Teambuilding Myths & Realities
Carlos: In this Teaming With Ideas episode, you, my brilliant readers and listeners, will meet Robert Ginnett, a teams practitioner and researcher with a bachelors in Psychology and Criminology, an MBA and a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Yale. I met Robert a few years ago at the Center for Creative Leadership where we did some work together. In this interview we explore common myths and misunderstandings about teams and team building. And, you’ll hear Robert’s fascinating stories of his work with teams in the US Military, at NASA; in hospital surgical suites and in commercial airline cockpits. Enjoy!
Robert: I have a rather sordid background of how I got into studying teams. My first introduction to teams was in the military where I was assigned to lead covert action teams. I tried reading everything I could on leadership. At the time, everything I read was written by generals and presidents, about how to lead huge organizations and armies of great proportion, and I was interested in how I get my two or three guys in and out successfully without anyone dying. That carried on as I advanced and eventually ended up at the Air Force Academy where they decided I should get my PhD in Organizational Behavior.
So, I shopped for universities that were interested in teams and virtually no organizations or universities were at that time, except Yale. Richard Hackman and Victor Vroom were there and they thought it would be okay to have somebody who was interested in how you lead small teams even though they admitted there had not been a lot of work done in that, which as a graduate student turns out to be perfect.
I came back to the Air Force Academy where I was a tenured professor and then moved on to the Center for Creative Leadership.
Groups That Work, and Those That Don’t
Going back to when Richard Hackman and I were writing a book and it was originally supposed to be entitled Groups That Work, which is what people hoped would happen, the more research we did on it, and the more others were asked to contribute, we found out that almost all the teams had at least some degree of failure. The editor for the book said, “I'm not sure you've chosen the right title.” So we changed the title and it became Groups That Work and Those That Don't so we could include more of our groups in it. That's where we got started in looking at some of the reasons this happened. Perhaps the biggest overriding cause is that we live in an individualistic culture. With few exceptions in the global economy, we are focused on individuals and how individuals perform. That's sort of the root of creating the problem.
Team Myth #1: 100% effort + 100% of the time = success
I worked with a football coach once, and I believe his favorite saying to tell people was, “If everybody gives 100%, 100% of the time, we will win.” He was a fairly successful football coach and certainly knew more about it than I did, so we believed that was true, although their football team was not perfect and had a number of failures as well. It wasn't until I got into the academic side of it that I stumbled on something called Systems Theory, which we're not going to go into here today.
One small part of Systems Theory says. If you have a big system and it has a number of subsystems supporting it, if any one of those subsystems optimizes, the system as a whole cannot optimize. And I thought, well, now, you know, this helps me understand what was going wrong with that football team. A short example would be if they have a very fast running back, and they're going to do kind of an end sweep where everybody's going to move to the right side and theoretically block for this fast running back. If that fast running back catches the ball from the quarterback. and then pauses just a moment to remember what that coach has told him over and over again, “Give 100%, 100% of the time,” he will take off running as fast as he can. That's his 100%. And every time they do this he will outrun the blocking backs and they will lose five to seven yards. That's because the subsystem has optimized and the big system cannot. So, the myth is that's what happens. What really happens is people learn to give appropriately so the system can optimize. The whole team is more important than the individual. So there's myth #1.
In business settings, believe it or not, in our research we found this happening most frequently on executive teams or C-level teams because oftentimes the people who are selected to be a C-level team have a long history of splendid, individual excellence.
The CFO, for example, might come up as a brilliant financial analyst or contributor gets selected for the executive team and in his career or her career. That person may have never actually had any team experience, so we've sort of placed them in an unfair vacuum because they haven't learned anything about teams. They've excelled by individual performance and that's all they know how to contribute. So, they might do things from a financial standpoint that is their best shot, but it might be very harmful in terms of sub-teams in the organization.
Myth #2: Teams always develop in Tuckman’s 4 stages
Here's a classic one which kind of helps illustrate how sometimes academics have tried to contribute, but it gets misinterpreted when put into the work setting. When I'm doing consulting training exercises with teams and groups of teams, I will often ask them how many people here know about the group formation process, according to Tuckman. And there may be one or two hands that goes up, typically people who are taking an organizational behavior class at the time or something, and I'll say, okay, let's try it differently.
How many people have heard of group formation using Forming Storming, Performing and Norming? Well, virtually every hand goes up. Everybody knows about that. That's how groups form, and we've been trained and taught that. You can even find books where that's what they claim.
