💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 5917.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
But managing them is hard
Mar 16th 2016
TEAMS have become the basic building-blocks of organisations. Recruitment ads
routinely call for team players . Business schools grade their students in
part on their performance in group projects. Office managers knock down walls
to encourage team-building. Teams are as old as civilisation, of course: even
Jesus had 12 co-workers. But a new report by Deloitte, Global Human Capital
Trends , based on a survey of more than 7,000 executives in over 130 countries,
suggests that the fashion for teamwork has reached a new high. Almost half of
those surveyed said their companies were either in the middle of restructuring
or about to embark on it; and for the most part, restructuring meant putting
more emphasis on teams.
Companies are abandoning functional silos and organising employees into
cross-disciplinary teams that focus on particular products, problems or
customers. These teams are gaining more power to run their own affairs. They
are also spending more time working with each other rather than reporting
upwards. Deloitte argues that a new organisational form is on the rise: a
network of teams is replacing the conventional hierarchy. The fashion for teams
is driven by a sense that the old way of organising people is too rigid for
both the modern marketplace and the expectations of employees. Technological
innovation puts a premium on agility. John Chambers, chairman of Cisco, an
electronics firm, says that we compete against market transitions, not
competitors. Product transitions used to take five or seven years; now they
take one or two. Digital technology also makes it easier for people to
co-ordinate their activities without resorting to hierarchy. The millennials
who will soon make up half the workforce in rich countries were reared from
nursery school onwards to work in groups.
The fashion for teams is also spreading from the usual corporate suspects (such
as GE and IBM) to some more unusual ones. The Cleveland Clinic, a hospital
operator, has reorganised its medical staff into teams to focus on particular
treatment areas; consultants, nurses and others collaborate closely instead of
being separated by speciality and rank. The US Army has gone the same way. In
his book, Team of Teams , General Stanley McChrystal describes how the army s
hierarchical structure hindered its operations during the early stages of the
Iraq war. His solution was to learn something from the insurgents it was
fighting: decentralise authority to self-organising teams.
A good rule of thumb is that as soon as generals and hospital administrators
jump on a management bandwagon, it is time to ask questions. Leigh Thompson of
Kellogg School of Management in Illinois warns that, Teams are not always the
answer teams may provide insight, creativity and knowledge in a way that a
person working independently cannot; but teamwork may also lead to confusion,
delay and poor decision-making. The late Richard Hackman of Harvard University
once argued, I have no question that when you have a team, the possibility
exists that it will generate magic, producing something extraordinary...But don
t count on it.
Hackman (who died in 2013) noted that teams are hampered by problems of
co-ordination and motivation that chip away at the benefits of collaboration.
High-flyers forced to work in teams may be undervalued and free-riders
empowered. Groupthink may be unavoidable. In a study of 120 teams of senior
executives, he discovered that less than 10% of their supposed members agreed
on who exactly was on the team. If it is hard enough to define a team s
membership, agreeing on its purpose is harder still.
Profound changes in the workforce are making teams trickier to manage. Teams
work best if their members have a strong common culture. This is hard to
achieve when, as is now the case in many big firms, a large proportion of staff
are temporary contractors. Teamwork improves with time: America s National
Transportation Safety Board found that 73% of the incidents in its
civil-aviation database occurred on a crew s first day of flying together.
However, as Amy Edmondson of Harvard points out, organisations increasingly use
team as a verb rather than a noun: they form teams for specific purposes and
then quickly disband them.
Teeming with doubts
The least that can be concluded from this research is that companies need to
think harder about managing teams. They need to rid their minds of sentimental
egalitarianism: the most successful teams have leaders who set an overall
direction and clamp down on dithering and waffle. They need to keep teams small
and focused: giving in to pressure to be more inclusive is a guarantee of
dysfunction. Jeff Bezos, Amazon s boss, says that If I see more than two
pizzas for lunch, the team is too big. They need to immunise teams against
groupthink: Hackman argued that the best ones contain deviants who are
willing to ruffle feathers. A new study of 12,000 workers in 17 countries by
Steelcase, a furniture-maker which also does consulting, finds that the best
way to ensure employees are engaged is to give them more control over where
and how they do their work which may mean liberating them from having to do
everything in collaboration with others.
However, organisations need to learn something bigger than how to manage teams
better: they need to be in the habit of asking themselves whether teams are the
best tools for the job. Team-building skills are in short supply: Deloitte
reports that only 12% of the executives they contacted feel they understand the
way people work together in networks and only 21% feel confident in their
ability to build cross-functional teams. Slackly managed teams can become
hotbeds of distraction employees routinely complain that they can t get their
work done because they are forced to spend too much time in meetings or
compelled to work in noisy offices. Even in the age of open-plan offices and
social networks some work is best left to the individual.