Organizing Teams Summary-Week 3

Task 1: Give summary from the following Links/Articles/Videos-3-4 paragraphs.(please see attached files, reading links and Video Links)-Attached File-Analysis assignment in team no need to do the assignment but just give what we can learn from these type of assignment

Use task 2 Posts as references-Please don’t copy paste the same.

Reading Links:

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/rituals-at-work-teams-that-play-together-stay-together

Video Links:

https://hbr.org/video/5566537368001/the-explainer-how-management-teams-can-have-a-good-fight.

Task 2:

Please give comments(2-3 paragraphs) for the below two posts made by other teammates

Post 1:

This week’s assignment allowed me to reflect on previous sports teams I have been on throughout my career. I was able to look at the characteristics of successful teams and non-successful teams that I have been a part of. The difference between successful and non-successful teams was communication and leadership. Successful teams know how to communicate between individuals and leaders set the example for how to work to be successful. This summary ties into my three takeaways for this week. My main takeaway from this week is how individuals communicate can be more efficient than the message. Dr. Alex Pentland explained in the article that understanding how to efficiently communicate with each individual is important. The second takeaway from this week is that every successful team has leaders that set an example, build relationships to help understand how to push others, and communicate effectively. Successful businesses or teams always have a key leader that leads the group and their characteristics through others. Lastly, successful teams must make trust a priority. Individuals must be able to trust each other to complete their tasks and be honest about issues or situations. This trust is built through teamwork and team bonding activities, this is where people can learn how each individual works and their characteristics. If there is a lack of trust among individuals on the team it will cause issues from conflicts. Building a successful team is a process and does not happen overnight. The components of successful teams are communication, trust, and relationships.

Thanks,

Brock Webber

Post 2:

Hi All,

Talking about any organization’s success stories always there are many factors go into practice. In my opinion, one of the most important of all is to have great, efficient teamwork irrespective of what kind of an organization it might be. First, I would like to talk about “The Five Dysfunctions of Teams” pyramid by Patrick Lencioni. In my last class, Employee Engagement we read this book and it was a wonderful read with a real-world story explaining how important Trust among the co-workers can not be over emphasized even from the video we saw this week “Trust in Leadership”. No other factors or steps matter if there is no trust. Conflict sound like bad thing but for real, having a good fight is healthy for anyone in any relation otherwise there won’t be any commitment. Just like we also saw in the video “How Management Team can have a Good Fight” by following the 6 Tactics (work with more information, Have multiple alternatives, establish common goals, inject humor, maintain balanced corporate power or hierarchy). If an employee feels like there is no value for their input or argues about ideas then they won’t see point in committing for the idea which isn’t theirs. If there is no commitment, then there won’t be accountability. No person takes responsibility if that’s not their idea or for which they haven’t worked for or committed for. If there isn’t accountability then that affects the outcome, which is the final goal for any organization. All these functions are interdependent.

Having a productive meeting by using a plan, considering who gets affected with a decision, communicating with them, and getting the feedback, showing empathy, understanding the purpose of a meeting and outcomes of the decision, then testing the plan and checking the impact of the plan is great idea.

Whether it is science or not, how to have a productive team in organizations is very important. Clearly according to Alex Pentland from the article “The New Science Of Building Great Teams” way/pattern anything is communicated is more important than the matter itself. How face-to-face communication is more efficient than texting or emails. The key elements of communication that affect team performance are Energy, Engagement and Exploration. Also, having rituals at work impacts the performance like the author in the article “Rituals at Work: Teams that play together stay together” mentioned.

Thanks,

Dhatri Alla

Artwork Andy Gilmore, Chromatic, 2010
Digital drawingSpotlight

60 Harvard Business Review April 2012

SpotliGht on tHe secRets of gReat teams

Alex “Sandy” Pentland
is a professor at MIT, the
director of MIT’s Human
Dynamics Laboratory
and the MIT Media Lab
Entrepreneurship Program,
and the chairman of
Sociometric Solutions.

The New
Science of
Building
Great Teams

The chemistry of high-performing
groups is no longer a mystery.
by Alex “Sandy” Pentland

Hbr.org

April 2012 Harvard business review 61

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

It seems almost
absurd that how
we communicate
could be so much
more important to
success than what
we communicate.

IF YOU WERE looking for teams to rig for success, a
call center would be a good place to start. The skills
required for call center work are easy to identify and
hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy
to monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor-
mance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved,
customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT,
the golden standard of call center e� ciency). And
the list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call
center have such trouble � guring out why some of
his teams got excellent results, while other, seem-
ingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the
metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the
performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his
assumption that team building was an art, not a
science.

The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human
Dynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive
group dynamics that characterize high-performing
teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity,
and shared commitment to far surpass other teams.
These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and
measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams
can be taught how to strengthen them.

Looking for the “It Factor”
When we set out to document the behavior of teams
that “click,” we noticed we could sense a buzz in a
team even if we didn’t understand what the mem-

bers were talking about. That suggested that the
key to high performance lay not in the content of a
team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was
communicating. Yet little of the research on team
building had focused on communication. Suspect-
ing it might be crucial, we decided to examine it
more deeply.

For our studies, we looked across a diverse set
of industries to find workplaces that had simi-
lar teams with varying performance. Ultimately,
our research included innovation teams, post-op
wards in hospitals, customer-facing teams in banks,
backroom operations teams, and call center teams,
among others.

We equipped all the members of those teams
with electronic badges that collected data on their
individual communication behavior—tone of voice,
body language, whom they talked to and how much,
and more. With remarkable consistency, the data
con� rmed that communication indeed plays a criti-
cal role in building successful teams. In fact, we’ve
found patterns of communication to be the most
important predictor of a team’s success. Not only
that, but they are as signi� cant as all the other fac-
tors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and
the substance of discussions—combined.

