first appear that it was simply due to individual excellence.
Perhaps you like to work in a team. According to a survey of 23,000 employees conducted by CEB, a global research and advisory firm, most people say they want to work collaboratively, although obstacles often get in the way. But whether you like or dread being on teams, you’ll almost certainly be on many teams in your career—perhaps serving as a team leader. There’s a good chance you’ll be on more than one team at a time; maybe you’ll be on a departmental team while also leading a project team. And looking forward, the odds are that you’ll be expected to collaborate and work in teams even more frequently.
Organizations are becoming flatter and more matrixed with fewer layers of management. This type of organizational design heightens the need for teamwork. Over two-thirds of the respondents in the CEB survey reported that collaboration requirements are increasing in their organization. And in a widely cited Harvard Business Review article, Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant reported that time spent in collaborative activities has grown by 50%! Looking forward, in a Deloitte study of over 7000 companies from over 130 countries, business leaders said they expect to use team-based structures even more frequently as an organizational design strategy. Simply stated, there will be fewer opportunities to work alone.
Companies form and disband work teams, cross-functional teams, project teams, and even virtual teams with great regularity. Many of these teams struggle.
• Over 90% of employees believe teams are critical to the success of their organization but less than 25% of them consider their own teams to be very effective, according to Liane Davie, author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done.
• Over 60% of software project teams deliver behind schedule, and almost half come in over budget, as reported by journalist Po Bronson.
• Team-related problems contribute to almost 50% of the failures in business start-ups—either due to the composition of the leadership team or how they work together, as revealed in a series of postmortems collected by CB Insights, a business intelligence firm.
• Teamwork breakdowns are one of the three leading causes of safety problems in hospitals according to an Institute of Medicine study.
• Less than 25% of executives feel confident in their ability to build cross-functional teams, as reported by Deloitte.
Working as a team can have great benefits, but it isn’t easy.
Each team experience, good or bad, can make a person more or less eager to be on teams in the future. Having a bad teamwork experience makes you less inclined to take on another team assignment. It starts in school. Remember when the teacher gave you a team assignment? You were told that your team would receive one grade. Freddie, the kid who was loafing and didn’t come to any of your team meetings would get the same grade you do. And your teacher probably didn’t give your team any advice or training on how to work as a team, although perhaps he told you to “play nice.” If your team got a C, you were angry that others who didn’t pull their weight hurt your grade. And even if your team received an A+, you might have been resentful that the loafer also received that grade. Bad team experiences can sour you about teams in general. When you subsequently graduate and get a job, your new boss says, “Welcome, here’s your desk” and then gives you a team assignment. How enthusiastic are you? You may not be joining that team with the best attitude.
According to a Graduate Management Admission Council survey, less than 15% of US students prefer to learn in team settings (about 20% of Chinese students prefer it, which, while higher, is still a surprisingly low number for a more collectively oriented society). We suspect that team learning may be unpopular because without the right preparation and awareness most student teams don’t work well together, so the team experiences aren’t positive. Interestingly, when Scott and his colleagues Erik Eddy and John Mathieu helped student teams in the business school at Siena College improve their teamwork, not only did their performance improve, but they were also more interested in being on a team in the future—and they felt more ready to do so. Positive team experiences beget positive attitudes.
Unlike at school, where the worst case is a bad grade, in the workplace a struggling team can cause problems for the business. But in both contexts, it has an adverse effect on individuals. Why is being on a bad team so disconcerting? Psychologists, like Erica Boothby and her colleagues, have shown that sharing an experience with others amplifies the intensity of the experience. Good things seem better and bad things feel worse. The chocolate that you eat in a room with other people tastes better than when you eat it alone. Similarly, failing or succeeding as a team is amplified in comparison with doing so alone. We respond more intensely to team experiences—good and bad.
There are many opinions about what makes teams work. Some are well-grounded; most are pure conjecture. If you’ve been on a few teams, you almost certainly have developed your own implicit “theory” of teamwork or at least a set of beliefs about teaming. The following are a few beliefs that we’ve heard recently as we talked with people about their teams. We gave each of these a name:
• “It’s really important that we spend time together outside of work and learn to get along” (the like each other theory).
• “The key is to talk it out—you can’t hold anything back or the team won’t improve” (the openness theory).
• “It’s all about the chemistry. You know really quickly if the team will click” (the magic theory).
