Great Teams are More Productive

A good reminder on why teamwork is important.

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September 12, 2007

Mathematical proof that teams are more productive

Dear Bob ...

I liked this weeks' Keep the Joint Running ("The causes of greatness," 9/10/2007).

You have an assertion - that good employees who work together as a team outperform great employees who don't.

For a very long time I've been looking for a reference that provides some/any evidence for this, apart from anecdote or assertion.

Do you know any sources that show teams are more productive and creative?

I've read a heap of Jerry Weinberg's & friends work - this is one of their major planks. I believe it to be true, from my own experience, both negative and positive, I know it to be true, but haven't been able to find any hard/definitive evidence.

- Teaming with curiousity

Dear Teaming ...

Nope. Like you, all I've heard is assertion and anecdote. Seems to be a chronic problem in the business press, doesn't it?

Looking at professional sports is the usual way to assess this. Of course, you then have to decide which sport to look at.

In the Ryder Cup, it's pretty much about which "team" has the great players.

In football, though, teamwork is essential or your star quarterback will still get creamed. (On the other hand, try asserting that the Packers without Brett Favre would still have won the Superbowl a few years back because they had teamwork. Not very convincing, is it?)

In the end, I think this is what mathematicians would call a "Q.E.D." situation. When work processes require cooperation among employees, those who know and trust each other will be able to spend more time and energy doing the work and less questioning and challenging each other. While we'd need actual evidence to compute exactly how much less time, the principle seems pretty solid based on the logic alone.

- Bob
http://weblog.infoworld.com/lewis/archives/2007/09/mathematical_pr.html?source=NLC-ADVICE&cgd=2007-09-12

The causes of greatness

9/10/2007

ManagementSpeak: Thanks to your superhuman effort we dodged a bullet. Translation: Your job is now to dodge one bullet per week. This week's contributor asked to remain anonymous, possibly due to a need to engage in bullet-ducking.

Depending on the business expert I'm listening to and the day of the week, I know three truths: 1. Good employees who work together as a team outperform great employees who don't. 2. Good employees with great processes outperform great employees with bad processes. 3. If an employee is irreplaceable you should immediately fire that employee. From first-hand observation I know that when it comes to Information Technology organizations: Great employees can and do overcome bad processes. Great employees can and do overcome lousy managers. Great employees can and do pull along mediocre teams. Making one or two great hires is the most critical step in turning around an underperforming organization. Well-designed processes can be pretty useful, too. Which is to say, if you want an organization that works, you'll get more leverage from hiring great employees than from any other single effort you can undertake. Great employees can overcome organizational deficiencies to deliver useful results. They can't, by themselves deliver a great organization. That takes a lot more. The question of what makes a great organization tick is rife with superficial thinking. The usual approach is what you might call the "Tom Peters Fallacy": Find a great organization. Identify a trait in that organization you like. Decide that this trait is what makes that organization great. Declare that this trait is the panacea for all other organizations. As far as I can determine, there is no one characteristic that by itself can make an organization great. Well, okay -- there is one: excellent leadership. That only works because I define "excellent leadership" as "Doing everything required to build a great organization," thereby begging the question. So ... what is required to make an organization great, as opposed to simply functioning? Leadership: A great organization does start with strong leadership, in a non-question-begging way. If there's no direction -- no focus, no goals, no plan, no definition of excellence, no clearly stated expectations for employees to live up to; no alignment of purpose and standards -- the employees will keep things going, but not much more than that. Great employees: Not every employee has to be a superstar, although all must be competent. Great organizations do need enough top-notch performers to demonstrate that high standards are achievable, not theoretical. Focus on achievement: The definition of "great employee" has been diluted through too many managers reading about "emotional intelligence." Employees who are focused on getting along will concentrate on how irritating their colleagues are. Employees who are focused on achievement will value their colleagues' contributions and ignore their eccentricities. Teamwork: Just as the definition of "great employee" can't ignore the importance of serious technical ability, it also can't ignore the importance of working and playing well with others, and of providing leadership in the trenches. Willingness to innovate: This is IT we're talking about. Information technology. The field where if you can buy it, it is obsolete by definition. IT organizations and everyone who works in them must be willing to try new technologies, processes and practices ... and even more important must be driven to constantly find improvements to the ones already in production ... or they stagnate. Willingness to not innovate: "State of the art" means "doesn't work right yet." Most of the time, the work required of IT is best achieved by extending what you have, not by chasing whatever is being hyped in this year's press releases, aided and abetted by publications hungry for advertising revenue. Evidence-based decision-making: Great organizations make decisions through the use of evidence and logic, not wishful thinking and listening to one's intestines. You'll note the usual buzzwords are notably absent. Governance, ITIL, CMM and all the other processes and practices (I used to call them Processes and processes) that are supposed to lead to inexorable success don't, in fact, lead to excellence. Excellent IT organizations do have them. Even more important, they are kept in their proper place -- as useful tools that help employees be as effective as possible. The best woodworkers have band saws, coping saws, lathes and routers in their workshops, and not just hammers and chisels, but their tools aren't what make them the best. Great IT organizations are the same. They practice good governance; follow consistent application maintenance, enhancement, design and testing methodologies; adhere to clearly defined change control procedures; and otherwise avoid making things up as they go along. Their processes and practices are important. They are, however, merely the signs of a great IT organization. They are not its cause.

http://www.issurvivor.com/ArticlesDetail.asp?ID=631

Compass AE: Communicate to Collaborate

Do you ever get messages that confuse you?