Patterns of communication, for example, ex-
plained why performance varied so widely among
the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call
center. Several teams there wore our badges for six
weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues
at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin,
and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we
found that the best predictors of productivity were a
team’s energy and engagement outside formal meet-
ings. Together those two factors explained one-third
of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.

Drawing on that insight, we advised the cen-
ter’s manager to revise the employees’ co� ee break
schedule so that everyone on a team took a break at
the same time. That would allow people more time
to socialize with their teammates, away from their
workstations. Though the suggestion � ew in the face
of standard efficiency practices, the manager was
ba� ed and desperate, so he tried it. And it worked:
AHT fell by more than 20% among lower-performing
teams and decreased by 8% overall at the call center.
Now the manager is changing the break schedule at
all 10 of the bank’s call centers (which employ a total
of 25,000 people) and is forecasting $15 million a year
in productivity increases. He has also seen employee

Why Do Patterns of Communication Matter So Much?
Yet if we look at our evolutionary history, we can
see that language is a relatively recent develop-
ment and was most likely layered upon older sig-
nals that communicated dominance, interest, and
emotions among humans. Today these ancient pat-
terns of communication still shape how we make
decisions and coordinate work among ourselves.

Consider how early man may have approached
problem solving. One can imagine humans sitting
around a campfi re (as a team) making suggestions,
relating observations, and indicating interest or
approval with head nods, gestures, or vocal signals.
If some people failed to contribute or to signal their
level of interest or approval, then the group mem-
bers had less information and weaker judgment,
and so were more likely to go hungry.

I IF YOU WERE I IF YOU WERE
call center would be a good place to start. The skills Icall center would be a good place to start. The skills
required for call center work are easy to identify and Irequired for call center work are easy to identify and
hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy Ihire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy
to monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor-Ito monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor-
mance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, Imance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved,
customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, Icustomer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT,
the golden standard of call center e� ciency). And Ithe golden standard of call center e� ciency). And
the list goes on.Ithe list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call IWhy, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call
center have such trouble � guring out why some of Icenter have such trouble � guring out why some of
his teams got excellent results, while other, seem-Ihis teams got excellent results, while other, seem-
ingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the Iingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the
metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the Imetrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the
performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his Iperformance gaps. This mystery reinforced his
assumption that team building was an art, not a Iassumption that team building was an art, not a
science. Iscience.

The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human IThe truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human
Dynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive IDynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive
group dynamics that characterize high-performing Igroup dynamics that characterize high-performing
teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, Iteams—those blessed with the energy, creativity,
and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. Iand shared commitment to far surpass other teams.
These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and IThese dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and
measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams Imeasurable. And, perhaps most important, teams
can be taught how to strengthen them.Ican be taught how to strengthen them.

62 Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more
than 10%.

Any company, no matter how large, has the po-
tential to achieve this same kind of transformation.
Firms now can obtain the tools and data they need
to accurately dissect and engineer high performance.
Building great teams has become a science. Here’s
how it works.

Overcoming the Limits of Observation
When we sense esprit de corps, that perception
doesn’t come out of the blue; it’s the result of our in-
nate ability to process the hundreds of complex com-
munication cues that we constantly send and receive.

But until recently we had never been able to ob-
jectively record such cues as data that we could then
mine to understand why teams click. Mere observa-
tion simply couldn’t capture every nuance of human
behavior across an entire team. What we had, then,
was only a strong sense of the things—good leader-
ship and followership, palpable shared commit-
ment, a terri� c brainstorming session—that
made a team greater than the sum of its parts.

Recent advances in wireless and sensor
technology, though, have helped us over-
come those limitations, allowing us to mea-
sure that ineffable “It factor.” The badges
developed at my lab at MIT are in their seventh
version. They generate more than 100 data points
a minute and work unobtrusively enough that we’re
con� dent we’re capturing natural behavior. (We’ve
documented a period of adjustment to the badges:
Early on, people appear to be aware of them and act
unnaturally, but the e� ect dissipates, usually within
an hour.) We’ve deployed them in 21 organizations
over the past seven years, measuring the commu-
nication patterns of about 2,500 people, sometimes
for six weeks at a time.

With the data we’ve collected, we’ve mapped the
communication behaviors of large numbers of peo-

ple as they go about their lives, at an unprecedented
level of detail. The badges produce “sociometrics,”
or measures of how people interact—such as what
tone of voice they use; whether they face one an-
other; how much they gesture; how much they talk,
listen, and interrupt; and even their levels of extro-
version and empathy. By comparing data gathered
from all the individuals on a team with performance
data, we can identify the communication patterns
that make for successful teamwork.

Those patterns vary little, regardless of the type
of team and its goal—be it a call center team striv-
ing for e� ciency, an innovation team at a pharma-
ceutical company looking for new product ideas, or
a senior management team hoping to improve its
leadership. Productive teams have certain data sig-
natures, and they’re so consistent that we can pre-
dict a team’s success simply by looking at the data—
without ever meeting its members.

We’ve been able to foretell, for example, which
teams will win a business plan contest, solely on the
basis of data collected from team members wearing
badges at a cocktail reception. (See “Defend Your
Research: We Can Measure the Power of Charisma,”
HBR January–February 2010.) We’ve predicted the
financial results that teams making investments
would achieve, just on the basis of data collected dur-
ing their negotiations. We can see in the data when
team members will report that they’ve had a “pro-
ductive” or “creative” day.