• “If you leave me alone, I’ll get it done” (the minimize interference theory).
• “The leader needs to be tough, set the direction, and hold everyone accountable” (the strong leader theory).
Do any of these resonate with you? Are any of them valid? As we’ve alluded to earlier, there’s a strong, growing body of research about teams that can inform us and can help us crack the code—so we can move beyond hunches to advice grounded in science. Psychologists, neuroscientists, behavioral economists, sociologists, and human factors experts are producing new research findings about teams all the time. The cumulative findings from that research can guide our actions and help us avoid things that sound clever but don’t really drive team effectiveness. The good news is there’s an emerging science of teamwork. It’s not perfect, and it’s still developing, but we do know a lot. For example, we know that the commonly held beliefs above aren’t the answer.
The best teams aren’t great on day 1. They learn from their experiences and make smart adjustments—they self-correct over time. Research has consistently shown that team adaptation boosts team performance. Knowing what really drives team performance can enable you and your teams to make smart adjustments. That knowledge can help you be a better team leader and even a better team member.
What Is a Meta-Analysis?
As we describe the research, at times we’ll refer to “meta-analysis.” In fact, we allude to over 35 different meta-analyses in this book. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, here’s a brief description.
Science is conducted one study at a time. A researcher develops a hypothesis, designs a study and gathers data to test the hypothesis, analyzes the data, and then writes up and publishes the findings. After enough researchers have studied a topic, someone will review all the research and attempt to summarize what it means.
Meta-analysis is a statistical technique for quantitatively combining the results from prior studies. You can think of it as the weighted average of findings across studies. It also reveals if the findings are consistent and, if not, why not. Because a meta-analysis is based on multiple studies, it doesn’t rely too heavily on any single study. Moreover, while meta-analysis doesn’t eliminate subjectivity, it can reduce it. It isn’t perfect—for example, a meta-analysis is only as good as the body of research it summarizes—but we are usually more confident when we can make recommendations that are based on a solid meta-analysis. Meta-analyses have been conducted in many fields including medicine and psychology; quite a few have examined aspects of team effectiveness. That shows the depth and maturity of the available research on teams.
Before we explore the evidence, let’s debunk five false assumptions about teams and teamwork.
“We don’t have time for teamwork. We have a business to run.” That is a quote from a leader with whom we worked. His perspective at the time was that teamwork was mainly happy talk and not really related to the work at hand. It made no sense to him to spend any time on teamwork. He thought teamwork was about having a team party and going to dinner together. His team was struggling. Why have a party? It was only when he recognized that teamwork is not distinct from getting work done—it is how work gets done—that he became willing to focus on boosting teamwork.
There is plenty of evidence that teamwork boosts performance. For example:
• Teams that demonstrate better teamwork processes are 20% to 25% more likely to succeed, as revealed in a meta-analysis by Jeff LePine and his colleagues that combined results from 130 previous studies.
• Team training improves on-the-job performance by an average of 7%. When teams learn how to work as a team they perform better, as shown in a meta-analysis involving 2,650 teams conducted by Eduardo and his colleagues and in a more recent meta-analysis that examined team training in healthcare.
• Organizations that boosted their collaborative performance had 5% greater annual revenue increases than those emphasizing individual achievement alone, according to a Corporate Executive Board report.
E. O. Wilson, the famous biologist and myrmecologist (he studies ants), suggested that while selfish individuals might defeat altruistic individuals, groups of collaborators are likely to be victorious over groups of selfish people. In his book, The Social Conquest of Earth, he intimated that collaboration may be the result of group evolution (analogous to individual evolution). Tribes that collaborated won. The same is seen in the insect world, his primary focus as a researcher; insects that collaborate prevail.
We’re not prepared to say that human collaboration is a function of group evolution or that we’re intrinsically drawn to collaborate, although it is certainly a thought-provoking concept. But based on the research, we are comfortable saying that when there is a need to work together it makes sense to focus some attention on teamwork—it isn’t a distraction; it’s a strategic advantage.
Fact: Teamwork boosts performance.
It is certainly more pleasant to work with people you like than with people you dislike. But liking your teammates isn’t a prerequisite to team effectiveness. It’s how you work together that matters. For example, the venerable team researcher Richard Hackman found that “grumpy” orchestras often performed better. If team members have a clear understanding of and an agreement about how they will perform together, they can succeed, even if they may not appear to be the best of friends.