So when I first started actually out of the classroom and into the real world, my first teams that I looked at were surgical teams at Yale New Haven hospital. And I spent about two weeks: I probably observed 10 to 15 different surgical teams, and I came back to our research team that was doing the work, and I said, “I'm not so sure I'm good at this.” And they said, “Well, why Robert?” And I said, “Well, I've watched like 10 or 15 surgical teams and we all know Tuckman. I can clearly see when they form. I can tell you the moment the team is formed, but then they move right on and they're performing surgery. I'm unable to see the storming phase or the norming phase. I'm just not good at it.” And they said, “Well, maybe it's something to do with surgical teams. Why don't you go to what our research contract wants us to look at it - air crews - and start with that?”
I spent about a month getting familiar with the airline crews and I flew in the cockpit with them and I came back to our meeting and I said, “Here I am again. I really don't think I'm good at this because I can tell you when they form, and the next thing I know, we're lifting this plane off the ground and flying and I never see them storm or norm.”
Question: How long does it take a team to form and does familiarity matter?
In almost all cases, both the surgical teams and the airline crews had never worked together as an entire team. In fact, an operations researcher who once studied airline crews said, “If you and I worked together today as a pilot and copilot, the next time we are likely to work together is 5.6 years from now.”
If you get surgical teams that have a very unique specialty, that team might work together over time, and that's a good thing. But nope, these were not familiar with each other. They just jumped in and went to work. More often than not they were effective, but they were not as perfect as we might like. And we have data on that. But somebody said in our group, “What do you mean they don't storm?” And I said, “Well, we've all seen storming when we watch students, we know what storming is. But as for forming in the surgical suite, you never see the scrub nurse say, ‘you know what? I've been doing this job for 15 years. I've never done it with you, but I actually think I could cut better than you cut.’ “ That would be storming. You just don't see that.
And so Richard had the genius to say, “Well, maybe we should go back and read Tuckman.” Of course we're all graduate students saying, “Geez, Richard, everybody knows Tuckman.” He said, “I didn't say you didn't know Tuckman. Let's go back and actually read his research.” So we did, and we found out Tuckman was absolutely right... about what he researched.
But what Tuckman researched only contain two unique kinds of groups:
Students in learning laboratories.
Mental patients in group therapy sessions.
I have confirmed that if you watch either of those two groups, you will see forming, storming, norming and performing, but not if you're having teams in a relevant organizational setting. They pick up so much information from being in the organization that they really don't need this and they don't do it.
Myth #3: Teams need frequent churning
That actually leads us to a third myth. The counter side of what you were just talking about is teams will get stale. We always need to bring in new people and churn the team when in fact the exact opposite is true.
Our research has never found a case where a team makes a serious error because they get complacent. What happens is they usually never get a chance to get to complacency because there's too much churn going on. And since we'd been talking about airline crews, and I've done a lot of work with airline companies and crews, let me give you a statistic from the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB. When they looked at accidents in commercial aviation, they found that 73% of the accidents happened on the first day of the crew’s working together. And 44% of them happened on the first leg, the first flight with these crews. It's because they didn't know how to work with each other. Yes, they knew who the pilot was and who the co-pilot was. They knew the role of the flight attendant, but they hadn't really gotten a chance to work together. So it's not the churn. That's the problem. It's that we don't allow teams to build and develop appropriately.
High-performance teams training
Of all the airlines we studied and air crews the most effective were the ones who were the pilots of military bombers, B-1s, and B-52s that we studied. These guys aren't even allowed to touch that airplane until they have worked together, trained together, gotten to know each other. Then over time, before they're really required to do anything critical - they were training to deliver nuclear weapons…that's sort of like the ultimate let's-get-it-right - they built a high-performance team first. That is the ultimate ideal setting. We talk about building sort of high definition training that's very close to what we're going to do. That's the objective.
Conventional Team Building is flawed
Sometimes I'll come into an organization and I'll ask, “Have you done anything in terms of teams?” and they'll go, “Oh yeah. Yeah. In fact, just last month we had a team development session.” I go, “Really? Well, tell me about it.”
“Well, we went out and played golf all day.”
Not only is that not the work you do, golf is an individual sport. I'm not sure how you learn about teams doing that.