Idea in Brief
What managers sense
as an ineff able buzz
or esprit de corps in a
good team is actually
observable, measur-
able, and learnable.

In data collected by wearable
electronic sensors that capture
people’s tone of voice and
body language, we can see the
highly consistent patterns of

communication that are as-
sociated with productive teams,
regardless of what kind of work
they do. The data do not take
into account the substance
of communication, only the
patterns, but they show that
those patterns are what matter
most—more than skill, intel-
ligence, and all other factors
that go into building a team
combined.

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WHAT DATA THE
SOCIOMETRIC
BADGES COLLECT

HBR.OR

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 63

WHEN PEOPLE
ARE TALKING AND
THEIR TONE OF
VOICE, BUT NOT
WORDS

BODY POSITION
RELATIVE TO OTHERS—
WHETHER PEOPLE
FACE EACH OTHER
AND HOW THEY STAND
IN A GROUP

BODY LANGUAGE,
INCLUDING ARM AND
HAND MOVEMENTS
AND NODS, BUT NOT
FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

Mapping Teamwork
CONCERNED ABOUT UNEVEN PERFORMANCE across its branches, a
bank in Prague outfi tted customer-facing teams with electronic
sensors for six weeks. The fi rst two maps below display data col-
lected from one team of nine people over the course of diff er-
ent days, and the third illustrates data collected on interactions
between management and all the

teams.

By looking at the data, we unearthed a divide between teams at
the “Soviet era” branches of the bank and teams at more modern
facilities. Interestingly, at the Soviet-era branches, where poor

team communication was the rule, communication outside teams
was much higher, suggesting that those teams were desperately
reaching out for answers to their problems. Teams at the modern
facilities showed high energy and less need to explore outside.
After seeing initial data, the bank’s management published these
dashboard displays for all the teams to see and also reorganized
the teams so that they contained a mix of members from old and
new branches. According to the bank, those measures helped
improve the working culture within all the teams.

Exploration
HOW TEAMS COMMUNICATE
WITH ONE ANOTHER

Energy
HOW TEAM MEMBERS CONTRIBUTE
TO A TEAM AS A WHOLE

Engagement
HOW TEAM MEMBERS COMMUNICATE
WITH ONE ANOTHER

Clearly, these data come from a team
at a branch with poor customer service.
We can see that A, C, and E give off more
informal energy than the rest of the team
does. A, B, and C contribute a lot to the
team, while the others contribute noth-
ing. The pattern illustrated here is often
associated with hierarchical teams in
which a boss (C) issues commands while
his lieutenants (A and B) reinforce his
directions. The three are a “team within
a team,” and it’s likely that the others
feel they have no input. Often leaders are
shocked and embarrassed to see how
much they dominate a team and imme-
diately try to change the pattern. Sharing
such a map with the team can make it
easier for less energetic individuals to
talk about their sense of the team’s dys-
function, because data are objective and
elevate the discussion beyond attacks or
complaints.

This diagram shows that the same team’s
engagement skews heavily to the same
three people (A, B, and C). G is making
an eff ort to reach the decision makers,
but the team within the team is where
the engagement is. Those three people
may be higher up the ladder or simply
more extroverted, but that doesn’t
matter. This pattern is associated with
lower performance because the team
is not getting ideas or information from
many of its members. Leaders can use
this map both to assess “invisible” team
members (How can they get them more
involved? Are they the right people for
the project?) and to play the role of a

“charismatic connector” by bringing to-
gether members who ought to be talking
to one another and then helping those
members share their thinking with the
entire group.

This map shows that management is
doing a lot of exploring. Although its
internal team energy is relatively low,
that is OK. Energy and engagement can-
not be high when exploration is, because
when you’re exploring you have less time
to engage with your own team. In a high-
functioning organization, however, there
would be more exploration among all the
teams, and you’d see an arc between,
say, Teams 3 and 4, or Teams 5 and 9. A
time lapse view of all the teams’ explora-
tion would show whether teams were os-
cillating between communication within
their own group (shown by the yellow
dots) and exploration with other teams
(shown by the green arcs). If they’re not,
it could mean silo busting is needed to
encourage proper exploration.

IDEAL
TEAM

ENERGY

AMOUNT OF
COMMUNICATION
BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS

AMOUNT OF
COMMUNICATION
BETWEEN TEAMS

INTERNAL
TEAM
ENERGY

M
AN

AG
EM

TE
AM

1
0

TOTAL TEAM ENERGY
(DOT’S POSITION
REFLECTS WHO

CONTRIBUTES MOST)

TEAM
MEMBER A
AMOUNT OF
INFORMAL
ENERGY

AMOUNT
OF ENERGY
CONTRIBUTED
TO TEAM

COURTESY OF SOCIOMETRIC SOLUTIONS

64 Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

The data also reveal, at a higher level, that suc-
cessful teams share several de� ning characteristics:

1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in
roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short
and sweet.

2. Members face one another, and their conversa-
tions and gestures are energetic.

3. Members connect directly with one another—
not just with the team leader.

4. Members carry on back-channel or side conver-
sations within the team.

5. Members periodically break, go exploring out-
side the team, and bring information back.

The data also establish another surprising fact:
Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less
to team success than one might expect. The best
way to build a great team is not to select individu-
als for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn
how they communicate and to shape and guide the
team so that it follows successful communication
patterns.

The Key Elements of Communication
In our research we identi� ed three aspects of com-
munication that a� ect team performance. The � rst
is energy, which we measure by the number and
the nature of exchanges among team mem-
bers. A single exchange is de� ned as a com-
ment and some acknowledgment—for
example, a “yes” or a nod of the head.
Normal conversations are often made up
of many of these exchanges, and in a team
setting more than one exchange may be go-
ing on at a time.

