The Truth about Teams

There’s this erroneous notion that we’re team players, meaning we’ll work even harder for the team than we would for ourselves. But in real life we belong to five or six different teams, none of which provide this deep sense of belonging. You’re on the marketing team and I’m on the product team and we’re also on the quality team. We’re not solely devoted to a single team. Plus, coordinating teamwork—organizing meetings and such—causes about a 40 percent loss in productivity. And there’s another problem. There’s this concept that teams need to have good relationships between members in order to be high-performing. But a team that’s all chummy, with no discord, is often like a couple that’s burying something and not talking about it. Teams are going to be challenged, and they have to perform—and that sometimes requires yelling at teammates or doing something that pisses people off. Discord can be more associated with performance than harmony is.

Po Bronson quoted in Wired magazine

Observed Behavior is Changed Behavior

When the lead singer at the concert asks you to scream as loud as you can, and then he asks again, going, “I can’t hear you! You can do better than that!” have you ever noticed that the second time is always louder?  Why wasn’t everyone yelling at the top of their lungs the first time?  Some really cool scientists actually tested this in 1979. (They) had people shout as loud as they could in a group and then alone, or vice-versa. Sure enough, the overall loudness of a small group of people was less than any one of them by themselves. You can even chart it on a graph. The more people you add, the less effort any one person does.

If you know you aren’t being judged as an individual, your instinct is to fade into the background. To prove this, psychologist Alan Ingram ruined tug-of-war forever. In 1974, he had people put on a blindfold and grab a rope. The rope was attached to a rather medieval-looking contraption that simulated the resistance of an opposing team. The subjects were told many other people were also holding the rope on their side, and he measured their efforts. Then, he told them they would be pulling alone, and again he measured. There were alone both times, but when they thought they were in a group, they pulled 18 percent less strenuously on average.

This behavior is more likely to show up when the task a hand is simple. With complex tasks, it is usually easy to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Once you know your laziness can be seen, you try harder. You do this because of another behavior called evaluation apprehension, which is just a fancy way of saying you care more when you know you are being singled out. Your anxiety levels decrease when you know your effort will be pooled with others’. You relax. You coast. 

David McRaney, You are Not so Smart

A Successful Team needs Cohesive Personalities

A useful way to think about teams with the right mix of skills and personalities is to consider the two roles every person plays in a working group: a functional role, based on their formal position and technical skill, and a psychological role, based on the kind of person they are. Too often, organizations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows. This is why even the most expensive professional sports teams often fail to perform according to the individual talents of each player: There is no psychological synergy. A more effective approach focuses as much on people’s personalities as on their skills.

Dave Winsborough and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic writing in Harvard Business Review  

This is how to really get to know people

If you want people to really know you, weekly meetings don’t cut it. You need deep dives with them in high-intensity situations. When I talked with a crew of astronauts who went to the International Space Station together, I found out that NASA prepared them by sending them into the wilderness for 11 days together. Their guides promptly let them get lost, and they said they came out of that experience knowing each other better than colleagues they’d worked with for years. At Morning Star, a leading tomato-paste plant that has operated successfully for decades without a single boss, I was stunned to discover that the founder often interviews job applicants at their own homes for three to five hours.

Adam Grant writing in The Atlantic