Why Aren’t Teams Working and What to Do About It

Since the dawn of human existence, people have organized into teams to accomplish what no one person could effectively do on their own.  But it wasn’t until the late 1920s and early 1930s with the now classic Hawthorne Studies that researches conducted a series of research activities designed to examine in-depth what happened to a group of workers under various conditions.

Before then, most organizations were a strictly hierarchical organization with a deep trench separating management from workers.  Management was the brain of the operations and workers were the muscle.  Workers would seldom be asked to contribute ideas or knowledge to help the company compete.  Today, the strict function-based segregation of the past has, for the most part, been rejected.  Companies today create functional, cross-functional, and even cross-company teams to garner ideas and initiatives from the diverse experience and talents of their members.  So, why aren’t teams working and what can we do about it?

Richard Hackman, a professor of Psychology at Harvard University and a leading expert on teams, has spent a career exploring and questioning the wisdom of teams. Research, he says, consistently shows that teams underperform despite all the resources management places at their disposal. A review of his and the writing of other experts in the field of teams reveals the following seven most common failures and how to correct them:

1. Failure to put the right people on the team (along with the failure to kick the wrong people off the team)

Much like Jim Collins who in his book, Good to Great, advocates “first who … then what”, Professor Hackman says, “You ought to first make sure that you know who’s on it.  In truth, putting together a team involves some ruthless decisions about membership; not everyone who wants to be on the team should be included and some individuals should be forced off”.

A team without clear leadership often lacks direction and is destined to failure.  This does not mean the team leader is supposed to make all of the decisions for the team. Instead, their role is to act as a facilitator for the team.  This role may include delegation, helping keep meetings on track, scheduling, etc.

When putting a team together, skills and experience matter; but, so do fit, chemistry, and motives. That’s why, when selecting a team, we advise using the same due diligence you use when you hire a new employee.  Too often teams that fail have someone on it who is a “team destroyer”.  This may be a person whose behavior makes it difficult for others to work with them, or it may be someone who is unwilling to participate fully, or who comes to meetings with their own agenda as seen from their traditional department silo.  Interestingly, every team needs a “deviant”, someone who challenges the team and by doing so generates more discussion, ideas, and innovation.

The idea that bigger teams are better because they have more resources is another mistake organizations make when they put together a team.  In reality, the opposite is true, “as the team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed between members goes up” and “it’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble”.

Another stumbling block for teams is the lack of diversity among its members and this issue goes beyond race and gender.  Diverse backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints can lead a team to better problem-solving and superior solutions in the same way that diverse cultures can lead an organization to a deeper understanding of complex global issues.

To avoid these blunders:

• Appoint a team leader who will act as a facilitator for the team, not as a dictator.
• Avoid putting “team destroyers” on the team.
• Always include a deviant on the team, someone who will challenge the team.
• Limit the size of the team to less than 10 members.
• Include individuals with an eye to diversity (age, race, gender, backgrounds, experience, and viewpoints)
• Use a validated, predictive assessment in order to understand the core behaviors and learning styles of the potential team members.
• Look at performance reviews and check references, not only from managers but from co-workers as well.
• Understand why applicants want to be part of the team as well as how being on the team will help each of them realize their longer-term goals

2. Failure to establish a meaningful performance goal; i.e., team members don’t agree on what the team is supposed to be doing.

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?  As anyone knows, that’s a recipe for disaster.  Members of the team need to know, and agree upon, what they’re supposed to be doing together.  Regardless of who establishes the goal for the team (the CEO, the department head, the team leader, or the team itself), setting the direction or goal for the team can be emotionally demanding because it always involves the exercise of authority.  But, unless someone articulates a clear goal or direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas and that will negatively impact delivery, timing, and the quality of the deliverable.

To avoid this blunder, the team leader needs to:

• Know how to run a launch meeting so members become oriented to and engaged with their tasks.
• Help the team review at the midpoint what’s functioning well – and what isn’t – which can correct the team’s performance strategy.
• Revisit team goals frequently to keep them meaningful since it can be tempting for team members to concentrate only on their individual tasks and challenges.
• Keep people’s heads out of the sand and aware of what matters to the team as a whole since this drives performance toward the desired outcome and enables adjustment of goals, timing, or resources needed for success.
• Take a few minutes when the work is finished to reflect on what went well or poorly, which can help members make better use of their knowledge and experience the next time around.