The most valuable form of communication is
face-to-face. The next most valuable is by phone or
videoconference, but with a caveat: Those technolo-
gies become less e� ective as more people participate
in the call or conference. The least valuable forms
of communication are e-mail and texting. (We col-
lect data on those kinds of communication without
using the badges. Still, the number of face-to-face
exchanges alone provides a good rough measure
of energy.) The number of exchanges engaged in,
weighted for their value by type of communication,
gives each team member an energy score, which is
averaged with other members’ results to create a
team score.

Energy levels within a team are not static. For in-
stance, in my research group at MIT, we sometimes
have meetings at which I update people on upcom-

ing events, rule changes, and other administrative
details. These meetings are invariably low energy.
But when someone announces a new discovery in
the same group, excitement and energy skyrocket as
all the members start talking to one another at once.

The second important dimension of communi-
cation is engagement, which re� ects the distribution
of energy among team members. In a simple three-
person team, engagement is a function of the av-
erage amount of energy between A and B, A and
C, and B and C. If all members of a team have rela-
tively equal and reasonably high energy with all
other members, engagement is extremely strong.
Teams that have clusters of members who engage in
high-energy communication while other members
do not participate don’t perform as well. When we
observed teams making investment decisions, for
instance, the partially engaged teams made worse
(less profitable) decisions than the fully engaged
teams. This e� ect was particularly common in far-
� ung teams that talked mostly by telephone.

The third critical dimension, exploration, in-
volves communication that members engage in out-
side their team. Exploration essentially is the energy
between a team and the other teams it interacts with.

Higher-performing teams seek more outside con-
nections, we’ve found. We’ve also seen that scoring
well on exploration is most important for creative
teams, such as those responsible for innovation,
which need fresh perspectives.

To measure exploration, we have to deploy
badges more widely in an organization. We’ve done
so in many settings, including the MIT Media Lab
and a multinational company’s marketing depart-
ment, which comprised several teams dedicated to
di� erent functions.

Our data also show that exploration and engage-
ment, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because
they require that the energy of team members be put
to two di� erent uses. Energy is a � nite resource. The
more that people devote to their own team (engage-

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HBR.ORG

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 65

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER
SERVICE MANAGEMENT SUPPORTSALES CUSTOMER

SERVICE

ment), the less they have to use outside their team
(exploration), and vice versa.

But they must do both. Successful teams, espe-
cially successful creative teams, oscillate between
exploration for discovery and engagement for inte-
gration of the ideas gathered from outside sources.
At the MIT Media Lab, this pattern accounted for
almost half of the di� erences in creative output of
research groups. And in one industrial research lab
we studied, it distinguished teams with high creativ-
ity from those with low creativity with almost 90%
accuracy.

Beyond Conventional Wisdom
A skeptic would argue that the points about energy,
engagement, and exploration are blindingly obvious.
But the data from our research improve on conven-
tional wisdom. They add an unprecedented level of
precision to our observations, quantify the key dy-
namics, and make them measurable to an extraordi-
nary degree.

For example, we now know that 35% of the varia-
tion in a team’s performance can be accounted for
simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges
among team members. We know as well that the

“right” number of exchanges in a team is as many
as dozens per working hour, but that going beyond
that ideal number decreases performance. We
can also state with certainty that in a typical high-
performance team, members are listening or speak-
ing to the whole group only about half the time, and
when addressing the whole group, each team mem-
ber speaks for only his or her fair share of time, using
brief, to-the-point statements. The other half of the
time members are engaging in one-on-one conver-
sations, which are usually quite short. It may seem
illogical that all those side exchanges contribute to
better performance, rather than distract a team, but
the data prove otherwise.

The data we’ve collected on the importance of
socializing not only build on conventional wisdom
but sometimes upend it. Social time turns out to be
deeply critical to team performance, often account-
ing for more than 50% of positive changes in com-
munication patterns, even in a setting as e� ciency-
focused as a call center.

Without the data there’s simply no way to under-
stand which dynamics drive successful teams. The
managers of one young software company, for in-
stance, thought they could promote better commu-

Mapping Communication over Time

THE MAPS BELOW DEPICT the communica-
tion patterns in a German bank’s marketing
department in the days leading up to and
immediately following a major new product
launch. The department had teams of
four members each in customer service,

sales, support, development, and manage-
ment. Besides collecting data on in-person
interactions with sociometric badges, we
gathered e-mail data to assess the balance
between high-value face-to-face communi-
cation and lower-value digital messages.

Most communication is via e-mail,
not face-to-face. In an ideal situ-
ation, the green arcs would be
thicker than the gray ones, and
there would be strong connec-
tions among all teams.

Management is communicating
face-to-face a little bit with every
team except customer service,
and most groups aren’t talking
much to one another.

Customer service
is the least con-
nected to other

teams.

Only sales and support
interact with each other
a lot in person—most
likely because they are
prepping for the launch.

DAY 2 MANAGEMENT IS CLEARLY DOING
MOST OF THE COMMUNICATING.

DAY 6 MANAGEMENT BY
E-MAIL CONTINUES.

THICKNESS OF
ARCS INDICATES
THE AMOUNT OF
COMMUNICATION
BETWEEN GROUPS

GRAY INDICATES
COMMUNICATION
VIA E-MAIL

GREEN INDICATES
FACE-TO-FACE
COMMUNICATION

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SUPPORT

HOW TO READ THESE MAPS

66 Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

MANAGEMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER
SERVICE

nication among employees by hosting “beer meets”
and other events. But the badge data showed that
these events had little or no e� ect. In contrast, the
data revealed that making the tables in the compa-
ny’s lunchroom longer, so that strangers sat together,
had a huge impact.

