Article notes must be a minimum of 400 words in length (not including your name, my name, and article citation). Most students tend to write article notes that are 750+ words in length (but varies by each paper), file must be in PDF or Word format.
Include the article citation at the top.
Number each article
Article notes are similar to an annotated bibliography. An annotated bibliography outlines the article and includes a narrative of the key points and/or frameworks presented in the article.
It is expected that your notes are professionally formatted.
These assignments ensure that you are engaging with the course material and probing the articles to get as much out of them as possible. Be sure that you are pulling out the key points and frameworks within each article. You may also include your own thoughts or questions to raise in discussion at the end of the article (so there is no excuse for missing the minimum of 400 words.
Are your article notes good? When you are finished ask yourself whether you could stand up and lead a discussion on the article using only your notes… could you do it three months after initially reading the article? If you have just a collection of bullet points with no connecting narrative, then your article notes are not going to make any sense to you later on.
84 harvard business review | hbr.org
When a major international software developer
needed to produce a new product quickly, the project
manager assembled a team of employees from India and
the United States. From the start the team members
could not agree on a delivery date for the product. The
Americans thought the work could be done in two to
three weeks; the Indians predicted it would take two
to three months. As time went on, the Indian team mem-
bers proved reluctant to report setbacks in the production
process, which the American team members would find
out about only when work was due to be passed to them.
Such conflicts, of course, may affect any team, but in this
case they arose from cultural differences. As tensions
mounted, conflict over delivery dates and feedback be-
came personal, disrupting team members’ communica-
tion about even mundane issues. The project manager
decided he had to intervene–with the result that both the
American and the Indian team members came to rely on
him for direction regarding minute operational details
Teams whose members come from
different nations and backgrounds
place special demands on managers –
especially when a feuding team looks
to the boss for help with a conflict.
by Jeanne Brett, Kristin Behfar, and Mary C. Kern
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Managing
Multicultural
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Managing Multicultural Teams
that the team should have been able to handle itself. The
manager became so bogged down by quotidian issues
that the project careened hopelessly off even the most
pessimistic schedule–and the team never learned to work
together effectively.
Multicultural teams often generate frustrating manage-
ment dilemmas.Cultural differences can create substantial
obstacles to effective teamwork–but these may be subtle
and difficult to recognize until significant damage has al-
ready been done. As in the case above, which the manager
involved told us about, managers may create more prob-
lems than they resolve by intervening. The challenge in
managing multicultural teams effectively is to recognize
underlying cultural causes of conflict, and to intervene in
ways that both get the team back on track and empower
its members to deal with future challenges themselves.
We interviewed managers and members of multicul-
tural teams from all over the world. These interviews,
combined with our deep research on dispute resolution
and teamwork, led us to conclude that the wrong kind of
managerial intervention may sideline valuable members
who should be participating or, worse, create resistance,
resulting in poor team performance. We’re not talking
here about respecting differing national standards for
doing business, such as accounting practices. We’re refer-
ring to day-to-day working problems among team mem-
bers that can keep multicultural teams from realizing
the very gains they were set up to harvest, such as knowl-
edge of different product markets, culturally sensitive
customer service, and 24-hour work rotations.
The good news is that cultural challenges are manage-
able if managers and team members choose the right
strategy and avoid imposing single-culture-based ap-
proaches on multicultural situations.
The Challenges
People tend to assume that challenges on multicultural
teams arise from differing styles of communication. But
this is only one of the four categories that, according to
our research, can create barriers to a team’s ultimate suc-
cess. These categories are direct versus indirect communi-
cation; trouble with accents and fluency; differing atti-
tudes toward hierarchy and authority; and conflicting
norms for decision making.
Direct versus indirect communication. Communica-
tion in Western cultures is typically direct and explicit.
The meaning is on the surface, and a listener doesn’t have
to know much about the context or the speaker to inter-
pret it. This is not true in many other cultures, where
meaning is embedded in the way the message is pre-
sented. For example, Western negotiators get crucial in-
formation about the other party’s preferences and pri-
orities by asking direct questions, such as “Do you prefer
option A or option B?” In cultures that use indirect com-
munication, negotiators may have to infer preferences
and priorities from changes – or the lack of them – in the
other party’s settlement proposal. In cross-cultural nego-
tiations, the non-Westerner can understand the direct
communications of the Westerner, but the Westerner
has difficulty understanding the indirect communications
of the non-Westerner.
An American manager who was leading a project to
build an interface for a U.S. and Japanese customer-data
system explained the problems her team was having this
way: “In Japan, they want to talk and discuss. Then we
take a break and they talk within the organization. They
want to make sure that there’s harmony in the rest of
the organization. One of the hardest lessons for me was
when I thought they were saying yes but they just meant
‘I’m listening to you.’”
The differences between direct and indirect communi-
cation can cause serious damage to relationships when
team projects run into problems. When the American
manager quoted above discovered that several flaws in
the system would significantly disrupt company opera-
tions, she pointed this out in an e-mail to her American
boss and the Japanese team members. Her boss appreci-
ated the direct warnings; her Japanese colleagues were
embarrassed, because she had violated their norms for
uncovering and discussing problems. Their reaction was
to provide her with less access to the people and informa-
tion she needed to monitor progress. They would proba-
bly have responded better if she had pointed out the
problems indirectly – for example, by asking them what
would happen if a certain part of the system was not func-
tioning properly, even though she knew full well that it
was malfunctioning and also what the implications were.
As our research indicates is so often true, communi-
cation challenges create barriers to effective teamwork
by reducing information sharing, creating interpersonal
conflict, or both. In Japan, a typical response to direct con-
frontation is to isolate the norm violator. This American
manager was isolated not just socially but also physically.
She told us, “They literally put my office in a storage
room, where I had desks stacked from floor to ceiling and
I was the only person there. So they totally isolated me,
which was a pretty loud signal to me that I was not a part
of the inside circle and that they would communicate
with me only as needed.”
86 harvard business review | hbr.org
Jeanne Brett is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr., Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations and the direc-
tor of the Dispute Resolution Research Center at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illi-
nois. Kristin Behfar is an assistant professor at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California at Irvine.
Mary C. Kern is an assistant professor at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College in New York.
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Her direct approach had been intended to solve a prob-
lem, and in one sense, it did, because her project was
launched problem-free. But her norm violations exacer-
bated the challenges of working with her Japanese col-
leagues and limited her ability to uncover any other prob-
lems that might have derailed the project later on.
Trouble with accents and fluency. Although the lan-
guage of international business is English, misunderstand-
ings or deep frustration may occur because of nonnative
speakers’ accents, lack of fluency, or problems with trans-
lation or usage. These may also influence perceptions of
status or competence.
For example, a Latin American member of a multicul-
tural consulting team lamented, “Many times I felt that
because of the language difference, I didn’t have the
words to say some things that I was thinking. I noticed
that when I went to these interviews with the U.S. guy,
he would tend to lead the interviews, which was under-
standable but also disappointing, because we are at the
same level. I had very good questions, but he would take
the lead.”
When we interviewed an American member of a U.S.-
Japanese team that was assessing the potential expan-
sion of a U.S. retail chain into Japan, she described one
American teammate this way: “He was not interested in
the Japanese consultants’ feedback and felt that because
they weren’t as fluent as he was, they weren’t intelligent
enough and, therefore, could add no value.” The team
member described was responsible for assessing one as-
pect of the feasibility of expansion into Japan. Without
input from the Japanese experts, he risked overestimating
opportunities and underestimating challenges.
Nonfluent team members may well be the most expert
on the team, but their difficulty communicating knowl-
edge makes it hard for the team to recognize and utilize
their expertise. If teammates become frustrated or impa-
tient with a lack of fluency, interpersonal conflicts can
arise. Nonnative speakers may become less motivated to
contribute, or anxious about their performance evalua-
tions and future career prospects. The organization as a
whole pays a greater price: Its investment in a multicul-
tural team fails to pay off.
Some teams, we learned, use language differences to
resolve (rather than create) tensions. A team of U.S. and
Latin American buyers was negotiating with a team from
a Korean supplier. The negotiations took place in Korea,
but the discussions were conducted in English. Frequently
the Koreans would caucus at the table by speaking Ko-
rean. The buyers, frustrated, would respond by appearing
to caucus in Spanish – though they discussed only incon-
sequential current events and sports, in case any of the
Koreans spoke Spanish. Members of the team who didn’t
speak Spanish pretended to participate, to the great
amusement of their teammates. This approach proved ef-
fective: It conveyed to the Koreans in an appropriately
indirect way that their caucuses in Korean were frustrat-
ing and annoying to the other side. As a result, both teams
cut back on sidebar conversations.
Differing attitudes toward hierarchy and authority.
A challenge inherent in multicultural teamwork is that
by design, teams have a rather flat structure. But team
members from some cultures, in which people are treated
differently according to their status in an organization,
are uncomfortable on flat teams. If they defer to higher-
status team members, their behavior will be seen as ap-
propriate when most of the team comes from a hierar-
chical culture; but they may damage their stature and
credibility – and even face humiliation – if most of the
team comes from an egalitarian culture.
One manager of Mexican heritage, who was working
on a credit and underwriting team for a bank, told us,“In
Mexican culture, you’re always supposed to be humble. So
whether you understand something or not, you’re sup-
posed to put it in the form of a question. You have to keep
it open-ended, out of respect. I think that actually worked
against me, because the Americans thought I really didn’t
know what I was talking about. So it made me feel like
they thought I was wavering on my answer.”
When, as a result of differing cultural norms, team
members believe they’ve been treated disrespectfully,
the whole project can blow up. In another Korean-U.S.
negotiation, the American members of a due diligence
team were having difficulty getting information from
their Korean counterparts, so they complained directly to
higher-level Korean management, nearly wrecking the
deal. The higher-level managers were offended because
hierarchy is strictly adhered to in Korean organizations
and culture. It should have been their own lower-level
people, not the U.S. team members, who came to them
with a problem. And the Korean team members were
mortified that their bosses had been involved before they
themselves could brief them. The crisis was resolved only
when high-level U.S. managers made a trip to Korea, con-
veying appropriate respect for their Korean counterparts.
november 2006 87
Communication in Western cultures is typically direct and explicit.
In many other cultures, meaning is embedded in the way the message is presented.
The differences can cause serious damage to team relationships.
manent or temporary? Does the team’s manager have the
autonomy to make a decision about changing the team in
some way? Once the situational conditions have been an-
alyzed, the team’s leader can identify an appropriate re-
sponse (see the exhibit “Identifying the Right Strategy”).