One team-building trap associated with this myth is assuming that simply spending time together away from work will necessarily make a team better. Google uses teams extensively. Not surprisingly, some of their teams perform better than others, and they felt it was important to find out why. Googlers consider themselves experts in discerning patterns in data, so they conducted a two-year, data-driven study of their teams they called Project Aristotle. One of their hypotheses going into the study was that on the best teams, team members spent more time hanging out together. They found no support for that hypothesis.
In most cases, it won’t hurt, but if the problems your team faces are related to issues such as role ambiguity, competing priorities, or insufficient talent, please don’t expect a nice dinner together or a weekend retreat socializing to cure it. So, go to dinner with your team, have fun experiences together if you’d like. But please do so with reasonable expectations—it won’t resolve significant team performance problems.
Moreover, a little discord isn’t always bad. Avoiding conflict isn’t the answer. We’ll see later how conflict can help a team when it is about the right issues and is handled in the right way. Seeking to perpetually maintain harmony can result in team members being too nice with one another and may prevent the team from acknowledging concerns and making necessary adjustments.
Fact: It doesn’t hurt to be friendly with your teammates, but it’s not a prerequisite for team effectiveness.
It is easy to accept the false dichotomy that I can either look out for myself or be a team player, but I can’t do both. That’s nonsense. Either–or thinking like that is very “Western”—what is needed is more dialectical thinking about this. You can strive for individual excellence, continuing to boost your own capabilities, while simultaneously caring about your team and enabling your teammates to be successful.
It is also easy to assume that being perceived as a star should boost one’s career. But times are changing; in many organizations there is less tolerance of egotistical stars. Most organizations expect people to show they are both personally competent and that they can be team players. NASA is no longer looking for the “right stuff” or individual superheroes. They want astronauts who are individually excellent and also great team players who can work well with others and elevate the people around them.
The flip side is true as well. Most companies acknowledge that teamwork is a critical, desirable competency. But being a team player isn’t enough, you need to be individually competent as well.
Michael Jordan is arguably the best basketball player in history, certainly one of the top five all-time greats. At the beginning of his career he posted gaudy individual scoring statistics, but his teams lost. It was only later when he began to elevate his teammates, that the Bulls started winning championships.
There doesn’t appear to be a correlation between individual competence and teamwork orientation. Rob Cross and his colleagues reported that about 50% of top collaborators are also deemed to be top performers. So being a great collaborator doesn’t guarantee you’ll be viewed as a top performer, but it doesn’t preclude it either (as long as you don’t neglect your individual task assignments). A meta-analysis of over 160 previous studies conducted by Nathan Podsakoff revealed that employees who demonstrate more helpful, supportive behaviors in the workplace (what they referred to as “organizational citizenship behaviors”) typically receive higher performance evaluations and are more likely to be recommended for rewards by their boss. You can be both a strong individual contributor and a strong team player—and both can be career enhancing.
Fact: You can be a team player and individually excellent—and should strive for both.
In 1976, the movie The Bad News Bears featured a youth baseball team made up of mostly untalented misfits, who somehow pull together to win despite their dearth of talent. It was funny and uplifting, but it doesn’t ring true (not that it was intended to depict reality!). In the real world, sports and business teams with such a large talent deficit almost never win. Competence and capability matter. Teamwork can’t overcome a significant lack of talent. For example, if team members are simply incapable of performing their work assignments adequately, better teamwork won’t solve the problem. Teamwork can give your team a bump—at times, a big bump—but the team needs at least “sufficient” talent and expertise.
As we’ll see later, the relationship between talent, teamwork, and performance is actually a bit complex (spoiler alert: simply adding stars won’t always boost team performance). And you shouldn’t assume that individual excellence is enough unless you are working on tasks that require no coordination. Teamwork does matter, but so does talent.
Fact: Competence matters. It is difficult if not impossible to overcome a dearth of talent through teamwork. Sometimes you need new team members.
By now you can tell that we believe in the power of teamwork. But let’s be really clear—teams are not a panacea. Not all work should be performed in teams. We’ve seen tasks that should have been handled by individuals assigned to committees and task forces with dire consequences. A team is not always the answer. When used inappropriately, teams can lead to suppression of innovation, social loafing, delays, and inefficiency.