A similarly refined view of exploration has
emerged in the data. Using fresh perspectives to
improve performance is hardly a surprising idea;
it’s practically management canon. But our re-
search shows that most companies don’t do it the
right way. Many organizations we’ve studied seek
outside counsel repeatedly from the same sources
and only at certain times (when building a business
case, say, or doing a postmortem on a project). The
best-performing and most creative teams in our
study, however, sought fresh perspectives con-
stantly, from all other groups in (and some outside)
the organization.

How to Apply the Data
For management tasks that have long de� ed objec-
tive analysis, like team building, data can now pro-
vide a foundation on which to build better individual
and team performance. This happens in three steps.

Step 1: Visualization. In raw form the data don’t
mean much to the teams being measured. An energy
score of 0.5 may be good for an individual, for exam-
ple, but descriptions of team dynamics that rely on
statistical output are not particularly user-friendly.
However, using the formulas we developed to cal-
culate energy, engagement, and exploration, we can
create maps of how a team is doing on those dimen-
sions, visualizations that clearly convey the data and
are instantly accessible to anyone. The maps starkly
highlight weaknesses that teams may not have rec-
ognized. They identify low-energy, unengaged team
members who, even in the visualization, look as if
they’re being ignored. (For examples, see the exhibit

“Mapping Teamwork.”)
When we spot such people, we dig down into

their individual badge data. Are they trying to con-
tribute and being ignored or cut off? Do they cut
others o� and not listen, thereby discouraging col-
leagues from seeking their opinions? Do they com-
municate only with one other team member? Do
they face other people in meetings or tend to hide
from the group physically? Do they speak loudly
enough? Perhaps the leader of a team is too domi-
nant; it may be that she is doing most of the talking

Mapping Communication over Time

Sales is now clearly
engaging with development,

probably to learn the fi nal
details of the product

off ering and understand its
technical aspects.

The big jump in com-
munication here might
be a result of sales’
hammering develop-
ment about why the
product isn’t working
and how it can be fi xed.

For the fi rst time, e-mail
communication is lower
than face-to-face com-
munication. In a crisis
people naturally start
talking more in person.

We did not provide iterative feedback
in this project, but if we had, by the end
of week one, we would have pointed out
three negative trends the group could
have corrected: the invisibility of customer
service, overreliance on e-mail, and highly

uneven communication among groups.
If these issues had been addressed, the
problems with the product might have
surfaced much earlier, and the responses
to them would probably have improved.

Customer
service is still
not involved.

DAY 15 AS THE LAUNCH APPROACHES,
COMMUNICATION IS STARTLINGLY LOW.

DAY 23 TWO DAYS AFTER LAUNCH, TEAMS ARE
FINALLY COMMUNICATING IN PERSON, AS THEY
TRIAGE A DISASTROUS CAMPAIGN.

Customer
service and
support are
locked in all-
day meetings
trying to patch
the problems.

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER
SERVICE DEVELOPMENT

HBR.ORG

April 2012 Harvard Business Review 67

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

at meetings and needs to work on encouraging oth-
ers to participate. Energy and engagement maps will
make such problems clear. And once we know what
they are, we can begin to � x them.

Exploration maps reveal patterns of communi-
cation across organizations. They can expose, for
instance, whether a department’s management is
failing to engage with all its teams. Time-lapse views
of engagement and exploration will show whether
teams are e� ectively oscillating between those two
activities. It’s also possible to layer more detail into
the visualizations. We can create maps that break
out di� erent types of communication among team
members, to discover, for example, if teams are fall-
ing into counterproductive patterns such as shooting
o� e-mail when they need more face time. (For an
example, see the exhibit “Mapping Communication
over Time.”)

Step 2: Training. With maps of the data in hand,
we can help teams improve performance through it-
erative visual feedback.

Work we did with a multicultural design team
composed of both Japanese and American members
o� ers a good example. (Visual data are especially ef-
fective at helping far-� ung and multilingual groups,
which face special communication challenges.) The
team’s maps (see the exhibit “Mapping Communica-
tion Improvement”) showed that its communication
was far too uneven. They highlighted that the Japa-
nese members were initially reluctant to speak up,
leaving the team both low energy and unengaged.

Every day for a week, we provided team mem-
bers a visualization of that day’s work, with some
light interpretation of what we saw. (Keep in mind
that we didn’t know the substance of their work, just
how they were interacting.) We also told them that
the ideal visualization would show members con-
tributing equally and more overall contributions. By
day seven, the maps showed, the team’s energy and
engagement had improved vastly, especially for the
two Japanese members, one of whom had become a
driving force.

The notion that visual feedback helps people
improve quickly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone
who has ever had a golf swing analyzed on video or
watched himself deliver a speech. Now we have the
visual tools to likewise improve teamwork through
objective analysis.

Step 3: Fine-tuning performance. We have
seen that by using visualizations as a training tool,
teams can quickly improve their patterns of com-

munication. But does that translate to improved
performance? Yes. The third and � nal step in using
the badge data is to map energy and engagement
against performance metrics. In the case of the
Japanese-American team, for example, we mapped
the improved communication patterns against the
team’s self-reported daily productivity. The closer
the patterns came to those of our high-performance
ideal, the higher productivity rose.

We’ve duplicated this result several times over,
running similar feedback loops with teams aiming
to be more creative and with executive teams look-
ing for more cohesiveness. In every case the self-
reporting on e� ectiveness mapped to the improved
patterns of communication.