Adaptation. Some teams find ways to work with or
around the challenges they face, adapting practices or at-
titudes without making changes to the group’s mem-
bership or assignments. Adaptation works when team
members are willing to acknowledge and name their cul-
tural differences and to assume responsibility for figur-
ing out how to live with them. It’s often the best possible
approach to a problem, because it typically involves less
managerial time than other strategies; and because team
members participate in solving the problem themselves,
they learn from the process. When team members have
this mind-set, they can be creative about protecting their
own substantive differences while acceding to the pro-
cesses of others.
An American software engineer located in Ireland who
was working with an Israeli account management team
from his own company told us how shocked he was by the
Israelis’ in-your-face style: “There were definitely different
ways of approaching issues and discussing them. There is
something pretty common to the Israeli culture: They
like to argue. I tend to try to collaborate more, and it got
very stressful for me until I figured out how to kind of
merge the cultures.”
The software engineer adapted. He imposed some
structure on the Israelis that helped him maintain his
own style of being thoroughly prepared; that accommo-
dation enabled him to accept the Israeli style. He also no-
ticed that team members weren’t just confronting him;
they confronted one another but were able to work to-
gether effectively nevertheless. He realized that the con-
frontation was not personal but cultural.
In another example, an American member of a post-
merger consulting team was frustrated by the hierarchy
of the French company his team was working with. He
felt that a meeting with certain French managers who
were not directly involved in the merger “wouldn’t deliver
any value to me or for purposes of the project,” but said
that he had come to understand that “it was very impor-
tant to really involve all the people there” if the integra-
tion was ultimately to work.
A U.S. and UK multicultural team tried to use their dif-
fering approaches to decision making to reach a higher-
Conflicting norms for decision making. Cultures dif-
fer enormously when it comes to decision making–partic-
ularly, how quickly decisions should be made and how
much analysis is required beforehand. Not surprisingly,
U.S. managers like to make decisions very quickly and
with relatively little analysis by comparison with manag-
ers from other countries.
A Brazilian manager at an American company who
was negotiating to buy Korean products destined for
Latin America told us, “On the first day, we agreed on
three points, and on the second day, the U.S.-Spanish side
wanted to start with point four.But the Korean side wanted
to go back and rediscuss points one through three. My
boss almost had an attack.”
What U.S. team members learn from an experience like
this is that the American way simply cannot be imposed
on other cultures. Managers from other cultures may, for
example, decline to share information until they under-
stand the full scope of a project. But they have learned
that they can’t simply ignore the desire of their American
counterparts to make decisions quickly. What to do? The
best solution seems to be to make minor concessions on
process–to learn to adjust to and even respect another ap-
proach to decision making.For example,American manag-
ers have learned to keep their impatient bosses away from
team meetings and give them frequent if brief updates.
A comparable lesson for managers from other cultures is
to be explicit about what they need – saying, for example,
“We have to see the big picture before we talk details.”
Four Strategies
The most successful teams and managers we interviewed
used four strategies for dealing with these challenges:
adaptation (acknowledging cultural gaps openly and
working around them), structural intervention (changing
the shape of the team), managerial intervention (setting
norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and
exit (removing a team member when other options have
failed). There is no one right way to deal with a particular
kind of multicultural problem; identifying the type of
challenge is only the first step. The more crucial step is
assessing the circumstances – or “enabling situational
conditions”–under which the team is working. For exam-
ple, does the project allow any flexibility for change, or do
deadlines make that impossible? Are there additional re-
sources available that might be tapped? Is the team per-
88 harvard business review | hbr.org
Managing Multicultural Teams
Team members who are uncomfortable on flat teams may,
by deferring to higher-status teammates, damage their stature and credibility –
and even face humiliation – if most of the team is from an egalitarian culture.
including the most unlikely, while the U.S. members
chomped at the bit and muttered about analysis paralysis.
The strength of this team was that some of its members
were willing to forge ahead and some were willing to
work through pitfalls. To accommodate them all, the
team did both–moving not quite as fast as the U.S. mem-
bers would have on their own and not quite as thor-
oughly as the UK members would have.
Structural intervention. A structural intervention is
a deliberate reorganization or reassignment designed to
reduce interpersonal friction or to remove a source of
conflict for one or more groups. This approach can be
quality decision. This approach, called fusion, is getting
serious attention from political scientists and from gov-
ernment officials dealing with multicultural populations
that want to protect their cultures rather than integrate
or assimilate. If the team had relied exclusively on the
Americans’“forge ahead”approach, it might not have rec-
ognized the pitfalls that lay ahead and might later have
had to back up and start over. Meanwhile, the UK mem-
bers would have been gritting their teeth and saying “We
told you things were moving too fast.” If the team had
used the “Let’s think about this” UK approach, it might
have wasted a lot of time trying to identify every pitfall,
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november 2006 89
Identifying the Right Strategy
The most successful teams and managers we interviewed use four strategies for dealing with problems: adaptation
(acknowledging cultural gaps openly and working around them), structural intervention (changing the shape of the
team), managerial intervention (setting norms early or bringing in a higher-level manager), and exit (removing a team
member when other options have failed). Adaptation is the ideal strategy because the team works effectively to
solve its own problem with minimal input from management – and, most important, learns from the experience. The
guide below can help you identify the right strategy once you have identified both the problem and the “enabling
situational conditions” that apply to
the team.
REPRESENTATIVE
PROBLEMS
• Conflict arises from decision-
making differences
• Misunderstanding or stone-
walling arises from commu-
nication differences
• The team is affected by emo-
tional tensions relating to flu-
ency issues or prejudice
• Team members are inhibited
by perceived status differ-
ences among teammates
• Violations of hierarchy have
resulted in loss of face
• An absence of ground rules
is causing conflict
• A team member cannot ad-
just to the challenge at hand
and has become unable to
contribute to the project
ENABLING SITUATIONAL
CONDITIONS
• Team members can attribute a
challenge to culture rather than
personality
• Higher-level managers are not
available or the team would be
embarrassed to involve them
• The team can be subdivided
to mix cultures or expertise
• Tasks can be subdivided
• The problem has produced
a high level of emotion
• The team has reached
a stalemate
• A higher-level manager is able
and willing to intervene
• The team is permanent rather
than temporary
• Emotions are beyond the point
of intervention
• Too much face has been lost
COMPLICATING
FACTORS
• Team members must
be exceptionally aware
• Negotiating a common
understanding takes
time
• If team members aren’t
carefully distributed, sub-
groups can strengthen
preexisting differences
• Subgroup solutions
have to fit back together
• The team becomes
overly dependent
on the manager
• Team members may
be sidelined or resistant
• Talent and training
costs are lost
STRATEGY
Adaptation
Structural
Intervention
Managerial
Intervention
Exit
Managing Multicultural Teams
extremely effective when obvious subgroups demarcate
the team (for example, headquarters versus national
subsidiaries) or if team members are proud, defensive,
threatened, or clinging to negative stereotypes of one
another.
A member of an investment research team scattered
across continental Europe, the UK, and the U.S. described
for us how his manager resolved conflicts stemming from
status differences and language tensions among the
team’s three “tribes.” The manager started by having
the team meet face-to-face twice a year, not to discuss
mundane day-to-day problems (of which there were
many) but to identify a set of values that the team would
use to direct and evaluate its progress. At the first meet-
ing, he realized that when he started to speak, everyone
else “shut down,”waiting to hear what he had to say. So he
hired a consultant to run future meetings. The consultant
didn’t represent a hierarchical threat and was therefore
able to get lots of participation from team members.
Another structural intervention might be to create
smaller working groups of mixed cultures or mixed corpo-
rate identities in order to get at information that is not
forthcoming from the team as a whole. The manager of
the team that was evaluating retail opportunities in Japan
used this approach. When she realized that the female
Japanese consultants would not participate if the group
got large, or if their male superior was present, she broke
the team up into smaller groups to try to solve problems.
She used this technique repeatedly and made a point of
changing the subgroups’ membership each time so that
team members got to know and respect everyone else on
the team.
The subgrouping technique involves risks, however. It
buffers people who are not working well together or not
participating in the larger group for one reason or an-
other. Sooner or later the team will have to assemble the
pieces that the subgroups have come up with, so this ap-
proach relies on another structural intervention: Some-
one must become a mediator in order to see that the var-
ious pieces fit together.
Managerial intervention. When a manager behaves
like an arbitrator or a judge, making a final decision with-
out team involvement, neither the manager nor the team
gains much insight into why the team has stalemated.
But it is possible for team members to use managerial
intervention effectively to sort out problems.
When an American refinery-safety expert with
significant experience throughout East Asia got
stymied during a project in China, she called in
her company’s higher-level managers in Beijing
to talk to the higher-level managers to whom the
Chinese refinery’s managers reported. Unlike
the Western team members who breached eti-
quette by approaching the superiors of their Ko-
rean counterparts, the safety expert made sure
to respect hierarchies in both organizations.
“Trying to resolve the issues,” she told us,“the
local management at the Chinese refinery would
end up having conferences with our Beijing of-
fice and also with the upper management within
the refinery. Eventually they understood that we
weren’t trying to insult them or their culture or
to tell them they were bad in any way. We were
trying to help. They eventually understood that
there were significant fire and safety issues. But
we actually had to go up some levels of manage-
ment to get those resolved.”
Managerial intervention to set norms early in
a team’s life can really help the team start out
with effective processes. In one instance reported
to us, a multicultural software development
team’s lingua franca was English, but some mem-
bers, though they spoke grammatically correct
English, had a very pronounced accent. In setting
the ground rules for the team, the manager ad-
dressed the challenge directly, telling the mem-
bers that they had been chosen for their task ex-
pertise, not their fluency in English, and that the
90 harvard business review | hbr.org
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team was going to have to work around language prob-
lems. As the project moved to the customer-services train-
ing stage, the manager advised the team members to ac-
knowledge their accents up front. She said they should
tell customers,“I realize I have an accent. If you don’t un-
derstand what I’m saying, just stop me and ask questions.”
Exit. Possibly because many of the teams we studied
were project based, we found that leaving the team was an
infrequent strategy for managing challenges. In short-term
situations, unhappy team members often just waited out
the project. When teams were permanent, producing
products or services, the exit of one or more members was
a strategy of last resort, but it was used – either voluntar-
ily or after a formal request from management. Exit was
likely when emotions were running high and too much
face had been lost on both sides to salvage the situation.
An American member of a multicultural consulting
team described the conflict between two senior consul-
tants, one a Greek woman and the other a Polish man,
over how to approach problems: “The woman from
Greece would say, ‘Here’s the way I think we should do it.’
It would be something that she was in control of. The
guy from Poland would say,‘I think we should actually do
it this way instead.’ The woman would kind of turn red
in the face, upset, and say, ‘I just don’t think that’s the
right way of doing it.’ It would definitely switch from just
professional differences to personal differences.
