Working in teams is the most effective approach for complex
work. However effective teamwork doesn't just happen. This lecture examines
some of the issues a manager encounters in facilitating teamwork and describes
tools that help launch teams.
If this course was being offered in a group training
environment this lecture would be a group exercise that is a classic in
management training. Since it is a self-study course you cannot have the
benefit of experiencing the impact of this exercise. I am constrained to
describe the exercise and what happens to participants. Unfortunately you are
constrained to read and visualize it rather than experience it firsthand. You
are getting visual learning (reading) rather than learning by doing (the
exercise) and for most people learning by doing is much more effective. We
encounter this deficiency several times in this course so you need to use your
imagination to visualize the experience I have observed others get from these
exercises.
The team work or consensus seeking exercise is called Lost on
the Moon. It is almost always a powerful demonstration that teams perform
better than individuals in problem solving. The participants are told that they
are members of a space crew that is forced to land on the lighted surface of
the moon about 200 miles from their mother ship. They are given a list of 15
items that have survived undamaged with them. The objective is to prioritize
the list in importance to their survival until they reach the mother ship. The
items on the list include things that are very useful for their survival and
items that are less useful or even useless in the moon environment. After the
individual students complete the exercise they are instructed to form teams of
four to five individuals and repeat the exercise as a team. When the teams have
completed the exercise the results are scored for the individuals and for the
teams by comparing their prioritized lists to the correct list.
I suspect you don’t find it surprising that typically the team
scores are higher than any individual scores of the team members. Usually there
is a question period where the team members are asked to discuss why their team
score was higher than the individual scores. They often describe how ideas from
different team members were helpful in reaching the best prioritization. The
instructor then nods knowingly to accent the benefits of teamwork and consensus
seeking in problem solving, whether it’s for an exercise or a real job problem.
What you may not find obvious is that sometimes the benefits of
teamwork are brought out in a more dramatic way. Let me describe the results of
one such training session that I conducted. The trainees were engineers and
scientists. Many of the engineers already worked together daily in a team
environment. Most of the scientists tended to be more individual contributors
although they were working on similar projects as the engineers. When it came
time to form teams those that worked together daily quickly grouped into teams
leaving the individual contributors left over so that they formed a team. Two
teams stood out. One contained the smartest and most productive scientists in
the organization, all excellent and productive employees that worked mostly as
individual contributors. The other was a group of young engineers with many
years less experience than the scientists. They had been assigned to the lowest
priority project in the organization where they worked closely together every
day. There were no prima donas in this group and they demonstrated true teamwork.
As you might expect the individual scores of the scientists
were considerably higher than the individual scores of the young engineers.
What was more interesting was that the team score of the young engineers was
considerably higher than the team score of the scientists and the team score of
the scientists was lower than many of their individual scores.
I was able to observe how each of the teams addressed the
exercise. The young engineers wasted no time in getting to the heart of the
exercise. They also used every minute available in intense discussion and
debated every item on the list as they made their decisions. Every member
contributed just as they were used to doing in their daily work. In contrast
the team used to working as individual contributors was not as intense and didn't interact as smoothly. They worked very hard on getting the top five
items correct and then gave only minimal attention to the remaining items on
the list. If I remember correctly they didn't even use all the allotted time to
finish the exercise.
The results of the two teams’ performance are very instructive.
The higher individual scores of the experienced scientists showed that they had
the potential for a much better team score than the team score of the young
engineers. However, the scientists were not used to working together as a team
and didn’t handle the team dynamics as well. As a result they did not
capitalize on their advantage and didn’t score as well working as a team as
some of them scored individually. The young engineers were experienced in
working as a team. They demonstrated very effective team dynamics and thereby
raised their team score well above any of their individual scores.
Several lessons can be derived from the results of the two
teams in the exercise.
First, teamwork is more effective than individual efforts in
solving complex problems. Second, effective teamwork doesn't just happen by
assigning people to a team. It’s important that they are trained or mentored in
how to work together in ways that utilizes the best knowledge and skills of
each team member. Finally, note how the exercise demonstrated the value of
having people in job assignments that match their styles. The scientists
performed very well as individual contributors, which was their normal
assignment. The young engineers were a dynamite team. If one of the young
engineers had been given an individual contributor assignment he would have
likely performed under expectations. Similarly if one of the scientists had
been given a team assignment he would likely have been unhappy and not been as
valuable a contributor to the team as he would have been as an individual
contributor to the teams efforts.