We’re not advocating the formation of more teams. Don’t default to forming a team without ample thought about whether a team is the right solution. When a team is asked to do something that would be better handled by an individual, the experience is likely to be bad, the results are likely to be suboptimal, and people will incorrectly assume that teams don’t work. Teams work when they are deployed for the right reasons.
So be smart about whether a team is needed. And when a team is formed, use the key drivers to help ensure the team works as it should.
Fact: Some work is better performed individually or by loose couplings of individuals, not by formal teams.
Throughout the book we share research findings with you from the science of teamwork and examples of some of those principles in action. While the research reveals some universal truths about teams, unfortunately, teamwork is too complex to describe in a handful of “simple truths.” Certain recommendations are applicable for some but not all types of teams. So, prior to exploring the drivers of teamwork, we first consider the meaningful ways in which teams differ from one another.
Let’s wrap up this chapter by revisiting our opening story about Mookie Betts and the Red Sox. Remember, he made what appeared to be a spectacular, individual athletic play in centerfield. How is this an illustration of team effectiveness and the seven drivers of teamwork?
• Capability. There is no doubt Mookie Betts had the skills and ability to make this play. Mookie is a gifted athlete with the speed and hand–eye coordination to perform his job. In 2018, he was named the league’s most valuable player. As an aside, he has also bowled seven perfect games and can solve a Rubik’s cube in under two minutes. No shortage of capabilities!
• Cooperation. On the Red Sox team at that time, there were three young, talented outfielders, Mookie Betts, Rusney Castillo, and Jackie Bradley Jr. They all believed they were capable of being the centerfielder (and we’d speculate probably all wanted to play that position). But their attitude in practice had been to support one another and help each other become better players, even if it meant they weren’t chosen to play centerfield. No brooding or griping! They demonstrated solid “teamwork orientation.”
• Coordination. If you only watched Mookie Betts, it would appear that he was the only active player when the ball left Ruf’s bat. But a wide-angle view would show that Rusney Castillo was also running at high speed from left field, positioning himself in the proper place to provide backup if Betts was unable to make the catch and the ball ricocheted off the wall. This allowed Betts to go full speed without worrying about what would happen if the ball evaded him. Incidentally, Castillo had only played left field five times in his professional career prior to this game but he demonstrated perfect, role-specific back-up behavior!
• Communication. Rusney wasn’t the only teammate who enabled Mookie Betts to make a great “individual” play. The right fielder, Jackie Bradley Jr., also helped tremendously. How? When the ball was hit, he ran toward center field and as Mookie’s eyes were focused upwards tracking the baseball, Jackie shouted out how far Mookie was from the wall. Knowing he was 20 feet or 5 feet from the wall allowed Mookie to run at high speed “safely.” Betts had suffered an injury on a similar play earlier in the year, so without those communications about distance, he would likely have become nervous and slowed down to avoid hitting the wall.
• Cognition. A good outfield possesses a shared “if–then” mental model about what to do in certain situations. This trio of outfielders knew that “if” the ball is hit in the right centerfield gap, “then” each person has a specific role to play. Bradley’s view was that originally he and Mookie “both were attacking it” then he quickly realized that Mookie “had the best angle on it” at which point all three outfielders had a shared understanding of the situation and evoked a synchronized response based on that awareness.
• Coaching. Their shared awareness didn’t happen by chance. Remember, Rusney Castillo had very little experience playing left field. Fortunately, Red Sox outfield instructor Arnie Beyeler had been working with the outfielders, coaching them on how to handle certain situations, including this particular one. “Those are the kind of things to me that we look at,” Beyeler said. “Backing up bases, the little stuff of guys helping each other out, them working as a group, cutting balls off, taking deep angles, holding balls to singles.” Coaching prepared the outfielders to make this play in a coordinated manner.
• Conditions. This Red Sox team operated within in a culture in which teamwork was the norm. That wasn’t always true. There was a time when the Red Sox were known as a group of individuals who didn’t play as a team. It was epitomized by the phrase, “25 players, 25 taxis,” suggesting that each player went his own way after the game (and, at times, during the game!). When a prior manager (Bobby Valentine) called out a Red Sox player in the press rather than behind closed doors (something that tends to kill psychological safety), another team member said, “That’s not the way we go about our stuff around here.” The conditions at that time were not conducive to cooperation. In contrast, the play Mookie made was a collective effort, in part enabled by an organizational expectation of playing as a team.
The lesson here: Behind most individual displays of excellence you’ll find subtle teamwork contributions that made it possible.