“The woman from Greece ended up leaving the firm.
That was a direct result of probably all the different issues
going on between these people. It really just wasn’t a
good fit. I’ve found that oftentimes when you’re in con-
sulting, you have to adapt to the culture, obviously, but
you have to adapt just as much to the style of whoever is
leading the project.”
• • •
Though multicultural teams face challenges that are not
directly attributable to cultural differences, such differ-
ences underlay whatever problem needed to be addressed
in many of the teams we studied. Furthermore, while se-
rious in their own right when they have a negative effect
on team functioning, cultural challenges may also unmask
fundamental managerial problems. Managers who inter-
vene early and set norms; teams and managers who struc-
ture social interaction and work to engage everyone on
the team; and teams that can see problems as stemming
from culture, not personality, approach challenges with
good humor and creativity. Managers who have to inter-
vene when the team has reached a stalemate may be able
to get the team moving again, but they seldom empower
it to help itself the next time a stalemate occurs.
When frustrated team members take some time to think
through challenges and possible solutions themselves, it
can make a huge difference. Take, for example, this story
about a financial-services call center. The members of the
call-center team were all fluent Spanish-speakers, but some
were North Americans and some were Latin Americans.
Team performance, measured by calls answered per hour,
was lagging. One Latin American was taking twice as
long with her calls as the rest of the team. She was han-
dling callers’ questions appropriately, but she was also
engaging in chitchat. When her teammates confronted
her for being a free rider (they resented having to make
up for her low call rate), she immediately acknowledged
the problem, admitting that she did not know how to
end the call politely – chitchat being normal in her cul-
ture. They rallied to help her: Using their technology, they
would break into any of her calls that went overtime, ex-
cusing themselves to the customer, offering to take over
the call, and saying that this employee was urgently
needed to help out on a different call. The team’s solution
worked in the short run, and the employee got better at
ending her calls in the long run.
In another case, the Indian manager of a multicultural
team coordinating a companywide IT project found him-
self frustrated when he and a teammate from Singapore
met with two Japanese members of the coordinating
team to try to get the Japan section to deliver its part of
the project. The Japanese members seemed to be saying
yes, but in the Indian manager’s view, their follow-
through was insufficient. He considered and rejected the
idea of going up the hierarchy to the Japanese team mem-
bers’ boss, and decided instead to try to build consensus
with the whole Japanese IT team, not just the two mem-
bers on the coordinating team. He and his Singapore
teammate put together an eBusiness road show, took it to
Japan, invited the whole IT team to view it at a lunch
meeting, and walked through success stories about other
parts of the organization that had aligned with the com-
pany’s larger business priorities. It was rather subtle, he
told us, but it worked. The Japanese IT team wanted to be
spotlighted in future eBusiness road shows. In the end,
the whole team worked well together – and no higher-
level manager had to get involved.
Reprint R0611D
To order, see page 159.
november 2006 91
One team manager addressed the language challenge directly,
telling the members that they had been chosen for their task expertise, not their
fluency in English, and that the team would have to work around problems.
Copyright 2006 Harvard Business Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Additional restrictions
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please visit hbsp.harvard.edu.
46 HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019 Illustration by PÂTÉ
from the cross-functional teams that
in recent years have become crucial to
business success.
We studied how surgical teams at 16
major medical centers implemented a
diffi cult new procedure for performing
cardiac surgery. What we found sheds
light on one of the key determinants
of team performance: a team’s ability
to adapt to a new way of working. In
corporate settings, teams frequently
have to learn new technologies or
processes that are designed to improve
performance. Often, however, things
get worse—sometimes for a long time—
before they get better. Team members
may fi nd it hard to break out of deeply
ingrained routines. Or they may struggle
CARD IAC SURGERY IS one of medicine’s
modern miracles. In an operating room
no larger than many household kitchens,
a patient is rendered functionally dead—
the heart no longer beating, the lungs no
longer breathing—while a surgical team
re pairs or replaces damaged arteries or
valves. A week later, the patient walks
out of the hospital.
The miracle is a test ament to med ical
technology—but also to incredible team-
work. A cardiac surgical team includes
an array of specialists who need to work
in close cooperation for the oper ation to
succeed. A single error, miscommunica-
tion, or slow response can have disas-
trous consequences. In other words,
surgical teams are not all that diff erent
Speeding Up
Team Learning
The most successful teams adapt quickly to
new ways of working. Now, a study of 16 cardiac
surgery teams offers intriguing insights on how
to make that happen.
→ by AMY EDMONDSON, RICHARD BOHMER, and GARY PISANO
TEAMS THAT LEARN
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2001
HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019 47
to adjust to new roles and communica-
tion requirements.
When a product development team
adopts computer-aided design tools,
for example, designers, test engineers,
process engineers, and even marketers
have to learn the technology. But they
also have to create and become com-
fortable with entirely new relationships,
working collaboratively instead of mak-
ing contributions individually and then
handing pieces of the project off to the
next person.
Most teams become profi cient at new
tasks or processes over time. But time
is a luxury few teams—or companies—
have. If you move too slowly, you may
fi nd that competitors are reaping the
benefi ts of a new technology while
you’re still in the learning stages or that
an even newer technology has super-
seded the one you’re fi nally integrating
into your work. The challenge of team
management these days is not simply to
execute existing processes effi ciently. It’s
to implement new processes—as quickly
as possible.
Whether in a hospital or an offi ce park,
getting a team up to speed isn’t easy. As a
surgeon on one of the teams we studied
wryly put it, the new surgical procedure
represented “a transfer of pain—from
the patient to the surgeon.” But if that
came as no surprise, we were surprised at
some of the things that helped, or didn’t
help, certain teams learn faster than
others. An overriding lesson was that the
most successful teams had leaders who
actively managed their teams’ learning
eff orts. That fi nding is likely to pose a
challenge in many areas of business
where, as in med icine, team leaders are
chosen more for their technical expertise
than for their management skills.
Teamwork in Operation
A conventional cardiac operation,
which typically lasts two to four hours,
unites four professions and a battery
of specialized equipment in a carefully
48 HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019
TEAMS THAT LEARN
SPEEDING UP TEAM LEARNING
Idea in Brief
NEW WAYS OF WORKING
One challenge of team
management is to implement new
processes as quickly as possible—
which can be highly disruptive,
regardless of the industry. The
authors studied how surgical
teams implemented a diffi cult
new procedure for performing
cardiac surgery to discover how
teams learn, and why some learn
faster than others.
CREATING A LEARNING TEAM
The most successful teams had
leaders who actively managed
the groups’ learning efforts.
Teams that most successfully
implemented the new technology
shared three essential
characteristics:
• They were designed for
learning.
• Their leaders framed the
challenge to motivate learning.
• An environment of
psychological safety fostered
communication and innovation.
THE FINDINGS
Team leaders must become
adept at creating learning
environments, and senior
managers must look beyond
technical competence alone to
tap leaders who can manage
and motivate teams of disparate
specialists.
choreographed routine. The surgeon and
the surgeon’s assistant are supported by
a scrub nurse, a cardiac anesthesiologist,
and a perfusionist—a technician who
runs the bypass machine that takes over
the functions of the heart and lungs.
A team in a typical cardiac surgery
department performs hundreds of open-
heart operations a year. Consequently,
the well-defi ned sequence of individ-
ual tasks that constitute an operation
becomes so routine that team members
often don’t need words to signal the start
of a new stage in the procedure; a mere
look is enough.
Open-heart surgery has saved count-
less lives, but its invasiveness—the sur-
geon must cut open the patient’s chest
and split the breastbone—has meant a
painful and lengthy recovery. Recently,
however, a new technology has enabled
surgical teams to perform “minimally
invasive cardiac surgery” in which the
surgeon works through a relatively small
incision between the ribs. The proce-
dure, introduced in hospitals in the late
1990s, held out the promise of a much
shorter and more pleasant recovery for
thousands of patients—and a potential
competitive advantage for the hospitals
that adopted it. (For a description of the
procedure, see the sidebar “A New Way
to Mend a Broken Heart.”
)
Although the scene and players re-
main the same, the new technology sig-
nifi cantly alters the nature of the surgical
team’s work. Obviously, individual team
members need to learn new tasks. The
surgeon, with the heart no longer laid
out in full view, has to operate without
the visual and tactile cues that typi-
cally guide this painstaking work. The
anesthesiologist has to use ultrasound
imaging equipment, never before a part
of cardiac operations. But the mastery of
new tasks isn’t the only challenge. In
the new procedure, a number of familiar
tasks occur in a diff erent sequence, re-
quiring a team to unlearn the old routine
before learning the new one.
More subtly, the new technology
requires greater interdependence and
communication among team members.
For example, much of the information
about the patient’s heart that the sur-
geon traditionally gleaned through sight
and touch is now delivered via digital
readouts and ultrasound images dis-
played on monitors out of his or her fi eld
of vision. Thus the surgeon must rely on
team members for essential information,
disrupting not only the team’s routine
but also the surgeon’s role as order giver
in the operating room’s tightly struc-
tured hierarchy.
Isolating the “Fast Factors”
The 16 teams we studied were among
those that adopted this demanding new
procedure. Given its complexity, they
exercised great care in carrying it out,
checking and double-checking every
step. As a result, the rate of deaths and
serious complications was no higher
than for conventional procedures. But
the teams were taking too long. At every
hospital we studied, operations using
the new technology initially took two
to three times longer than conventional
open-heart procedures.
Time is important in cardiac surgery.
Long operations put patients at risk and
strain operating teams, both mentally
and physically. And with operating-
room time costly and profi t margins for
HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019 49
cardiac surgery relatively high, cash-
strapped hospitals want to maximize
the number of operations cardiac teams
perform daily.
As teams at the various hospitals
struggled with the new procedure, they
did get faster. This underscored one of
the key tenets of learning, that the more
you do something, the better you get
at it. But a striking fact emerged from
our research: The pace of improvement
differed dramatically from team to team.
Our goal was to find out what allowed
certain teams to extract disproportionate
amounts of learning from each incre-
ment of experience and thereby learn
more quickly than their counterparts at
other hospitals.
The adoption of the new technol-
ogy provided an ideal laboratory for
rigorously studying how teams learn and
why some learn faster than others. We
collected detailed data on 660 patients
who underwent minimally invasive
cardiac surgery at the 16 medical centers,
beginning with each team’s first such
operation. We also interviewed in person
all staff members who were involved in
adopting the technology. Then we used
standard statistical methods to analyze
how quickly procedure times fell with
accumulated experience, adjusting for
variables that might influence operating
time, such as the type of operation and
the patient’s condition. Using these and
other data, we also assessed the tech-
nology implementation effort at each
hospital.