Through such maps, we often make important
discoveries. One of the best examples comes from
the bank’s call center. For each team there, we
mapped energy and engagement against average
handling time (AHT), which we indicated with color.
(See the exhibit “Mapping Communication Against
Performance.”) That map clearly showed that the
most e� cient work was done by high-energy, high-
engagement teams. But surprisingly, it also showed
that low-energy, low-engagement teams could out-
perform teams that were unbalanced—teams that
had high energy and low engagement, or low energy
and high engagement. The maps revealed that the
manager needed to keep energy and engagement in
balance as he worked to strengthen them.

If a hard metric like AHT isn’t available, we can
map patterns against subjective measures. We have
asked teams to rate their days on a scale of “creativ-
ity” or “frustration,” for example, and then seen
which patterns are associated with highly creative or
frustrating days. Teams often describe this feedback
as “a revelation.”

Successful tactics. The obvious question at
this point is, Once I recognize I need to improve
energy and engagement, how do I go about doing
it? What are the best techniques for moving those
measurements?

Simple approaches such as reorganizing office
space and seating are effective. So is setting a per-
sonal example—when a manager himself actively
encourages even participation and conducts more
face-to-face communication. Policy changes can im-
prove teams, too. Eschewing Robert’s Rules of Order,
for example, is a great way to promote change. In
some cases, switching out team members and bring-
ing in new blood may be the best way to improve the

Our data show that far-
fl ung and mixed-language
teams often struggle to
gel. Distance plays a role:
Electronic communication
doesn’t create the same
energy and engagement that
face-to-face communication
does. Cultural norms play
a role too. Visual feedback
on communication patterns
can help.

For one week we
gathered data on a team
composed of Japanese
and Americans that were
brainstorming a new design
together in Japan. Each
day the team was shown
maps of its communication
patterns and given simple
guidance about what makes
good communication (active
but equal participation).

MAPPING
COMMUNICATION
IMPROVEMENT

DAY 1 The two Japanese
team members (bottom and
lower left) are not engaged,
and a team within a team
seems to have formed
around the member at the
top right.

DAY 7 The team has im-
proved remarkably. Not only
are the Japanese members
contributing more to energy
and engagement (with the
one at the bottom becom-
ing a high-energy, highly
engaged team member) but
some of the Day 1 “domina-
tors” (on the lower right, for
example) have distributed
their energy better.

68 Harvard Business Review April 2012

HBR.ORG

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

energy and engagement of the team, though we’ve
found that this is often unnecessary. Most people,
given feedback, can learn to interrupt less, say, or to
face other people, or to listen more actively. Lead-
ers should use the data to force change within their
teams.

The ideal team player. We can also measure
individuals against an ideal. In both productivity-
focused and creativity-focused teams, we have dis-
covered the data signature of what we consider the
best type of team member. Some might call these
individuals “natural leaders.” We call them “char-
ismatic connectors.” Badge data show that these
people circulate actively, engaging people in short,
high-energy conversations. They are democratic
with their time—communicating with everyone

equally and making sure all team members get a
chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extro-
verts, although they feel comfortable approaching
other people. They listen as much as or more than
they talk and are usually very engaged with whom-
ever they’re listening to. We call it “energized but
focused listening.”

The best team players also connect their team-
mates with one another and spread ideas around.
And they are appropriately exploratory, seeking ideas
from outside the group but not at the expense of
group engagement. In a study of executives attend-
ing an intensive one-week executive education class
at MIT, we found that the more of these charismatic
connectors a team had, the more successful it was.

TEAM BUILDING is indeed a science, but it’s young and
evolving. Now that we’ve established patterns of
communication as the single most important thing
to measure when gauging the effectiveness of a
group, we can begin to re� ne the data and processes
to create more-sophisticated measurements, dig
deeper into the analysis, and develop new tools that
sharpen our view of team member types and team
types.

The sensors that enable this science are evolv-
ing as well. As they enter their seventh generation,
they’re becoming as small and unobtrusive as tra-
ditional ID badges, while the amount and types of
data they can collect are increasing. We’ve begun to
experiment with apps that present teams and their
leaders with real-time feedback on group communi-
cations. And the applications for the sensors are ex-
panding beyond the team to include an ever-broader
set of situations.

We imagine a company’s entire staff wearing
badges over an extended period of time, creating

“big data” in which we’d � nd the patterns for every-
thing from team building to leadership to negotia-
tions to performance reviews. We imagine changing
the nature of the space we work in, and maybe even
the tools we use to communicate, on the basis of
the data. We believe we can vastly improve long-
distance work and cross-cultural teams, which are
so crucial in a global economy, by learning their pat-
terns and adjusting them. We are beginning to create
what I call the “God’s-eye view” of the organization.
But spiritual as that may sound, this view is rooted in
evidence and data. It is an amazing view, and it will
change how organizations work.

HBR Reprint R1204C

VISUALIZATIONS CAN BE USED to compare energy and engagement with estab-
lished performance metrics. The map below plots the energy and engagement
levels of several teams at a bank call center against the center’s metric of
effi ciency, average handling time (AHT).

The expected team effi ciency is based on a statistical analysis of actual
team AHT scores over six weeks. Blue indicates high effi ciency; red low ef-
fi ciency. High-energy, high-engagement teams are the most effi cient, the map
shows. But it also indicates that low-energy, low-engagement teams outper-
form teams that are out of balance, with high energy and low engagement,
or low energy and high engagement. This means the call center manager
can pull more than one lever to improve performance. Points and are
equally effi cient, for example, but refl ect diff erent combinations of energy and
engagement.