Not all work is teamwork
Carlos: Regarding the panacea of “teamwork” which is not the answer to everything: When is it appropriate to use teamwork, and when is it better to let capable individuals go do what they do so well without jamming the imperative “teamwork” down their throars?
Robert: Let me cite my mentor, Richard Hackman, who used to say, “There is no doubt that teams can do magic, but all work is not teamwork And teamwork can indeed produce magic. Teams can do wonderful things, but all work is not teamwork.
There are a number of criteria for declaring teamwork. First of all, as you pointed out, it does need to be a task that requires a team. Not all tasks are team tasks. And we need to get it off to a good start.
Define your team’s collaboration. Know what requires collaboration and what doesn’t.
Differentiated skills: If it's really going to be something that a team can do, it should require differentiated skills, different people have different specialties that they bring. If everybody brings the same specialty, we might have a fun group, but it's probably not a task for a team. And lastly,
Interdependent in real time. If I can do my work and then just mail it in and you can work on your part whenever you get around to it, even if you can use mine as boosters, that's not really a situation that requires a team. A work group can do just fine there.
Workgroups vs Teams
If tasks are done sort of more the old fashioned way where it's done with emails, it’s really more of a workgroup. Here's my work for the day. I'm sending that on. There has been some work done recently where sort of a group room is built. It's not a real room, it's a virtual room, but then we work our problem to the point where… we haven't got the answer, but it's time for us to go home, and then that is picked up in Japan by real time workers. Now that's their first chance to see it. That counts almost as real time interdependence because they're working based on that. If the technology supports it, not just an email system, but you can move around the globe in sort of virtual real time.
A good team start
The most important thing a leader will ever get to do with a team is get it started off, right? So we looked at air crews as, again, one example and we found out, although this particular crew that may have never worked together before is going to spend a week together flying a schedule. What is really important is the first 15 minutes that leader gets to spend with them. That's where they get to get them started off right. And the two components of this that we think are critical is first of all:
The team needs clear direction about what it is supposed to be doing
Now that may sound silly to most people, but when we actually studied real teams and real organizations, we found that very rarely did everybody on the team know what they were even supposed to be doing.
Let me give you an example. Two things that often conflict in a flying organization are
Safety. I mean, there shouldn't be any conflict about safety and people will often tell you safety is our most important job. Okay, well, that's good.
Saving fuel. You're also getting all this information from the corporate headquarters that the second biggest cost in our industry is fuel. And anything you can do to help us save fuel we'll support that.
Well, that's fine. Except there are times when you’ve got to figure out whether to save fuel or be safe? If you want me to say fuel, I'm going to stay up at 30,000 feet until I'm right over the airport and then all out of the sky. That'll save fuel, but that's not safe. So those are the kinds of things that are important that get discussed.
Team boundaries
The second component of getting it right up in front, this may sound crazy, is the team needs to be appropriately bounded. Now that's almost an academic thing. There are two components.
You need to know who's on the team and who's not. This is the one that surprises people.
Not all tasks are team tasks
With an air crew it turns out that was an easy one to study because once we locked the door, I knew who the cockpit crew was. Nobody left midway through my project. But if you study executive teams, very rarely do they all agree on who's actually on the team.
I worked with the General Motors Corporation for a while and they told me their executive team for North America had 18 members. Well, I could never get the same 18 in the room. And that was part of their problem too. So, on the other side of it is, you don't want to be too bounded so that you only think it's you against the world. No, you have to have some permeability in that boundary too. So, getting that right is the leader's job and it's not easy.
It's hard to put this on an absolute timeline because of the demands. But for example, we studied project teams in the Department of Defense and found out sometimes the best team leaders were the ones who didn't let them get started on the task right away, that they did some of the things you were joking about in the name of traditional team building. They took them offsite and had Myers Briggs analyses done, and they did ropes courses and things like that to get them at least talking to each other. Then they would start on the task.
For airline crews It's 15 minutes. Sometimes for surgical teams it was five minutes. But when Richard Hackman asked a symphony conductor, “Are the first rehearsals important for you?” He said, “First rehearsal? I get about 15 seconds to get them started.” So, it varies.
Differentiated skills in teams
Regarding differentiated skills: it's now football season. So, if you look at a college football team, they don't all look the same. They bring different skills. You have a guy who's really good at throwing the ball, some guys who are tall and skinny and really good at catching the ball, some guys that are the heavy jumbo guys who are really good at blocking or tackling, that's the way you make up a team. If everybody looks exactly the same, has the same skills, then maybe you have a work group like all accountants, but that's not really a team. Teams by design bring differentiated skills, which again makes a challenge for the leader. And how do you appropriately coordinate those?