Because teams doing conventional
cardiac surgery follow widely accepted
protocols and use standardized tech-
nology, the teams adopting the new
procedure started with a common set
The cardiac surgery
technology we studied is a
modification of conventional
cardiac surgery, but it
requires the surgical team to
take a radical new approach
to working together.
The standard cardiac
operation has three major
phases: opening the chest,
stopping the heart, and
placing the patient on a
heart-lung bypass machine;
repairing or replacing
damaged coronary arteries
or valves; and weaning the
patient from bypass and
closing the chest wound.
The minimally invasive
technology, adopted by
more than 100 hospitals
beginning in the late 1990s,
provides an alternative way
to gain access to the heart.
Instead of cutting through
the breastbone, the surgeon
uses special equipment to
work on the heart through an
incision between the ribs.
The small size of the
incision changes open-heart
surgery in several ways.
For one thing, the surgeon
has to operate in a severely
restricted space. For another,
the tubes that connect
the patient to the bypass
machine must be threaded
through an artery and vein
in the groin instead of being
inserted directly into the
heart through the incision.
And a tiny catheter with a
deflated balloon must be
threaded into the aorta, the
body’s main artery, and
the balloon inflated to act
as an internal clamp. In
conventional cardiac surgery,
the aorta is blocked off with
external clamps inserted into
the open chest.
The placement of the
internal clamp is an example
of the greater coordination
among team members
required by the new
procedure. Using ultrasound,
the anesthesiologist works
carefully with the surgeon
to monitor the path of the
balloon as it is inserted,
because the surgeon can’t
see or feel the catheter.
Correct placement is
crucial, and the tolerances
on balloon location are
extremely low. Once the
balloon clamp is in position,
team members, including the
nurse and the perfusionist,
must monitor it to be sure it
stays in place.
“The pressures have
to be monitored on the
balloon constantly,” said
one nurse we interviewed.
“The communication with
perfusion is critical. When I
read the training manual,
I couldn’t believe it. It was
so different from standard
cases.”
Perhaps it isn’t surprising
that adoption of the
procedure—by all of the
teams—took longer than
expected. The company that
developed the technology
estimated that it would
take surgical teams about
eight operations before
they were able to perform
the new procedure in the
same amount of time as
conventional surgery. But
for even the fastest-learning
teams in our study, the
number was closer to 40.
A New Way to Mend
a Broken Heart
of practices and norms. They also
received the same three-day training
program in the new technology. This
consistency among teams in both their
traditional work practices and their
preparation for the new task helped us
zero in on the “fast factors” that allowed
some teams to adopt the technology
relatively quickly.
Rethinking Conventional
Wisdom
We were surprised by some of the factors
that turned out not to matter in how
quickly teams learned. For instance,
variations among the teams in educational
background and surgical experience didn’t
necessarily have any impact on the steep-
ness of the learning curve. (For a compar-
50 HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019
A Tale of Two Hospitals
The leader of the team implementing the
minimally invasive surgical procedure at
Chelsea Hospital was a renowned cardiac
surgeon who had signifi cant experience with
the new technology. Despite that apparent
advantage, his team learned the new
procedure more slowly than the teams at
many other hospitals, including Mountain
Medical Center, where the team leader was
a relatively junior surgeon with an interest
in trying new techniques. Why?
The new technology as a plug-in
component. Chelsea Hospital (the names
of the hospitals are pseudonyms) is an urban
academic medical center that at the time
of our study had just hired a new chief of
cardiac surgery. He seemed an ideal choice
to lead the department’s adoption of the
new technology, as he had used the new
procedure in numerous operations at another
hospital (one that was not in our sample).
Administrators at Chelsea supported the
surgeon’s request to invest in the new
technology and agreed to send a team
to the supplier company’s formal training
program.
The surgeon, however, played no role in
selecting the team, which was assembled
according to seniority. He also didn’t
participate in the team’s dry run prior to the
fi rst case. He later explained that he didn’t
see the technique as particularly challenging,
having experimented for years with placing
a balloon in the aorta. Consequently, he
explained, “it was not a matter of training
myself. It was a matter of training the team.”
Such training, though, wouldn’t require a
change in his style of communicating with
the team, he said: “Once I get the team
set up, I never look up [from the operating
fi eld]. It’s they who have to make sure that
everything is fl owing.”
Mastering the new technology proved
unexpectedly diffi cult for all team members.
After almost 50 cases at Chelsea, the
surgeon said: “It doesn’t seem to be getting
that much better. We’re a little slicker, but
not as slick as I would like to be.” As at other
sites, team members at Chelsea reported
being amazed by the extent to which the
procedure imposed a need for a new style
and level of communication. But they were
less confi dent than team members at other
hospitals that they would be able to put these
into practice.
The new technology as a team innovation
project. Mountain Medical Center is a
respected community hospital serving a
small city and the surrounding rural area.
Although the cardiac surgery department
didn’t have a history of undertaking major
research or cardiac surgical innovation, it had
recently hired a young surgeon who took an
interest in the new procedure. More than any
of the team leaders at other hospitals, this
surgeon recognized that implementing the
technology would require the team to adopt
a very different style. “The ability of the
surgeon to allow himself to become a partner,
not a dictator, is critical,” he said. “For
example, you really do have to change what
you’re doing [during an operation] based
on a sugg estion from someone else on the
team. This is a complete restructuring
of the [operating room] and how it works.”
Team members, who were picked by the
surgeon based on their experience working
together, responded enthusiastically to his
approach. One noted that the “hierarchy
[has] changed,” creating a “free and open
environment with input from everybody.”
Said another: “I’m so excited about [the new
procedure]. It has been a model, not just
for this hospital but for cardiac surgery. It
is about what a group of people can do.” He
explained that the team got better because
“the surgeon said, ‘Hey, you guys have got
to make this thing work.’ That’s a great
motivator.”
In the end, despite the team leader’s
modest reputation and the hospital’s limited
experience in implementing new cardiac
procedures, Mountain Medical was one
of the two hospitals in our study that learned
the new technology most quickly.
TEAMS THAT LEARN
SPEEDING UP TEAM LEARNING
“instead of weight?
–
Hospitals Compared
2
3
4
5
6
Pr
oc
ed
ur
e
tim
e
(h
ou
rs
)
Number of procedures
0
1
50 10 15 20
Mountain
Medical Center
Average of all
hospitals studied
Chelsea
Hospital
Note: Procedure times have been adjusted for the type of
operation and severity of the patient’s illness. The curves
are trend lines that reflect the average improvement in
procedure times.
HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019 51
ison of teams at two medical centers, see
the sidebar “A Tale of Two Hospitals.”)
We also turned up evidence that coun-
tered several cherished notions about the
ways organizations—and, by im plication,
teams—adopt new technologies and pro-
cesses. For one thing, high-level manage-
ment support for the minimally invasive
technology wasn’t decisive in hospitals’
success in implementing it. At some
hospitals, implementation was unsuc-
cessful despite strong vocal and fi nancial
support from senior offi cials. At others,
teams enjoyed tremendous success
despite support that was ambivalent at
best. For example, one surgeon initially
had diffi culty convincing hospital
administrators that the new procedure
should be tried there; they saw it as a
time-consuming distraction that might
benefi t surgeons but would further tax
the overworked hospital staff . Even
so, the surgeon’s team became one of
the more successful in our study.
The status of the surgeon who led
the team also didn’t seem to make a
diff erence. Conventional wisdom holds
that a team charged with implementing
a new technology or process needs a
leader who has clout within the orga-
nization—someone who can “make
things happen” in support of the team’s
eff orts. But we saw situations in which
department heads and world-renowned
cardiac surgeons couldn’t get their teams
to adapt to the new operating routine.
At other sites, relatively junior surgeons
championed the new technology and,
with little support from more senior
colleagues, brought their teams quickly
along the learning curve.
Finally, the debriefs, project audits,
and after-action reports so often cited
as key to learning weren’t pivotal to
the success or failure of the teams we
studied. In fact, few surgical teams had
time for regular, formal reviews of their
work. At one hospital, such reviews were
normally conducted at midnight over
take-out Chinese food. Some research-
oriented academic medical centers did
aggregate performance data and analyze
the data retrospectively, but teams at
these hospitals didn’t necessarily im-
prove at faster rates. Instead, as we will
discuss, the successful teams engaged
in real-time learning—analyzing and
drawing lessons from the process while
it was under way.
Creating a Learning Team
We found that success in learning
came down to the way teams were put
together and how they drew on their ex-
periences—in other words, on the teams’
design and management. Teams that
learned the new procedure most quickly
shared three essential characteristics.
They were designed for learning; their
leaders framed the challenge in such
a way that team members were highly
motivated to learn; and the leaders’
behavior created an environment of psy-
chological safety that fostered communi-
cation and innovation.
Designing a team for learning.
Team leaders often have considerable
discretion in determining, through
choice of members, the group’s mix of
skills and areas of expertise. The teams
in our study had no such leeway—cardiac
surgery requires a surgeon, an anes-
thesiologist, a perfusionist, and a scrub
nurse. But the leaders who cap italized
on the opportunity to choose partic u lar
individuals from those specialties reaped
signifi cant benefi ts.
At one extreme, the leaders—the
surgeons— took little initiative in choos-
ing team members. At one hospital, the
staff members chosen for training in the
procedure were, essentially, those who
happened to be available the weekend
of the training session.
In a few teams, however, selection
was much more collaborative, and the
choices were carefully weighed. An anes-
thesiology department head, for
instance, might get signifi cant input
from the cardiac surgeon before choos-
ing an anesthesiologist. Selection was
based not only on competence but also
on such factors as the individual’s ability
to work with others, willingness to deal
with new and ambiguous situations, and
confi dence in off ering suggestions to
team members with higher status.
Another critical aspect of team design
was the degree to which substitutions
were permitted. In conventional sur gery,
all members of the surgical department
are assumed to be equally capable of
doing the work of their particular disci-
pline, and team members within
a discipline are readily substituted
for one another. It’s logical to assume
that training additional team members
would allow for more cases to be per-
formed using the new procedure, but
we found that such fl exibility has a cost.
Reductions in average procedure time
(adjusted for patient complexity) were
faster at hospitals that kept the original
teams intact.
At one hospital where several
additional members of the nursing,
anesthesiology, and perfusion staff were
trained in the new procedure shortly
The challenge of team management these days is
to implement new processes—as quickly as possible.
52 HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019
TEAMS THAT LEARN
SPEEDING UP TEAM LEARNING
after adoption, the makeup of the team
changed with almost every operation.
Again and again, teams had to learn from
scratch how to work together. After the
tenth time, the surgeon demanded a
fi xed team whenever he performed the
new procedure. Operations went more
smoothly after that.