The manager wanted to raise energy and engagement in lockstep. We sug-
gested instituting a common coff ee break for each team at the call center.
This increased the number of interactions, especially informal ones, and
raised the teams’ energy levels. And because all team members took a break
at once, interactions were evenly distributed, increasing engagement. When
we mapped energy and engagement against AHT afterward, the results were
clear: Effi ciency in the center increased by 8%, on average, and by as much as
20% for the worst-performing teams.

Mapping Communication Against Performance

H
IG

HIGHLOW ENERGY

EN
G

A
G

EM
EN

LO
W

EF
FI

CI
EN

AVERAGE
PERFORMANCE

AFTER

AVERAGE
PERFORMANCE

BEFORE

ONCE A COMMON COFFEE
BREAK WAS INSTITUTED,
EFFICIENCY AMONG THE
TEAMS INCREASED BY

H
IG

and are are

70 Harvard Business Review April 2012

HBR.ORG

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What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life.
She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a
researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big
corporation would be a better fit. Or perhaps a fast-growing start-up. All she knew for
certain was that she wanted to find a job that was more social. ‘‘I wanted to be part of a
community, part of something people were building together,’’ she told me. She thought
about various opportunities — Internet companies, a Ph.D. program — but nothing
seemed exactly right. So in 2009, she chose the path that allowed her to put off making a
decision: She applied to business schools and was accepted by the Yale School of
Management.

When Rozovsky arrived on campus, she was assigned to a study group carefully
engineered by the school to foster tight bonds. Study groups have become a rite of
passage at M.B.A. programs, a way for students to practice working in teams and a
reflection of the increasing demand for employees who can adroitly navigate group
dynamics. A worker today might start the morning by collaborating with a team of
engineers, then send emails to colleagues marketing a new brand, then jump on a
conference call planning an entirely different product line, while also juggling team
meetings with accounting and the party-planning committee. To prepare students for that
complex world, business schools around the country have revised their curriculums to
emphasize team-focused learning.

Every day, between classes or after dinner, Rozovsky and her four teammates gathered to
discuss homework assignments, compare spreadsheets and strategize for exams.
Everyone was smart and curious, and they had a lot in common: They had gone to similar
colleges and had worked at analogous firms. These shared experiences, Rozovsky hoped,
would make it easy for them to work well together. But it didn’t turn out that way. ‘‘There
are lots of people who say some of their best business-school friends come from their
study groups,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It wasn’t like that for me.’’

Instead, Rozovsky’s study group was a source of stress. ‘‘I always felt like I had to prove
myself,’’ she said. The team’s dynamics could put her on edge. When the group met,
teammates sometimes jockeyed for the leadership position or criticized one another’s
ideas. There were conflicts over who was in charge and who got to represent the group in
class. ‘‘People would try to show authority by speaking louder or talking over each other,’’
Rozovsky told me. ‘‘I always felt like I had to be careful not to make mistakes around

them.’’

So Rozovsky started looking for other groups she could join. A classmate mentioned that
some students were putting together teams for ‘‘case competitions,’’ contests in which
participants proposed solutions to real-world business problems that were evaluated by
judges, who awarded trophies and cash. The competitions were voluntary, but the work
wasn’t all that different from what Rozovsky did with her study group: conducting lots of
research and financial analyses, writing reports and giving presentations. The members of
her case-competition team had a variety of professional experiences: Army officer,
researcher at a think tank, director of a health-education nonprofit organization and
consultant to a refugee program. Despite their disparate backgrounds, however, everyone
clicked. They emailed one another dumb jokes and usually spent the first 10 minutes of
each meeting chatting. When it came time to brainstorm, ‘‘we had lots of crazy ideas,’’
Rozovsky said.

One of her favorite competitions asked teams to come up with a new business to replace
a student-run snack store on Yale’s campus. Rozovsky proposed a nap room and selling
earplugs and eyeshades to make money. Someone else suggested filling the space with
old video games. There were ideas about clothing swaps. Most of the proposals were
impractical, but ‘‘we all felt like we could say anything to each other,’’ Rozovsky told me.
‘‘No one worried that the rest of the team was judging them.’’ Eventually, the team settled
on a plan for a microgym with a handful of exercise classes and a few weight machines.
They won the competition. (The microgym — with two stationary bicycles and three
treadmills — still exists.)

Rozovsky’s study group dissolved in her second semester (it was up to the students
whether they wanted to continue). Her case team, however, stuck together for the two
years she was at Yale.

It always struck Rozovsky as odd that her experiences with the two groups were
dissimilar. Each was composed of people who were bright and outgoing. When she talked
one on one with members of her study group, the exchanges were friendly and warm. It
was only when they gathered as a team that things became fraught. By contrast, her
case-competition team was always fun and easygoing. In some ways, the team’s
members got along better as a group than as individual friends.

‘‘I couldn’t figure out why things had turned out so different,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘It didn’t
seem like it had to happen that way.’’

Our data-saturated age enables us to examine our work habits and office quirks with a

scrutiny that our cubicle-bound forebears could only dream of. Today, on corporate
campuses and within university laboratories, psychologists, sociologists and statisticians
are devoting themselves to studying everything from team composition to email patterns
in order to figure out how to make employees into faster, better and more productive
versions of themselves. ‘‘We’re living through a golden age of understanding personal
productivity,’’ says Marshall Van Alstyne, a professor at Boston University who studies
how people share information. ‘‘All of a sudden, we can pick apart the small choices that
all of us make, decisions most of us don’t even notice, and figure out why some people
are so much more effective than everyone else.’’