Do you ever get projects where the goal and objectives are vague and disconnected?


It is so difficult to thrive if the team's goal and objectives are vague. How can a team ever collaborate effectively when they spent most of the time arguing over the meaning of words?

When reviewing the content of their Tangible Vision, the Compass team eliminates the vagueness by agreeing the specifics of each significant word.

"The team that collaborate to communicate" will succeed over "the team that communicate to collaborate".

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October 7, 2007
Preoccupations
E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread)
By DANIEL GOLEMAN

AS I was in the final throes of getting my most recent book into print, an employee at the publishing company sent me an e-mail message that stopped me in my tracks.

I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an e-mail exchange about some crucial detail involving publishing rights, which I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: "It's difficult to have this conversation by e-mail. I sound strident and you sound exasperated."

At first I was surprised to hear I had sounded exasperated. But once she identified this snag in our communications, I realized that something had really been off. So we had a phone call that cleared everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.

The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly greatest when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which e-mail may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place.

This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.

Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say.

Most crucially, the brain's social circuitry mimics in our neurons what's happening in the other person's brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

E-mail, of course, has a multitude of virtues: it's quick and convenient, democratizes access and lets us stay in touch with loads of people we could never see or call. It enables us to accomplish huge amounts of work together.

Still, if we rely solely on e-mail at work, the absence of a channel for the brain's emotional circuitry carries risks. In an article to be published next year in the Academy of Management Review, Kristin Byron, an assistant professor of management at Syracuse University's Whitman School of Management, finds that e-mail generally increases the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication.

One reason for this is that we tend to misinterpret positive e-mail messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.

We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing e-mail, the sender internally "hears" emotional overtones, though none of these cues will be sensed by the recipient.

When we talk, my brain's social radar picks up that hint of stridency in your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation, all in the service of working things out. But when we send e-mail, there's little to nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up. E-mail lacks those channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in a conversation, provide its positive or negative spin.

On the upside, the familiarity that develops between sender and receiver can help to reduce these problems, according to findings by Joseph Walther, a professor of communication and telecommunication at Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns out, are less likely to have these misunderstandings online.

These quirks of cyberpsychology are familiar to Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University's interactive telecommunications program. His expertise is social computing - software programs through which multiple users interact, ranging from Facebook to Listservs and chat rooms to e-mail. I asked Professor Shirky what all of this might imply for the multitudes of people who work with others by e-mail.

"When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it's like having functional Asperger's Syndrome - you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle," Professor Shirky said.

"I'm part of a far-flung distributed network that at one point was designing a piece of software for sharing medical data; we worked mostly by conference calls and e-mail, and it was going nowhere. So we finally said we'd all fly to Boston and get together for two days, just sit in a room and hash it out."

During that meeting, the team got an enormous amount of work done. And, Professor Shirky recalls, "because the synchronization by e-mail was so much better after the face-to-face piece, we actually hit the launch date."

He proposes that work groups whose members are widely dispersed but need to have high levels of coordination - say, a computer security team protecting a global bank - do not have to assemble everyone in one room to reap the same benefit. Instead, he suggests a "banyan model," after the Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches.

In this approach, he said, "you put down little roots of face-to-face contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications."

Professor Shirky advised the I.T. head of a global bank to gather together one representative from disparate cities for a day or two and complete tasks. That way, when the security group in Singapore gets e-mail from the security people in London, someone will be more likely to know the sender, and sense how to read the information with less risk of misconstruing or discounting it.

CONSIDER, too, the "e-mail the guy down the hall" effect: as the use of e-mail increases in an organization, the overall volume of other kinds of communication drops - particularly routine friendly greetings. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, people feel more disconnected from co-workers. This was noted in an article in Organizational Science almost a decade ago, just as e-mail was starting to surge. Saying "Hi," it turns out, really does matter; it's social glue.

As Professor Shirky puts it, "social software" like e-mail "is not better than face-to-face contact; it's only better than nothing."

Daniel Goleman is the author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships" (Bantam). E-mail: preoccupations@nytimes.com.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/jobs/07pre.html

Typical Project Management Outcome

When the actual outcome does not match the planned outcome, the management or the team must determine if the origin of the problem is the team collaborating properly.

The Benefits from Building, Connecting and Lead with the Tangible Vision

When a Compass team complete "the initial build and connect with their Tangible Vision" stage, the following actions occur:

• the top-down connections from goal to objectives are understood;
• the team trust are built; and
• the rules for strategic collaboration are defined.
  

When all of the above guidelines are covered, structured order is established in the Compass team.

The Benefits from Collaboratively Building and Connecting a Tangible Vision (2)

"This one who excels at warfare first establishes himself in a position when he cannot be defeated while not losing [any opportunity] to defeat the enemy. For this reason, the victorious army first realizes the conditions for victory, and then seeks to engage in battle. The vanquished army fights first. and then seeks victory . " - Sun Zi's Art of War : Chapter 4 Dispositions


With Compass AE, a project team leads with their Tangible Vision. They can perform the following:
* Determine the critical path;
* Avoid the negatives while focus on the positives;
* Foresee challenges;
* Position strategically;
* Shape the goal; and
* Collaborate through a Character-Based Leadership.

When those six steps are achieved, they are positioned to succeed.

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