Framing the challenge. When
discussing the new procedure with
team members, the leaders of teams
that successfully implemented the new
technology characterized adopting it
as an organizational challenge rather
than a technical one. They emphasized
the importance of creating new ways of
working together over simply acquiring
new individual skills. They made it clear
that this reinvention of working relation-
ships would require the contribution of
every team member.
By all accounts, the diffi culty of the
new procedure makes cardiac surgery
even more stressful than usual, at least
initially. But many surgeons didn’t
acknowledge the higher level of stress or
help their teams internalize the ratio-
nale for taking on this signifi cant new
challenge. Instead, they portrayed the
technology as a plug-in component in
an otherwise unchanged procedure. As
one surgeon told us: “I don’t see what’s
really new here. All the basic components
of this technology have been around for
years.” This view led to frustration and re-
sistance among team members. Another
surgeon, who characterized the proce-
dure as primarily a technical challenge for
surgeons, was assisted by a nurse who,
with grim humor, said she would rather
slit her wrists than do the new procedure
one more time. Her attitude was shared
by many we interviewed.
Becoming
a Learning Leader
Creating an environment conducive
to team learning isn’t hard, but it does
require a team leader to act quickly. Social
psychologists have shown that people
watch their supervisors carefully for cues
on how team members are expected to
behave. These impressions form early in
the life of a group or project. To set the right
tone, team leaders must:
Be accessible. In order to make clear
that others’ opinions are welcomed and
valued, the leader must be available, not
aloof. One nurse in our study commented
about a successful team leader: “He’s in
his offi ce, always just two seconds away.
He can always take fi ve minutes to explain
something, and he never makes you feel
stupid.”
Ask for input. An atmosphere of
information sharing can be reinforced by
an explicit request from the team leader
for contributions from members. The
surgeon on one successful team “told us
to immediately let him know—let everyone
know—if anything is out of place,” said the
team’s perfusionist.
Serve as a “fallibility model.” Team leaders
can further foster a learning environment
by admitting their mistakes to the team.
One surgeon in our study explicitly
acknowledged his shortcomings. “He’ll
say, ‘I screwed up. My judgment was bad in
that case,’” a team member reported. That
signaled to others on the team that errors
and concerns could be discussed without
fear of punishment.
But that attitude wasn’t universal.
At some hospitals, staff members were
excited to be “part of something new,” as
one expressed it. A nurse reported that
she felt honored to be a member of the
team, in part because it was “exciting
to see patients do so well.” The leaders
of teams with positive attitudes toward
the challenge explicitly acknowledged
that the task was diffi cult and empha-
sized the importance of each person’s
contribution. The surgeon who talked
of the transfer of pain from the patient
to the sur gical team helped his team
by highlighting, with light humor, the
frustration they all faced in this learning
challenge.
Creating an environment of psy-
chological safety. Teams, even more
than individuals, learn through trial and
error. Because of the many interactions
among members, it’s very diffi cult for
teams to perform tasks smoothly the fi rst
time, despite well-designed training pro-
grams and extensive individual prepa-
ration. The fastest-learning teams in our
study tried diff erent approaches in an
eff ort to shave time from the operation
without endangering patients. Indeed,
team members uniformly emphasized
the importance of experimenting with
new ways of doing things to improve
team performance—even if some of the
new ways turned out not to work.
As we have noted, this learning in ac-
tion proved to be more eff ective than the
after-action analysis so often touted as
key to organizational learning. Real-time
learning occasionally yielded insights
that might have been lost had a team
member waited for a formal review ses-
sion. During a procedure at one hospital,
for instance, a nurse spontaneously sug-
gested solving a surgical problem with a
long-discarded type of clamp aff ection-
ately known as the “iron intern.” The use
of the nearly forgotten medical device
immediately became part of that team’s
permanent routine.
When individuals learn, the process
of trial and error—propose something,
HBR Special Issue
Winter 2019 53
try it, then accept or reject it—occurs
in private. But on a team, people risk
appearing ignorant or incompetent
when they suggest or try something
new. This is particularly true in the case
of technology implementation, because
new technologies often render many of
the skills of current “experts” irrelevant.
Neutralizing the fear of embarrassment
is necessary in order to achieve the
robust back-and-forth communication
among team members required for
real-time learning.
Teams whose members felt comfort-
able making suggestions, trying things
that might not work, pointing out poten-
tial problems, and admitting mistakes
were more successful in learning the new
procedure. By contrast, when people
felt uneasy acting this way, the learning
process was stifled.
Although the formal training for the
new procedure emphasized the need
for everyone on the team to speak up
with observations, concerns, and ques-
tions while using the technology, such
feedback often didn’t happen. One team
member even reported being upbraided
for pointing out what he believed to be a
life-threatening situation. More typical
was the comment of one nurse: “If you
observe something that might be a prob-
lem, you are obligated to speak up, but
you choose your time. I will work around
the surgeon and go through his PA [phy-
sician’s assistant] if there is a problem.”
But other teams clearly did foster
a sense of psychological safety. How?
Through the words and actions of the
surgeons who acted as team leaders—not
surprising, given the explicit hier archy
of the operating room. At one hospital,
the surgeon told team members that
they had been selected not only because
of their skills but also because of the
input they could provide on the process.
Another surgeon, accord ing to one of his
team members, repeatedly told the team:
“I need to hear from you because I’m
likely to miss things.” The repetition itself
was important. If they hear it only once,
people tend not to hear—or believe—
a message that contradicts old norms.
Leading to Learn
While our research focused on the envi-
ronment of cardiac surgery, we believe
our findings have implications that go
well beyond the operating room. Orga-
nizations in every industry encounter
challenges similar to those faced by our
surgical teams. Adopting new technolo-
gies or new business processes is highly
disruptive, regardless of industry. Like
the surgical teams in our study, busi-
ness teams that use new technology for
the first time must deal with a learning
curve. And the learning that takes place
is not just technical. It is also organiza-
tional, with teams confronting problems
similar to those encountered by the
surgical teams we studied: issues of
status and deeply ingrained patterns of
communication and behavior.
Implementing an enterprise resource
planning system, for example, involves
a lot of technical work in configuring
databases, setting operational parame-
ters, and ensuring that the software runs
properly on a given hardware platform.
The hard part for many companies,
though, is not the technical side but
the fact that ERP systems completely
change the dynamics—the team relation-
ships and routines—of the organization.
As our study shows, it takes time for
teams to learn how decisions should be
made and who should talk to whom and
when. It takes even longer if people don’t
feel comfortable speaking up.
There’s yet another parallel between
business teams and surgical teams.
Business teams are often led by people
who have been chosen because of their
technical skills or expertise in a particular
area: Outstanding engineers are selected
to lead product development proj ects, IT
experts lead systems implementations,
and so on. These experts often find them-
selves in a position similar to that of the
cardiac surgeons. If their teams are to
succeed, they must transform them-
selves from technicians into leaders who
can manage teams in such a way that
they become learning units.
Thus the key finding of our study—
that teams learn more quickly if they are
explicitly managed for learning—imposes
a significant new burden on many team
leaders. Besides maintaining technical
expertise, they need to become adept
at creating environments for learning.
(See the sidebar “Becoming a Learning
Leader.”) This may require them—like
surgeons who give up dictatorial author-
ity so that they can function as partners
on the operating teams—to shed some of
the trappings of their traditional status.
The importance of a team leader’s
actions suggests that the executives
responsible for choosing team leaders
need to rethink their own approaches. For
instance, if an executive views a team’s
challenge as purely technical, he or she
is more likely to appoint a leader based
solely on technical competence. In the
worst (and not unfamiliar) case, this can
lead to disaster; we’ve all known superstar
technocrats with no interpersonal skills.
Clearly, there is a danger in erring too far
in the other direction. If team leaders are
technically incompetent, they’re not only
liable to make bad decisions but they also
lack the credibility needed to motivate
a team. But senior managers need to
look beyond technical competence and
identify team leaders who can motivate
and manage teams of disparate specialists
so that they are able to learn the skills and
routines needed to succeed.
HBR Reprint R0109J
Amy Edmondson, Richard Bohmer, and
Gary Pisano are all affiliated with Harvard
Business School in Boston. Edmondson is
the Novartis Professor of Leadership and
Management; Bohmer, a physician, is a
visiting executive in the Executive Education
program; and Pisano is the Harry E. Figgie
Jr. Professor of Business Administration
and the senior associate dean of faculty
development.
Copyright 2019 Harvard Business Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Additional restrictions
may apply including the use of this content as assigned course material. Please consult your
institution’s librarian about any restrictions that might apply under the license with your
institution. For more information and teaching resources from Harvard Business Publishing
including Harvard Business School Cases, eLearning products, and business simulations
please visit hbsp.harvard.edu.
NEU ROSCIENCE
THE
FEATURE THE NEUROSCIENCE OF TRUST
NEU ROSCIENCE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAN SAELINGER
OF
TRUST
MANAGEMENT BEHAVIORS
THAT FOSTER
EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
BY PAUL J. ZAK
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 85
ompanies are twisting themselves into knots to em-
power and challenge their employees. They’re anx-
ious about the sad state of engagement, and rightly
so, given the value they’re losing. Consider Gallup’s
meta-analysis of decades’ worth of data: It shows that
high engagement—defined largely as having a strong
connection with one’s work and colleagues, feeling
like a real contributor, and enjoying ample chances
to learn—consistently leads to positive outcomes for
both individuals and organizations. The rewards in-
clude higher productivity, better-quality products,
and increased profitability.
So it’s clear that creating an employee-centric
culture can be good for business. But how do you do
that effectively? Culture is typically designed in an ad
hoc way around random perks like gourmet meals or
“karaoke Fridays,” often in thrall to some psycholog-
ical fad. And despite the evidence that you can’t buy
higher job satisfaction, organizations still use golden
handcuffs to keep good employees in place. While
such efforts might boost workplace happiness in the
short term, they fail to have any lasting effect on talent
retention or performance.
In my research I’ve found that building a cul-
ture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference.
Employees in high-trust organizations are more pro-
ductive, have more energy at work, collaborate better
with their colleagues, and stay with their employers
longer than people working at low-trust companies.
They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with
their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.
Leaders understand the stakes—at least in princi-
ple. In its 2016 global CEO survey, PwC reported that
55% of CEOs think that a lack of trust is a threat to
their organization’s growth. But most have done little
to increase trust, mainly because they aren’t sure
where to start. In this article I provide a science-based
framework that will help them.
