1: What makes a great team great?
Is it simply a matter of intelligence? Do teams with the smartest people perform the best?
Is “group intelligence nothing more than the intelligence of the individuals making up the team?” Charles Duhigg asks in Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity.
Actually, no.
In 2008, psychologists from Carnegie Mellon and MIT recruited 699 people and divided them into 152 teams. They provided the groups with a series of assignments that required different kinds of cooperation.
The researchers tested the participants’ IQs beforehand.
They “found that individual intelligence didn’t correlate with team performance,” Charles writes.
“Putting ten smart people in a room didn’t mean they solved problems more intelligently—in fact, those smart people were often outperformed by groups consisting of people who had scored lower on intellect tests.”
What about leadership? Were the most successful teams those with the most decisive leaders?
Once again, the research results say no.
2: So, what explains the performance of the best teams?
A little background information. . . Each group was assigned a series of tasks requiring full team participation and various forms of collaboration.
The researchers began by giving the teams 10 minutes to brainstorm as many uses for a brick as possible. Each team was awarded one point for each unique idea.
Next, they were charged with planning a shopping trip as if they were housemates sharing a single car. Each team member was given a different list of items to purchase, along with a map showing prices at various stores.
“The only way to maximize the team’s score,” Charles writes, “was for each person to sacrifice one item they really wanted in exchange for something that pleased the entire group.”
Finally, the teams were directed to come up with a ruling “on a disciplinary case in which a college basketball player allegedly bribed his teacher,” he explains.
“Some teammates represented the interests of the faculty; others were stand-ins for the athletics department. Points were awarded for reaching a verdict that maximized each group’s concerns.”
The first result? “The teams that did well on one assignment also seemed to do well on the others,” Charles observes.
And, teams that struggled with one assignment also struggled with the other tasks.
“Some teams,” he notes, “came up with dozens of clever uses for the brick, arrived at a verdict that made everyone happy, and easily divvied up the shopping trip.
“Others,” Charles writes, “kept describing the same uses for the brick in different words; came to verdicts that left some participants feeling alienated; and managed to buy only ice cream and Froot Loops because no one was willing to compromise.”
3: So, what was happening here?
“The researchers,” he notes, “eventually concluded that the good teams had succeeded not because of innate qualities of team members, but because of how they treated one another.
“Put differently,” Charles writes, “the most successful teams had norms that caused everyone to mesh particularly well.”
Team performance was determined by the group’s norms, not individual intelligence.
“The right norms could raise the collective intelligence of mediocre thinkers,” he onserves. “The wrong norms could hobble a group made up of people who, on their own, were all exceptionally bright.”
Yet, when the researchers watched videos of the different teams working together, it was apparent that the successful team had a variety of different norms.
“It was striking how different some of them behaved,” says Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author. “Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work evenly.
“Other groups had pretty average members but came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths,” she states. “Some groups had one strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a leadership role.”
Despite the differences, there were two norms that all of the great teams shared.
The first norm that predicted team success was that “members of the good teams spoke in roughly the same proportion,” Charles observes.
“In some teams, for instance, everyone spoke during each task. In other groups, conversation ebbed from assignment to assignment—but by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.”
What was important was that everyone had the opportunity to talk.
“If only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined,” Anita explains. “The conversations didn’t need to be equal every minute, but in aggregate, they had to balance out.”
The second norm that all the great teams shared involved having “high average social sensitivity,” which Charles describes as “a fancy way of saying that the groups were skilled at intuiting how members felt based on their tone of voice, how people held themselves, and the expressions on their faces.”
Researchers measured social sensitivity, or empathy, by having participants look at photos of someone’s eyes and then describe what the person was thinking or feeling.
This “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test was developed by Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge.
Members of the great teams scored above average on the Empathy Test. “They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. They spent time asking one another what they were thinking about. Good teams also had more women. (Women typically choose correctly 61 percent of the time vs. 52 percent for men).
The big takeaway?
The two “successful” norms align with the concept we explored yesterday called “Psychological Safety,” a term popularized by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson.
Psychological Safety is defined as a “shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks. . . [that is] characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.”
Charles writes: “For psychological safety to emerge among a group, teammates don’t have to be friends. They do, however, need to be socially sensitive and ensure everyone feels heard.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Do the teams I am part of create space for everyone to contribute, or do a few voices dominate the conversation?
Action: During my next team meeting, intentionally invite input from someone who has spoken less and pay closer attention to how others may be feeling or reacting.