3. Failure to establish appropriate norms

A certain amount of conflict within the team is healthy (remember the value of the deviant).  It demonstrates that people care about the project.  Tolerating dissent also allows people to be honest and it put the team’s interests above the interests of individual members.

To avoid this blunder, the team leader must find the right balance:

• Encourage collaboration and educated risk-taking.
• Set the right tone and the right reward structure that prompts everyone to contribute.
• Let people know there may be some degree of ambiguity and that testing different approaches and taking smart risks is necessary for achieving the best result. This means that the answer will not always be clear and that not all efforts will result in immediate success.
• Most importantly, the team leader should use failure as an opportunity to dig deeper toward a solution.

4. Failure to build support for the team

Building “buy in” for the team is an investment the team leader absolutely must make.  We’ve seen too many cases in which an employee is assigned to a team even though his or her regular manager doesn’t know the team’s goals or the time commitment required of the employee. This can be confusing to managers whose employees are on the team when the manager is not.  It can create an antagonistic atmosphere in which managers undermine a team’s efforts!

Another issue is the lack of resources; without buy-in by the organization as to what will be needed for the team to be successful (time, money, materials, information systems, reward system, etc.), people on the team will feel as if they are only going to have one oar to row the boat.

To avoid this blunder, the team leader must:

• Ensure that information flows in both directions between the team members and their managers. Keep in mind that participating on a cross-functional team can take time and focus away from the team members’ day-to-day jobs since this can lead to the perception among managers that they’re losing control of their people.
• Align each manager’s expectations with the strategic importance of the team’s mission.
• Secure resources needed by the team by promoting the team’s interests with key stakeholders letting them know how the team’s success will reflect on the whole organization.

5. Failure to provide strong communication channels

There’s no substitute for understanding the innate behaviors of one’s team members; failure to do so invariably results in the team’s failure.  Accordingly, we recommend assessing team members in order to understand their individual communication styles.  Without an objective assessment of how individual team members communicate, collaborate, learn and solve problems, how can the team leader facilitate the best possible communications?  This knowledge will also provide the team leader with a better understanding of their individual styles.  It is also important to understand how this impacts communication among team members and it enables the team leader to anticipate sources of conflict or other challenges. This is especially true when dealing with remote or virtual team members.

To avoid this blunder, the team leader must:

• Encourage active listening and ensure influence based on task-relevant knowledge rather than on status or personal dominance.
• Apply their skills as a leader and facilitator to moderate the group and ensure that people have adequate opportunities to contribute.
• Establish norms and rules of engagement and enforce these rules when necessary. When forming a team, the team leader might not know everyone on it; but, they’ll want to get to know each member and a formal assessment of skills and strengths is an effective, time tested method.

6. Failure of or the absence of a clearly defined decision making process

While it’s important to create an environment that allows team members to voice their opinions in an open and honest manner, if a team leader doesn’t spend enough time framing problems, the team will lack direction.  This means soliciting the perspective of individual members and stepping through the team’s interdependent activities to identify potential challenges and solutions.

Again, the team leader doesn’t need to establish a truly democratic process. But they do need every team member to participate. The team leader will need to make difficult decisions at times. They will also be called upon to break ties and settle differences between team members while at the same time keeping everyone motivated and on board.

To avoid this blunder, the team leader must:

• Create an environment that allows team members to voice their opinions in an open and honest manner, get all sides of the story, and then weigh these arguments to make a decision that is in the best interest of the team.
• Use data and metrics in a fair and consistent manner to make decisions more objectively and always share the data and those metrics with the team. This will help to diffuse emotions and it will serve as a testing platform to explore disparate ideas and make informed decisions.

7. Failure to keep teams intact

Ironically, companies often disband a team when that team’s specific task is complete because of the common misperception “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”.  Yet research shows “the problem almost always is not that a team gets stale but, rather, that it doesn’t have the chance to settle in.  The National Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its database occurred on a crews first day of flying together, before people had the chance to learn through experience how best to operate as a team—and 44% of those took place on a crews very first flight. Also, a NASA study found that fatigued crews who had a history of working together made about half as many errors as crews composed of rested pilots who had not flown together before.” (Ref: Why Teams Don’t Work in the Harvard Business Review)

To avoid this blunder, organizations should:

• Keep effective teams together rather than change their composition.

Summary

Creating a team that exceeds the capabilities of its individual members requires commitment, planning, and time.  If history teaches us nothing else about teams, it’s that members of organizations, working together, can create miracles, but that the conditions must be right for them to occur. Miracles are not accidents – they are the result of high performance teams that were carefully established, supported, and nurtured by management.