About a decade ago, in an effort to understand
how company culture affects performance, I began
measuring the brain activity of people while they
worked. The neuroscience experiments I have run
reveal eight ways that leaders can effectively create
and manage a culture of trust. I’ll describe those
strategies and explain how some organizations are
using them to good effect. But first, let’s look at the
science behind the framework.
WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE BRAIN
Back in 2001 I derived a mathematical relationship
between trust and economic performance. Though
my paper on this research described the social, legal,
and economic environments that cause differences
in trust, I couldn’t answer the most basic question:
Why do two people trust each other in the first place?
Experiments around the world have shown that
humans are naturally inclined to trust others—but
IN BRIEF
THE PROBLEM
Leaders know that low
employee engagement is
a sign of lost value—it’s
clearly something they
want to fix. But most of
them don’t know how,
so they provide random
perks, hoping those will
move the needle.
THE SOLUTION
It’s much more effective to
create a culture of trust.
Neuroscience research
shows that you can do
this through eight key
management behaviors that
stimulate the production of
oxytocin, a brain chemical
that facilitates teamwork.
THE PAYOFF
By fostering organizational
trust, you can increase
employees’ productivity
and energy levels, improve
collaboration, and cultivate
a happier, more loyal
workforce.
86 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017
FEATURE THE NEUROSCIENCE OF TRUST
don’t always. I hypothesized that there must be a
neurologic signal that indicates when we should trust
someone. So I started a long-term research program to
see if that was true.
I knew that in rodents a brain chemical called oxy-
tocin had been shown to signal that another animal
was safe to approach. I wondered if that was the case
in humans, too. No one had looked into it, so I decided
to investigate. To measure trust and its reciprocation
(trustworthiness) objectively, my team used a strate-
gic decision task developed by researchers in the lab
of Vernon Smith, a Nobel laureate in economics. In our
experiment, a participant chooses an amount of money
to send to a stranger via computer, knowing that the
money will triple in amount and understanding that
the recipient may or may not share the spoils. Therein
lies the conflict: The recipient can either keep all the
cash or be trustworthy and share it with the sender.
To measure oxytocin levels during the exchange,
my colleagues and I developed a protocol to draw
blood from people’s arms before and immediately af-
ter they made decisions to trust others (if they were
senders) or to be trustworthy (if they were receivers).
Because we didn’t want to influence their behavior,
we didn’t tell participants what the study was about,
even though there was no way they could consciously
control how much oxytocin they produced. We found
that the more money people received (denoting
greater trust on the part of senders), the more oxyto-
cin their brains produced. And the amount of oxytocin
recipients produced predicted how trustworthy—that
is, how likely to share the money—they would be.
Since the brain generates messaging chemicals
all the time, it was possible we had simply observed
random changes in oxytocin. To prove that it causes
trust, we safely administered doses of synthetic oxy-
tocin into living human brains (through a nasal spray).
Comparing participants who received a real dose with
those who received a placebo, we found that giving
people 24 IU of synthetic oxytocin more than doubled
the amount of money they sent to a stranger. Using a
variety of psychological tests, we showed that those
receiving oxytocin remained cognitively intact. We
also found that they did not take excessive risks in
a gambling task, so the increase in trust was not due to
neural disinhibition. Oxytocin appeared to do just one
thing—reduce the fear of trusting a stranger.
My group then spent the next 10 years running ad-
ditional experiments to identify the promoters and
inhibitors of oxytocin. This research told us why trust
varies across individuals and situations. For example,
high stress is a potent oxytocin inhibitor. (Most peo-
ple intuitively know this: When they are stressed out,
they do not interact with others effectively.) We also
discovered that oxytocin increases a person’s empa-
thy, a useful trait for social creatures trying to work to-
gether. We were starting to develop insights that could
be used to design high-trust cultures, but to confirm
them, we had to get out of the lab.
So we obtained permission to run experiments at
numerous field sites where we measured oxytocin
and stress hormones and then assessed employees’
productivity and ability to innovate. This research
even took me to the rain forest of Papua New Guinea,
where I measured oxytocin in indigenous people to
see if the relationship between oxytocin and trust is
universal. (It is.) Drawing on all these findings, I cre-
ated a survey instrument that quantifies trust within
organizations by measuring its constituent factors
(described in the next section). That survey has
allowed me to study several thousand companies and
develop a framework for managers.
HOW TO MANAGE FOR TRUST
Through the experiments and the surveys, I identified
eight management behaviors that foster trust. These
behaviors are measurable and can be managed to
improve performance.
HOW TRUST CREATES JOY
Experiments show that having a sense of higher
purpose stimulates oxytocin production, as does
trust. Trust and purpose then mutually reinforce each
other, providing a mechanism for extended oxytocin
release, which produces happiness.
So, joy on the job comes from doing purpose-
driven work with a trusted team. In the nationally
representative data set described in the main
article, the correlation between (1) trust reinforced
by purpose and (2) joy is very high: 0.77. It means
that joy can be considered a “sufficient statistic”
that reveals how effectively your company’s culture
engages employees. To measure this, simply ask,
“How much do you enjoy your job on a typical day?”
74%
less stress
COMPARED WITH PEOPLE AT LOW-TRUST COMPANIES,
PEOPLE AT HIGH-TRUST COMPANIES REPORT
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 87
Recognize excellence. The neuroscience shows
that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it
occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when
it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unex-
pected, personal, and public. Public recognition not
only uses the power of the crowd to celebrate suc-
cesses, but also inspires others to aim for excellence.
And it gives top performers a
forum for sharing best practices,
so others can learn from them.
Barry-Wehmiller Companies,
a supplier of manufacturing
and technology services, is a
high-trust organization that
effectively recognizes top per-
formers in the 80 production-
automation manufacturers it
owns. CEO Bob Chapman and his
team started a program in which
employees at each plant nominate an outstanding peer
annually. The winner is kept secret until announced to
everyone, and the facility is closed on the day of the
celebration. The chosen employee’s family and close
friends are invited to attend (without tipping off the
winner), and the entire staff joins them. Plant leaders
kick off the ceremony by reading the nominating let-
ters about the winner’s contributions and bring it to
a close with a favorite perk—the keys to a sports car
the winner gets to drive for a week. Though the recog-
nition isn’t immediate, it is tangible, unexpected, and
both personal and public. And by having employees
help pick the winners, Barry-Wehmiller gives every-
one, not just the people at the top, a say in what con-
stitutes excellence. All this seems to be working well
for the company: It has grown from a single plant in
1987 to a conglomerate that brings in $2.4 billion
in annual revenue today.
Induce “challenge stress.” When a manager
assigns a team a difficult but achievable job, the
moderate stress of the task releases neurochemicals,
including oxytocin and adrenocorticotropin, that
intensify people’s focus and strengthen social con-
nections. When team members need to work together
to reach a goal, brain activity coordinates their be-
haviors efficiently. But this works only if challenges
are attainable and have a concrete end point; vague
or impossible goals cause people to give up before
they even start. Leaders should check in frequently
to assess progress and adjust goals that are too easy
or out of reach.
The need for achievabil-
ity is reinforced by Harvard
Business School professor
Teresa Amabile’s findings on
the power of progress: When
Amabile analyzed 12,000
diary entries of employees
from a variety of industries,
106%
more energy
at work
50%
higher
productivity
88 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017
FEATURE THE NEUROSCIENCE OF TRUST
she found that 76% of people reported that their best
days involved making progress toward goals.
Give people discretion in how they do their
work. Once employees have been trained, allow them,
whenever possible, to manage people and execute
projects in their own way. Being trusted to figure things
out is a big motivator: A 2014 Citigroup and LinkedIn
survey found that nearly half of employees would give
up a 20% raise for greater control over how they work.
Autonomy also promotes innovation, because
different people try different approaches. Oversight
and risk management procedures can help minimize
negative deviations while people experiment. And
postproject debriefs allow teams to share how posi-
tive deviations came about so that others can build on
their success.
Often, younger or less experienced employees will
be your chief innovators, because they’re less con-
strained by what “usually” works. That’s how prog-
ress was made in self-driving cars. After five years
and a significant investment by the U.S. government
in the big three auto manufacturers, no autonomous
military vehicles had been produced. Changing tack,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
offered all comers a large financial prize for a self-
driving car that could complete a course in the Mojave
Desert in less than 10 hours. Two years later a group of
engineering students from Stanford University won
the challenge—and $2 million.
Enable job crafting. When companies trust em-
ployees to choose which projects they’ll work on,
people focus their energies on what they care about
most. As a result, organizations like the Morning Star
Company—the largest producer of tomato products
in the world—have highly productive colleagues who
stay with the com-
pany year after year.
At Morning Star (a
company I’ve worked
with), people don’t
even have job titles;
they self- organize
into work groups.
G a m i n g s o f t w a r e
company Valve gives
employees desks on
wheels and encourages them to join projects that
seem “interesting” and “rewarding.” But they’re still
held accountable. Clear expectations are set when em-
ployees join a new group, and 360-degree evaluations
are done when projects wrap up, so that individual
contributions can be measured.
Share information broadly. Only 40% of em-
ployees report that they are well informed about
their company’s goals, strategies, and tactics. This
uncertainty about the company’s direction leads to
chronic stress, which inhibits the release of oxytocin
and undermines teamwork. Openness is the antidote.
Organizations that share their “flight plans” with
employees reduce uncertainty about where they are
headed and why. Ongoing communication is key:
A 2015 study of 2.5 million manager-led teams in
195 countries found that workforce engagement im-
proved when supervisors had some form of daily
communication with direct reports.
Social media optimization company Buffer goes
further than most by posting its salary formula on-
line for everyone to see. Want to know what CEO Joel
Gascoigne makes? Just look it up. That’s openness.
Intentionally build relationships. The brain
network that oxytocin activates is evolutionarily old.
This means that the trust and sociality that oxytocin
enables are deeply embedded in our nature. Yet at
work we often get the message that we should focus
on completing tasks,
not on making friends.
Neuroscience experi-
ments by my lab show
that when people
intentionally build
social ties at work,
their performance
improves. A Google
study similarly found
that managers who
“express interest in and concern for team members’
success and personal well- being” outperform others
in the quality and quantity of their work.
Yes, even engineers need to socialize. A study of
software engineers in Silicon Valley found that those
who connected with others and helped them with their
projects not only earned the respect and trust of their
peers but were also more productive themselves. You
can help people build social connections by sponsor-
ing lunches, after-work parties, and team-building ac-
tivities. It may sound like forced fun, but when people
care about one another, they perform better because
they don’t want to let their teammates down. Adding
a moderate challenge to the mix (white-water rafting
counts) will speed up the social-bonding process.
Facilitate whole-person
growth. High-trust workplaces
help people develop person-
ally as well as professionally.