Typically work doesn't automatically divide itself into stuff
for teams and stuff for individual contributors. Therefore how should a manager
assign people to projects when the people are a mix of individual performers
and people that work best in teams? It depends on the availability of skills
for assignment to the project. If there is an abundance of available skills and
if the project manager knows which are individual contributors and which are
team workers then the project tasks can be staffed by selecting from the
available skill pool so that team workers aren't mixed with individual contributors
on tasks that require close coordination.
If there are a minimum number of required skills then there isn't any choice at the beginning. The project manager should hold regular
project team coordinating meetings where progress on tasks is reviewed,
resources are assigned or reassigned and key information that the whole team
needs to hear is exchanged. At the first sign of trouble on a task check the
staffing on that task to see if the team dynamics is working. Poor team
dynamics is the number one cause of poor performance on projects so it is the
natural cause to be investigated first anyway. If the team dynamics does seem
to be a contributing cause of problems on the task then see if it is possible
to exchange people with other projects so that the dynamics are improved. This
causes a temporary disruption to both projects but that is preferable to
leaving in place a team structure that isn't working and won’t improve on its
own.
If the team dynamics can’t be improved by changing assignments
then it is up to the project leader to work with the team members to set up
working relationships that are sufficiently acceptable to all members that the
work gets done. One possibility to explore is setting up a mentoring
relationship between an experienced individual contributor and an inexperienced
person that works better in a team. The primary thing to remember is to never
let a team dynamics problem go unaddressed.
Tools for launching new
teams
Even if the manager has selected a team with high potential for
working together well that alone isn't sufficient to avoid team problems. There
are two tools that help launch teams so that many problems are avoided. The
first tool is a roles and responsibilities meeting. This meeting should be held
as soon as possible after forming the team. The manager facilitates the meeting
and introduces each person along with his or her assigned role on the team.
Then the team members in turn discuss how they understand the other team
member’s roles and how they understand their role. By the time each member has
had a turn there is usually consensus on roles and responsibilities of every
team member. Even though a manager believes the role of each member is clear
from the manager’s introduction the discussion often reveals that the team
members have a different interpretation and the meeting resolves these
differences.
The second tool helps a team that has been assigned to a new
project gain common understanding of the work they have before them. This tool
is called a Quality Table 1 (also called a House of Quality) and is from the
methodology called Quality Function Deployment (QFD). I have found that if a
team assigned to a new project develops a Quality Table 1 together the team
members reach a common understanding of the requirements for the project and
the approaches needed to satisfy these requirements. In addition they develop
criteria for evaluating their work during the project.
If you are not familiar with QFD look it up in Wikipedia or at
the QFD Institute web site, www.qfdi.org. Although QFD is typically described
in terms associated with engineering and manufacturing it is much more
generally useful. I don’t discuss QFD in this course because a manager does not
need to be an expert in QFD. It is advisable to be sufficiently familiar with
the methodology to facilitate a team in developing a Quality Table 1. It is
very beneficial to have access to an expert; either within the manager’s
organization, within the enterprise or available as a consultant. Software is
available that is useful for implementing a Quality Table 1. For example, free
templates for implementing Quality Tables in Excel or OpenOffice calc are
available at www.qfdonline.com.
Exercise
1. Even if it is not in
your action plan, now is a good time to evaluate if any of your workers are in
job assignments that do not fit their style. Consider those workers that are
not as productive as you think they should be. Think about their personalities
and how they have performed in different assignments. Are any of them perhaps
in an assignment that isn’t suitable? If so, consider how you might change the
assignment. If you think a change might be helpful but it isn’t required for
any obvious business reason you should discuss the change with the worker
before making any changes. You may find that your assessment is correct and the
worker welcomes the change or you may find that the worker is happy in the
current assignment in spite of your assessment. If you have subordinate
managers you might discuss any workers that they have that are considered
problem performers to see if a change in assignment might be in order. In this
case be careful not to trample on your subordinate manager’s turf. You can make
suggestions or observations but the subordinate manger should make the decision.
Remember the first rule of a manager. Attend to your own processes. A critical
failure of some managers is that they continue to work on the job they had
before their current assignment with the result that they interfere with their
subordinate’s jobs and their own job is neglected. This is usually because they
are more comfortable doing the previous job and may not know how to execute the
processes associated with the new job. Don’t fall into this trap.
2. Review how your organization is organized for
its work. Is the work done by teams, by individual contributors or a mix? Are
there opportunities for more teamwork? How would changing to more teamwork
affect the organization? Can beneficial changes be made without significant
disruption? Do the styles of the workers fit having additional teams or closer
teamwork? Depending on this assessment you should consider making the changes
so that the organization can benefit from the advantages of team problem
solving? Don’t forget that any new teams need training or mentoring in how to
work effectively as a team.
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