haruki zaemon

I can’t recall how I came across this paper from the “Center for Evidence-Based Management (CEBMa).”

I found it engrossing, even though it was quite long, especially for something itself described as a summary.

Naturally, there’s a whole lot of nuance and context I haven’t captured, so I highly recommend reading the original:

Most researchers summarise a team’s basic defining characteristics as: a group of employees who are:

1. formally established
2. assigned (some) autonomy
3. interdependent

[…]

Most studies included consider team effectiveness as synonymous with team performance. As such, team effectiveness is broadly defined as task performance, contextual performance, and/or adaptive performance (eg learning, creativity, decision-making).

[…]

This review identified a large number of high-quality studies that indicate that effective teams are not so much determined by their composition, but rather by the emergence of socio-affective (in particular trust, psychological safety and social cohesion) and cognitive states (in particular cognitive consensus, information-sharing and the transactive memory system).

Some thoroughly unsurprising findings:

• Intra-team trust is positively related to performance.
• Group-level psychological safety has a moderate to large positive impact on team performance.
• Team cohesion has a moderate to large impact on team performance.
• The emergence of intra-team trust and social cohesion is critical for virtual teams.
• Team cohesion is strongly associated with team inclusion.
• Team identification has a positive effect on social cohesion and consequently team performance.
• Turnover has a negative effect on social cohesion and consequently on team performance.
• Team cognition – in particular information-sharing, transactive memory systems and cognitive consensus – has a large positive impact on team performance.
• Team learning does not automatically lead to team performance improvement.
• Team reflexivity moderates the effect of team cognition on team performance.
• Teamwork training has a large positive effect on team performance.
• Debriefing sessions and guided team reflexivity have a moderate to large positive effect on team performance.
• Setting group goals that are challenging (in terms of difficulty) and specific (rather than non-specific ‘do your best’ goals) has a moderate to large positive effect on team performance.

Some moderately surprising findings:

• The link between team effectiveness and team diversity dimensions such as age, gender, ethnicity, religion, functional background, educational background, organisational tenure and experience is small and sometimes negative.
• Of the Big Five personality traits, only agreeableness and conscientiousness are (somewhat) positively related to team performance. Other personality traits, such as emotional stability, extraversion and openness to experience, were not related with team performance.

One hard-to-swallow finding was around team building. I’ve never felt team building exercises were of much value, but the science is against me:

A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies shows that, in general, teambuilding interventions have a moderate positive indirect effect on team performance, and a moderate to large positive direct effect on trust, social cohesion and internal communication.

Turns out, I’ve never really experienced the necessary conditions:

Results indicate that the effect of teambuilding is larger when:

• the initiator is external (rather than internal) to the team
• the rationale is corrective (rather than preventive)
• team members are not involved in the planning
• the focus is on both the team’s goals and interpersonal relations
• team building is planned together with other interventions
• team building is led by both internal and external consultants
• the focus is on the group (rather than on individuals)
• team building is supported by (higher) management

1. #leadership
2. #management
3. #organisational-dynamics
4. #performance
5. #psychological-safety
6. #research

(via Ray Grasso)

In a recent post I talked about my personal experience with the effort and discomfort required to lead people and teams. Creating alignment can feel inefficient.

I especially appreciate Jessica’s distinction between alignment and collaboration. I value collaboration over (not instead of) individual contribution, and the nuance here is not that collaboration is bad, rather “We can’t collaborate with everyone, so it’s alignment that can give us the trigger and authority to communicate when we need to.”

Jessica Kerr:

How can we do our work well, together, as we get bigger?

1. Accept coordination overhead. Document shared plans in a shared place (we use Asana). Coordination is for asynchronous work, and we can do a lot of the coordination asynchronously too.
2. Collaboration is expensive. Replace it with coordination when you can, by decoupling. When you need collaboration, go all in. Get people in the same room if that’s a thing, or talking every day in Slack & Zoom. Build relationships to make communication smooth. Read Team Topologies.
3. Do not skimp on alignment.

Alignment is not expensive, compared to collaboration. But it feels disposable, it’s easy to let slip. Alignment comes from leadership in our all-hands and all-teams meetings. It comes in 1:1s with our managers, and between our managers. It comes in documented company values and positions.

Alignment gives us the context to make good decisions in our scope. It also lets us question decisions outside our scope, constructively, because we can notice when we learn something inconsistent with our expectations. That catches discrepancies early, and gets us back on track together.

In a small enough company, alignment is mostly free. It happens in conversation, and via collaboration. As our company grows, our founders are more and more deliberate about reproducing it.

1. #decision-making
2. #leadership
3. #management
4. #performance

The article centres on the push to get people back into an office, but I think the general themes are more broadly applicable:

Get into a conversation with a company leader these days, and you’ll likely hear some version of “no one wants to work hard anymore.” I see my C-suite clients grasping for more control to get back to “normal” by pushing for longer hours in the office, tightening metrics, and hoping that economic headwinds will return their power.

[…]

Inspired people make inspired workers make inspired companies. Is it better to have a productive worker who leaves early to train for a marathon or a burned-out worker who’s strapped to their desk? How do you judge the person who declines a promotion because they love their job exactly as it is? Let’s not punish people who have an updated model of success that works for them.

[…]

For most of us coming up, there was a predictable cadence to professional work. You grind it out early, give up large parts of your life, and eventually gain some control over your time. Yes, you had to do it, but was it really the best way to get the best work? I know when I was working seven days a week until 11 P.M., I was not a fount of creativity. Every new shift in work necessitates an end to an existing norm. Instead of bringing people down to your experience, consider how you can bring everyone up to a new one.

[…]

People wasted a lot of time in the office right under your nose, and if they want to waste time, they’ll do it anywhere. You’re far better off measuring performance and losing the fixation with time. The more latitude managers can give in creating the right working environment for the individual, the less guilty everyone will feel and, thus, the more they can focus on doing good work.

[…]

When we sense control slipping, we tend to want to micromanage people and processes. Recessionary pressures exacerbate this effect. Fear has never been an effective motivator over the long term. Worrying about job preservation causes people to hunker down, not take risks toward excellence.

1. #leadership
2. #management
3. #organisational-dynamics
4. #performance

I’m a big believer in deliberate development. I still don’t get the balance right and can wait too long, or sometimes not long enough before I realise someone needs explicit coaching:

Big hearted leaders tend to wait too long and stress too much over poor performers. Kindness makes you beautiful. Enabling incompetence in others is destructive.

1. #leadership
2. #management
3. #performance

It only takes a few minutes to induce learned helplessness by exploiting our need for social acceptance.

This can happen through deliberate acts, and it can happen inadvertently as a consequence of poor leadership.

1. #leadership
2. #organisational-dynamics
3. #performance
4. #video

Starting from the point of view that this is probably a management failure – rather than something inherent to the person – correctly puts the onus on the manager for letting someone get into a situation like this. Sure, there are situations where there’s not much the manager could have done, but those are rare.

1. #leadership
2. #management
3. #organisational-dynamics
4. #performance

Well delivered feedback drives improvement, whilst poorly delivered feedback decreases performance and can cause real damage, sometimes lasting for years afterwards.

Good feedback is: Well intentioned; Non-trivial; Truthful; Consensual; Actionable; Timely; Specific; Private; Delivered from your perspective, not that of others; A two-way conversation; Focused; About behaviours and performance, not personalities or style; Combined with positive encouragement.

1. #leadership
2. #management
3. #performance
4. #psychological-safety