Effective teams
Talented individuals in a failed group.
Very often we see a group of individually talented engineers failing to deliver results as a team. Managers of such teams are boggled by it and they many a times they don’t know how to correct it. In their eyes they did almost everything right. They brought in a smart bunch of engineers from top engineering schools, provided them good work, provided the technical direction, provided them the right tools to get the work done and they still failed.
I have had the chance of working in such a team and experienced everything first hand. The team could not deliver. It quickly fell apart hurting everyone in the process.
Effectiveness of teams is as much about emotions, if not more, as is about technical or analytical abilities.
In this post I would talk about a different kind of intelligence that team members need to possess. This form of intelligence is especially important for leaders, for without it, their teams will fall apart – Emotional Intelligence.
Why don’t we learn this in school?
School is more about an individual’s performance than a group performance. We are given assignments and we complete them individually. We are almost never graded as a group. Even group assignments are small enough to be completed by one geek who does not want to take the pain of involving and following up on everyone. “I’ll just get that done myself” is usually what he would say.
The products of these great institutions are bright intellectual hardworking *individuals* who have no idea how to work in a team.
Bad habits we learn in school is a great article by an Amazon senior engineer which explains this is in a far better way than I ever can.
Conditions for a team’s effectiveness.
The goal of putting together a group of smart people is to produce a result which is greater than the sum of its individuals. There are three basic conditions for how a group would produce more than its parts –
- Trust among members – Belief that everyone in the team wants to do great work and we are all here to help each other achieve that goal.
- Sense of group identity – Belief that we as a team belong to a unique and worthwhile group. The purpose of the group is higher than any individual’s purpose.
- Sense of group efficacy – Belief that group members are better off working together than apart.
How do we instill effectiveness in teams?
- First and foremost, as with most improvements, this has to come from the top. From the CEO, from the senior executives, from the big bosses. If the senior executives in senior-most leadership team of the company do not trust/understand each other, its difficult for a group of engineers doing the groundwork to do the same. This is because behaviors and moods trickle down the management chain like electricity through wires.
- A system of checks and balances. Position-based leaders, like managers or executives, need to work tirelessly to grow everyone else into “leaders without titles”. These leaders without titles are cognizant of other team member’s emotions and keep each other in check. They raise constructive concerns when something is not right instead of hiding away from it. Leaders don’t shy away from difficult conversations.
- Fair and transparent processes instill trust within the team members. Fair processes make sure team members believe they have been treated fairly vis-à-vis the other team members. Managers need to make process process fairness top priority and ensure any concerns in this regard are quickly sorted out. Else these will pop out later breeding much uglier scenarios.
- Create a culture where team members ask for regular feedback from their peers. This would ensure a new college grad who just joined the team has all the resources available to understand that corporate works differently than school.