Interdependence
We know where we're going. We know who's on the team and who's not, and we've got differentiated skills that each bring that make us more powerful. But if we're not interdependent, then we could do our work in different space and time. And, if you can do that, that's not saying that's bad. It's just saying that doesn't require a team if they're not interdependent.
I suppose a surgeon could do the surgery all by herself. I've never seen it, but I suppose it could be done, but not effectively or efficiently or collaboratively. You're going to have to have somebody who's responsible for anesthesia; somebody who's responsible for getting the appropriate instruments to the surgeon; somebody who's monitoring time. There are all kinds of roles that go on and they are truly interdependent.
Carlos: In the corporate world, people use the term “team” fairly loosely. Are we a team if lines connect us on an organizational chart? That’s why I like to use the word, “collaboration” instead. What does the team actually need to collaborate on?
Size Matters
I worked with a CEO one time. who said, “I want my whole organization to be one team.”
I said, “How many people are we talking about here?”
He said, “We have 600 people. I want a 600-person team.”
I said, “I don't think that’s going to happen because you have people that didn't even know each other much less what they do or how they contribute.” So, it's virtually impossible for that team to be interdependent.
My rule of thumb is I like single digit teams. If we get to seven, we're about as big as I like to get us. And if we got 18, we're not a team.
The value of culture and an environment that understands teams
There are probably 25 things that are important. One that absolutely helps but isn't quite essential is it's nice to have a supportive team culture. It's nice to have an environment to work in that understands teams.
I got a chance to work with the Navy Seals for a while. That's an organization that understands all the real work is done in teams. We needed to set up everything so it supports teamwork, not individual work. In a kind of weird twist sometimes organizations with what we would traditionally call the most effective HR systems are not very helpful for teamwork.
They've got brilliant people that define the work and brilliant people that figure out testing to go out and select the right person to hire. Then they do training to get that person's skills up, but they don't look at the team as a whole. And so they're very supportive of individual work, but not of the group as a whole.
Would I prefer that my organization really understands teamwork? Yes. It makes everything easier. On the other hand, when we were at the Kennedy Space Center, we did research down there for six years. When we first got there, the director gave us a license plate frame that said “Launch work is teamwork” We were thinking, “Wow!” It turns out that was about as much as the organization did to support teamwork. Everything else was individually supported.
Keep in mind, there were some really effective teams that we would get to see. And we mostly were in what they call the OPF, the Orbiter Processing Facility. Anybody else would call it a hanger, but NASA has to rename everything. And there were some really great teams. For example, nobody was allowed to touch those main engines on the shuttle except Rocketdyne. And when Rocketdyne guys showed up, they were an intact, high-performance team.
But otherwise, we've got a task to perform today. The computer has told us what skills, the person needs to have, so a person from that shop shows up and he or she may be working with two other people they've never worked with before in their life, and they're on a time schedule. They just go and do their work. And it's not teamwork.
micro-managing a team vs NASA’s successful island of teamwork
We didn't get asked to come down there by our NASA research monitor until after the Challenger accident. Immediately after that the pendulum had swung way over to absolutely control every single moment and action. Well, that works into the individual's favor, not to the team’s.
I should mention, though, on the other hand, within this system, we found one amazingly small organization that always had great teamwork, and we couldn't figure it out. How come the rest of the organization doesn’t do the same thing? Well, the rest of the organization was under constant scrutiny. It's where the astronauts came. The senators came. That's where we were working in the Orbiter Processing Facility.
There was one organization that was so dangerous, it was five miles out in the swamp down there. They had really great teamwork. First of all, they couldn't afford not to because it was so dangerous. And secondly, because it was so dangerous, nobody ever wanted to go out there. So, they were in essence buffered from this other kind of non-supportive environment and it worked out great for them.
Carlos: Organizations I work with tend to be large, cultures tend to be messy and ill-defined. A great thing for teams and organizations to foster is developing organizational systems and processes to support collaborative work vs. reinforcing individual efforts.
Robert: That is the best summary of what we do you could possibly have done, Carlos.
Carlos: Thank you, Robert. You are a deep well of wisdom I hope to continue to draw from.