Numerous studies show that
acquiring new work skills isn’t
enough; if you’re not growing
as a human being, your perfor-
mance will suffer. High-trust
companies adopt a growth
mindset when developing tal-
ent. Some even find that when managers set clear
goals, give employees the autonomy to reach them,
and provide consistent feedback, the backward-
looking annual performance review is no longer
necessary. Instead, managers and direct reports can
76%
more
engagement
13%
fewer sick
days
29%
more satisfaction
with their lives
JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 89
meet more frequently to focus on professional
and personal growth. This is the approach taken
by Accenture and Adobe Systems. Managers can
ask questions like, “Am I helping you get your next
job?” to probe professional goals. Assessing personal
growth includes discussions about work-life integra-
tion, family, and time for recreation and reflection.
Investing in the whole person has a powerful effect on
engagement and retention.
Show vulnerability. Leaders in high-trust work-
places ask for help from colleagues instead of just
telling them to do things. My research team has found
that this stimulates oxytocin production in others, in-
creasing their trust and cooperation. Asking for help is
a sign of a secure leader—one who engages everyone
to reach goals. Jim Whitehurst, CEO of open-source
software maker Red Hat, has said, “I found that being
very open about the things I did not know actually
had the opposite effect than I would have thought.
It helped me build credibility.” Asking for help is
effective because it taps into the natural human
impulse to cooperate with others.
THE RETURN ON TRUST
After identifying and measuring the managerial behav-
iors that sustain trust in organizations, my team and I
tested the impact of trust on business performance. We
did this in several ways. First, we gathered evidence
from a dozen companies that have launched policy
changes to raise trust (most were motivated by a slump
in their profits or market share).
Second, we conducted the field
experiments mentioned ear-
lier: In two businesses where
trust varies by department, my
team gave groups of employ-
ees specific tasks, gauged their
productivity and innovation in
those tasks, and gathered very
detailed data—including direct measures of brain ac-
tivity—showing that trust improves performance. And
third, with the help of an independent survey firm, we
collected data in February 2016 from a nationally rep-
resentative sample of 1,095 working adults in the U.S.
The findings from all three sources were similar, but I
will focus on what we learned from the national data
since it’s generalizable.
By surveying the employees about the extent to
which firms practiced the eight behaviors, we were
able to calculate the level of trust for each organiza-
tion. (To avoid priming respondents, we never used
the word “trust” in surveys.) The U.S. average for or-
ganizational trust was 70% (out of a possible 100%).
Fully 47% of respondents worked in organizations
where trust was below the average, with one firm
scoring an abysmally low 15%. Overall, companies
scored lowest on recognizing excellence and sharing
information (67% and 68%, respectively). So the data
suggests that the average U.S. company could enhance
trust by improving in these two areas—even if it didn’t
improve in the other six.
The effect of trust on self-reported work perfor-
mance was powerful. Respondents whose companies
were in the top quartile indicated they had 106% more
energy and were 76% more engaged at work than re-
spondents whose firms were in the bottom quartile.
They also reported being 50% more productive—
which is consistent with our objective measures of
productivity from studies we have done with employ-
ees at work. Trust had a major impact on employee
loyalty as well: Compared with employees at low-trust
companies, 50% more of those working at high-trust
organizations planned to stay with their employer
over the next year, and 88% more said they would
recommend their company to family and friends as
a place to work.
My team also found that those working in high-
trust companies enjoyed their jobs 60% more, were
70% more aligned with their companies’ purpose, and
felt 66% closer to their colleagues. And a high-trust
culture improves how people treat one another and
themselves. Compared with employees at low-trust
organizations, the high-trust folks had 11% more empa-
thy for their workmates, depersonalized them 41% less
often, and experienced 40% less burnout from their
work. They felt a greater sense of accomplishment,
as well—41% more.
Again, this analysis supports the findings from our
qualitative and scientific studies. But one new—and
surprising—thing we learned is that high-trust compa-
nies pay more. Employees earn an additional $6,450 a
year, or 17% more, at companies in the highest quartile
of trust, compared with those in the lowest quartile.
The only way this can occur in a competitive labor
market is if employees in high-trust companies are
more productive and innovative.
FORMER HERMAN MILLER CEO Max De Pree once said,
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.
The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the
leader must become a servant.”
The experiments I have run strongly support this
view. Ultimately, you cultivate trust by setting a clear
direction, giving people what they need to see it
through, and getting out of their way.
It’s not about being easy on your employees or ex-
pecting less from them. High-trust companies hold
people accountable but without micromanaging
them. They treat people like responsible adults.
HBR Reprint R1701E
PAUL J. ZAK is the founding director of the Center for
Neuroeconomics Studies and a professor of economics,
psychology, and management at Claremont Graduate
University. He is the author of Trust Factor: The Science of
Creating High-Performance Companies (AMACOM, 2017).
40%
less burnout
90 HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW JANUARY–FEBRUARY 2017
FEATURE THE NEUROSCIENCE OF TRUST
Copyright 2017 Harvard Business Publishing. All Rights Reserved. Additional restrictions
may apply including the use of this content as assigned course material. Please consult your
institution’s librarian about any restrictions that might apply under the license with your
institution. For more information and teaching resources from Harvard Business Publishing
including Harvard Business School Cases, eLearning products, and business simulations
please visit hbsp.harvard.edu.
ARTWORK Jeff Perrott, Burden of Good, 2014
Oil on linenSPOTLIGHT
SPOTLIGHT ON MANAGING TEAMS
How to
Preempt
Team Conflict
BY GINKA TOEGEL AND JEAN-LOUIS BARSOUX
Team conflict can add value or
destroy it. Good conflict fosters
respectful debate and yields
mutually agreed-upon solutions that
are often far superior to those first
offered. Bad conflict occurs when
team members simply can’t get past
their differences, killing productivity
and stifling innovation.
Ginka Toegel is a professor
of organizational behavior
and leadership at IMD in
Lausanne, Switzerland.
Jean-Louis Barsoux is a
senior research fellow at IMD.
June 2016 Harvard Business Review 79
HBR.ORG
Disparate opinions aren’t the root of the problem,
however. Most destructive conflict stems from
something deeper: a perceived incompatibility in
the way various team members operate due to any
number of factors, including personality, industry,
race, gender, and age. The conventional approach
to working through such conflict is to respond to
clashes as they arise or wait until there is clear evi-
dence of a problem before addressing it. But these
approaches routinely fail because they allow frustra-
tions to build for too long, making it difficult to reset
negative impressions and restore trust.
In our 25 years of researching team dynam-
ics, coaching teams in Fortune 500 corporations,
and teaching thousands of executives at Duke
University, London Business School, and IMD,
we’ve found that a proactive approach is much
more effective. When you surface differences before
a team starts work—even when the group seems
homogeneous and harmonious—you can preempt
destructive conflict.
We have developed and tested a methodology
that focuses on five areas: how people look, act,
speak, think, and feel. Team leaders facilitate a se-
ries of 20- to 30-minute conversations, encouraging
members to express their preferences and expecta-
tions in each area, identify the most likely areas of
misalignment or friction, and come up with sug-
gestions for how those with differing expectations
can work together. Through the nonjudgmental
exchange of ideas and feedback, teams establish a
foundation of trust and understanding and are able
to set ground rules for effective collaboration.
Though setting aside time for these conversa-
tions up front might seem onerous, we’ve found
that it’s a worthwhile investment for any team—new
or old, C-suite or frontline—that will be collaborat-
ing on significant work for an extended period of
time. Leaders need no special training to facilitate
the discussions. Indeed, we’ve found that managers
can master these conflict-prevention skills far more
easily than those required for conflict resolution.
Five Conversations
Because the five conversations we propose go so far
beyond typical “getting to know you” chitchat, it’s
important to kick them off properly. First, although
this may seem obvious, make sure to include ev-
eryone on the team and explain why you’re initiat-
ing the discussions. You might say something like:
“Working on a team means collaborating with people
whose approaches may differ from your own. Let’s
explore these differences now, while the pressure is
off, so that they don’t catch us by surprise and gen-
erate unproductive conflict at an inopportune mo-
ment.” Explain that the focus of the discussions will
be on the process of work rather than the content.
As the facilitator, make sure that people are com-
fortable sharing at their own pace and coach them
on how to ask clarifying, nonjudgmental questions
of one another. Encourage everyone to begin state-
ments with “In my world…” and questions with “In
your world…?” This phrasing, borrowed from orga-
nizational behavior scholar Edgar Schein, reinforces
the idea that underlying sources of differences are
irrelevant. What does matter is the attitudes and be-
haviors expressed as a result of each person’s cumu-
lative personal and professional experience. For ex-
ample, the fact that you are assertive may be related
to your personality, gender, or culture, but the only
thing your colleagues need to know is that you tend
to vocalize your opinions in plain terms.
Team members are likely to be hesitant as you be-
gin, so ease everyone into the process by volunteer-
ing to share first. Once the dialogue gains steam, let
others guide (but not dominate) it. Eventually, peo-
ple will move from superficial disclosures to deeper
discussion. As they listen to the responses of oth-
ers and offer their own, they will develop not only
a better understanding of their colleagues but also
greater self-awareness.
The five topics can be addressed in any order;
however, we’ve found the sequence presented here
to be the most logical, especially with new teams,
because we perceive first how others look and then
how they speak and act. Only after observing them
for a longer period can we infer how they think or
feel. That said, facilitators should not get hung
up on the categories, because there is inevitable
We unconsciously
respond to cues
in how people look,
move, and dress.
80 Harvard Business Review June 2016
SPOTLIGHT ON MANAGING TEAMS
overlap. Likewise, if participants struggle with the
“In my world” language, it can be tweaked.
Let’s now consider the five categories in turn.
LOOK:
Spotting the Difference
Colleagues routinely make fast judg-
ments (especially negative ones)
about the character, competence, or
status of their peers on the basis of
the briefest exposure—what Nalini
Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, in re-
search conducted at Harvard, called
“thin slices” of behavior. These reac-
tions are often triggered by differences
in the way people present themselves.
We unconsciously respond to cues in
how they look, move, and dress, in
their tone of voice, and in what they
say about themselves.
The goal of this conversation is to help team
members reflect on how they intend to come
across to others—and how they actually do. A
good place to begin is a discussion about the driv-
ers of status in team members’ respective “worlds.”
For example, some people put a premium on job-
related characteristics, such as experience, con-
nections, and functional background. For oth-
ers, status is linked to demographic cues such as
age, gender, nationality, and education. Team
members can quickly put colleagues off by empha-
sizing the wrong credentials, adopting an unsuit-
able persona, or even dressing inappropriately for
the culture. One executive from the “buttoned-up”
banking sector faced this type of conflict when
he joined an advertising group. In a team discus-
sion, one of his colleagues told him, “The norm
here is business casual. So by wearing a suit and tie
at all times, it’s like you think you’re special, and
that creates distance.”
A similar situation arose at a heavy-engineering
company when a female designer joined its board.
Her colorful clothing and introductory comments,
which included two literary references, made
her pragmatic peers think she valued style over
substance, which set her up to be marginalized.
An example that highlights the value of discuss-
ing perceptions up front comes from a global food
group, where a leadership-development rotation of
promising young executives had been creating re-
sentment among older subsidiary executives, most
notably in the Australian operation. The local team
had developed a dysfunctional “keep your head
down” attitude and simply tolerated each ambitious
MBA until he or she moved on. But when one incom-
ing manager engaged his team in the five conversa-
tions at the start of his term, he was able to dispel
their negative preconceptions and develop far-more-
productive relationships than his predecessors had.
ACT:
Misjudging Behavior
On diverse teams, clashing behavioral
norms are common sources of trouble.
Seemingly trivial gestures can have a dis-
proportionate impact, aggravating stereo-
types, alienating people, and disrupting
communication flows.
Physical boundaries are often a prob-
lem area. Consider the media firestorm
that retired French soccer player Thierry
Henry set off when, as a TV pundit re-
acting to surprising breaking news, he
touched the thigh of his male English col-
league. French culture accepts that sort
of interaction, but for television studio
Idea in Brief
THE PROBLEM
Team conflict erupts not
because of differences in
opinion but because of a
perceived incompatibility
in the way different team
members think and act.
When people can’t get past
their differences, the resulting
clashes kill productivity and
stifle innovation.
AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW
Differences in perspective
and experience can generate
great value, of course. A
new methodology helps
leaders guide their teams
through five conversations
before work starts, to build
shared understanding
and lay the foundation for
effective collaboration.
IN PRACTICE
The approach focuses on the
process of work rather than
the content. Leaders facilitate
targeted discussions that
explore the varying ways team
members look, act, speak,
think, and feel, to immunize
the team against unproductive
conflict when the pressure is on.
QUESTIONS TO ASK
“In your world…
…what makes a good first
impression? A bad one?
…what do you notice first
about others (dress, speech,
demeanor)?
…what does that make you
think about them (rigid,
pushy, lazy)?
…what intangible
credentials do you value
(education, experience,
connections)?
…how do you perceive
status differences?”
QUESTIONS TO ASK
“In your world…
…how important are
punctuality and time limits?
…are there consequences
of being late or missing
deadlines?
…what is a comfortable
physical distance for
interacting in the workplace?
…should people volunteer
for assignments or wait to
be nominated?
…what group behaviors are
valued (helping others, not
complaining)?”
June 2016 Harvard Business Review 81
HBR.ORG
HOW TO PREEMPT TEAM CONFLICT
shallow self-promotion. Expectations for how much
colleagues should help one another, as opposed
to contributing individually to the group effort,
can also vary widely. For example, a team of soft-
ware engineers ran into problems when it became
clear that some members were very selective in
giving aid to peers, while others did so whenever
asked. Those who spent more time helping others
understandably began to feel resentful and dis-
advantaged, since doing so often interfered with
their own work. It’s important to establish team
norms around all these behaviors up front to avoid
unnecessary antagonism.
SPEAK:
Dividing by Language
Communication styles have many di-
mensions—the words people choose
to express themselves, tolerance for
candor, humor, pauses and interrup-
tions, and so on—and the possibilities
for misunderstanding are endless.
Teams made up of people with dif-
ferent native languages present signifi-
cant challenges in this area. But even
when everyone is fluent in a particu-
lar language, there may be deep dif-
ferences in how individuals express
themselves. For example, depending
on context, culture, and other fac-
tors, “yes” can mean “maybe” or “let’s
try it” or even “no way.” At a European software
firm we worked with, two executives were at each
other’s throats over what one of them called “bro-
ken promises.” Discussion revealed that words one
had interpreted as a firm commitment were merely
aspirational to his counterpart.
Sometimes even laudable organizational goals
can engender troublesome communication dynam-
ics: For example, corporations that promote a cul-
ture of positivity may end up with employees who
are reluctant or afraid to challenge or criticize. As the
marketing director of a fast-moving consumer goods
firm told us: “You’re not supposed to be negative
about people’s ideas. What’s going through the back
of your mind is ‘I can’t see this working.’ But what
comes out of your mouth is ‘Yeah, that’s great.’”
When teams discuss at the outset how much can-
dor is appropriate, they can establish clear guidelines
about speaking up or pushing back on others. At
colleagues in the macho world of British football, it
was a step too far. Or consider the introverted, high-
anxiety executive we worked with whose warm and
gregarious peer made him uncomfortable: Their ex-
pectations for the proper distance at which to inter-
act differed starkly. “I was taking a coffee with him
at one of those standing tables,” he remembers. “We
literally shuffled round the table as he moved toward
me and I tried to reestablish my buffer zone.”
Attitudes about time can stir up conflict, too.
People differ widely—even within the same firm or
department—with regard to the importance of being
punctual and respectful of other people’s schedules.
More broadly, the value of keeping projects on pace
and hitting milestone deadlines may be paramount
to some, whereas others may value flexibility and
the ability to nimbly respond as circumstances un-
fold. An example comes from a Nordic industrial ma-
chinery company that had recurrent tensions in the
top team. The non-Nordic executives in the group
were deeply frustrated by what they saw as a lack of
urgency shown by their Nordic colleagues, and they
responded with brusqueness—which, of course,
upset their peers. Eventually, the group discussed
the situation and set new rules of engagement. But
a preemptive conversation would have saved them
all a great deal of time and energy.
Differing levels of assertiveness between team
members can present problems as well. Male ex-
ecutives, for example, or people from individualis-
tic corporate and national cultures, often feel quite
comfortable volunteering for special assignments or
nominating themselves to take on additional respon-
sibilities because they consider it a sign of commit-
ment, competence, and self-confidence. But others
may see those actions as blatant, undignified, and
QUESTIONS TO ASK
“In your world…
…is a promise an aspiration
or a guarantee?
…which is most important:
directness or harmony?
…are irony and sarcasm
appreciated?
…do interruptions signal
interest or rudeness?
…does silence mean
reflection or disengagement?
…should dissenting views be
aired in public or discussed
off-line?
…is unsolicited feedback
welcome?”
Differing attitudes
about the
importance of
deadlines often
stir up conflict.
82 Harvard Business Review June 2016
SPOTLIGHT ON MANAGING TEAMS
differences, a facilitator used role play to help the two
groups better understand each other’s perspective.
FEEL:
Charting Emotionals
Team members may differ widely in
the intensity of their feelings, how
they convey passion in a group, and
the way they manage their emotions
in the face of disagreement or conflict.
Sometimes enthusiasm can over-
whelm peers or fuel skepticism. An
extroverted CMO at a logistics com-
pany we worked with assumed that
the more passion she showed for her
ideas, the more responsive the group
would be to them. But her “rah-rah” approach was
too much for the introverted, pragmatic CEO. She
would start picking apart proposals whenever the
CMO got excited. At the other extreme, strong nega-
tive emotions—especially overt displays of anger—
can be upsetting or intimidating.
Negative feelings can be a sensitive issue to
broach, so it’s helpful to start by talking about the
kind of context team members are used to. From
there, the discussion can get more personal. For ex-
ample, in one conversation we facilitated at a con-
struction company, an executive told his colleagues
that “yelling was common” in his previous work-
place—but that it was a habit he wanted to correct.
He told us that he had made this disclosure to “keep
[him]self honest” in pursuit of that goal.
Early discussions should touch on not only the
risks of venting but also the danger of bottling things
up. The tendency to signal irritation or discontent
indirectly—through withdrawal, sarcasm, and pri-
vately complaining about one another—can be just
as destructive as volatile outbursts and intimidation.
It’s important to address the causes of disengage-
ment directly, through open inquiry and debate, and
come up with ways to disagree productively.
THE BENEFITS of anticipating and heading off conflict
before it becomes destructive are immense. We’ve
found that they include greater participation, im-
proved creativity, and, ultimately, smarter decision
making. As one manager put it: “We still disagree,
but there’s less bad blood and a genuine sense of
valuing each other’s contributions.”
HBR Reprint R1606F
a German investment bank, a top team that had been
dominated by several assertive consultants adopted
a “four sentence” rule—a cutoff for each person’s
contributions in meetings—as a way to encourage
taking turns and give more-reserved members a
chance to contribute. At Heineken USA, board mem-
bers use little toy horses that sit on the conference
table to accomplish the same goal: If you’re talking
and someone tips one over, you know you’re beating
a dead horse and it’s time to move on.
THINK:
Occupying Different Mindsets
Perhaps the biggest source of conflict
on teams stems from the way in which
members think about the work they’re
doing. Their varied personalities and
experiences make them alert to vary-
ing signals and cause them to take dif-
ferent approaches to problem solving
and decision making. This can result
in their working at cross-purposes. As
one executive with a U.S. apparel com-
pany noted: “There is often tension
between the ready-fire-aim types on our team and
the more analytical colleagues.”
We found this dynamic in a new-product team
at a Dutch consumer goods company. Members’
cognitive styles differed greatly, particularly with
regard to methodical versus intuitive thinking. Once
aware of the problem, the project manager initiated
discussions about ways to rotate leadership of the
project, matching team needs to mindsets. During
the more creative and conceptual phases, the free-
thinkers would be in charge, while analytical and
detail-oriented members would take over evalua-
tion, organization, and implementation activities.
All members came to understand the value of the
different approaches.
Teams also need to find alignment on tolerance
for risk and shifting priorities. A striking example
comes from a biotech team made up of scientists and
executives. By virtue of their training, the scientists
embraced experimentation, accepted failure as part
of the discovery process, and valued the continued
pursuit of breakthroughs, regardless of time hori-
zon or potential for commercial applications. That
mindset jarred their MBA-trained peers, who sought
predictability in results and preferred to kill projects
that failed to meet expectations. To bridge those
QUESTIONS TO ASK
“In your world…
…is uncertainty viewed as a
threat or an opportunity?
…what’s more important: the
big picture or the details?
…is it better to be reliable or
flexible?
…what is the attitude toward
failure?
…how do people tolerate
deviations from the plan?”
QUESTIONS TO ASK
“In your world…
…what emotions (positive
and negative) are acceptable
and unacceptable to display
in a business context?
…how do people express
anger or enthusiasm?
…how would you react if
you were annoyed with a
teammate (with silence,
body language, humor,
through a third party)?”
HBR.ORG
June 2016 Harvard Business Review 83
HOW TO PREEMPT TEAM CONFLICT
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