Yet many of today’s most valuable firms have come to realize that analyzing and
improving individual workers — a practice known as ‘‘employee performance
optimization’’ — isn’t enough. As commerce becomes increasingly global and complex,
the bulk of modern work is more and more team-based. One study, published in The
Harvard Business Review last month, found that ‘‘the time spent by managers and
employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50 percent or more’’ over the last
two decades and that, at many companies, more than three-quarters of an employee’s
day is spent communicating with colleagues.

In Silicon Valley, software engineers are encouraged to work together, in part because
studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find
better solutions to problems. Studies also show that people working in teams tend to
achieve better results and report higher job satisfaction. In a 2015 study, executives said
that profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. Within
companies and conglomerates, as well as in government agencies and schools, teams are
now the fundamental unit of organization. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors,
it needs to influence not only how people work but also how they work together.

Five years ago, Google — one of the most public proselytizers of how studying workers
can transform productivity — became focused on building the perfect team. In the last
decade, the tech giant has spent untold millions of dollars measuring nearly every aspect
of its employees’ lives. Google’s People Operations department has scrutinized
everything from how frequently particular people eat together (the most productive
employees tend to build larger networks by rotating dining companions) to which traits
the best managers share (unsurprisingly, good communication and avoiding
micromanaging is critical; more shocking, this was news to many Google managers).

The company’s top executives long believed that building the best teams meant
combining the best people. They embraced other bits of conventional wisdom as well, like

https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload

‘‘It’s better to put introverts together,’’ said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People
Analytics division, or ‘‘Teams are more effective when everyone is friends away from
work.’’ But, Dubey went on, ‘‘it turned out no one had really studied which of those were
true.’’

In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative — code-named Project Aristotle — to
study hundreds of Google’s teams and figure out why some stumbled while others
soared. Dubey, a leader of the project, gathered some of the company’s best statisticians,
organizational psychologists, sociologists and engineers. He also needed researchers.
Rozovsky, by then, had decided that what she wanted to do with her life was study
people’s habits and tendencies. After graduating from Yale, she was hired by Google and
was soon assigned to Project Aristotle.

Project Aristotle’s researchers began by reviewing a half-century of academic studies
looking at how teams worked. Were the best teams made up of people with similar
interests? Or did it matter more whether everyone was motivated by the same kinds of
rewards? Based on those studies, the researchers scrutinized the composition of groups
inside Google: How often did teammates socialize outside the office? Did they have the
same hobbies? Were their educational backgrounds similar? Was it better for all
teammates to be outgoing or for all of them to be shy? They drew diagrams showing
which teams had overlapping memberships and which groups had exceeded their
departments’ goals. They studied how long teams stuck together and if gender balance
seemed to have an impact on a team’s success.

No matter how researchers arranged the data, though, it was almost impossible to find
patterns — or any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference. ‘‘We
looked at 180 teams from all over the company,’’ Dubey said. ‘‘We had lots of data, but
there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or
backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

Some groups that were ranked among Google’s most effective teams, for instance, were
composed of friends who socialized outside work. Others were made up of people who
were basically strangers away from the conference room. Some groups sought strong
managers. Others preferred a less hierarchical structure. Most confounding of all, two
teams might have nearly identical makeups, with overlapping memberships, but radically
different levels of effectiveness. ‘‘At Google, we’re good at finding patterns,’’ Dubey said.
‘‘There weren’t strong patterns here.’’

As they struggled to figure out what made a team successful, Rozovsky and her

colleagues kept coming across research by psychologists and sociologists that focused
on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and
unwritten rules that govern how we function when we gather: One team may come to a
consensus that avoiding disagreement is more valuable than debate; another team might
develop a culture that encourages vigorous arguments and spurns groupthink. Norms can
be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound. Team
members may behave in certain ways as individuals — they may chafe against authority
or prefer working independently — but when they gather, the group’s norms typically
override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.

Project Aristotle’s researchers began searching through the data they had collected,
looking for norms. They looked for instances when team members described a particular
behavior as an ‘‘unwritten rule’’ or when they explained certain things as part of the
‘‘team’s culture.’’ Some groups said that teammates interrupted one another constantly
and that team leaders reinforced that behavior by interrupting others themselves. On
other teams, leaders enforced conversational order, and when someone cut off a
teammate, group members would politely ask everyone to wait his or her turn. Some
teams celebrated birthdays and began each meeting with informal chitchat about
weekend plans. Other groups got right to business and discouraged gossip. There were
teams that contained outsize personalities who hewed to their group’s sedate norms, and
others in which introverts came out of their shells as soon as meetings began.

After looking at over a hundred groups for more than a year, Project Aristotle researchers
concluded that understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving
Google’s teams. But Rozovsky, now a lead researcher, needed to figure out which norms
mattered most. Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed
important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply
with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as
much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more
effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played
down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite
directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them.
Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful
teams shared?

Imagine you have been invited to join one of two groups.

Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you
watch a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in

which they are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to
do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the
agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle
chitchat or long debates. The meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can
get back to their desks.

Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle
managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of
discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member
abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of
the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk
about their lives.

Which group would you rather join?

In 2008, a group of psychologists from Carnegie Mellon, M.I.T. and Union College began
to try to answer a question very much like this one. ‘‘Over the past century, psychologists
made considerable progress in defining and systematically measuring intelligence in
individuals,’’ the researchers wrote in the journal Science in 2010. ‘‘We have used the
statistical approach they developed for individual intelligence to systematically measure
the intelligence of groups.’’ Put differently, the researchers wanted to know if there is a
collective I.”Q. that emerges within a team that is distinct from the smarts of any single
member.

To accomplish this, the researchers recruited 699 people, divided them into small groups
and gave each a series of assignments that required different kinds of cooperation. One
assignment, for instance, asked participants to brainstorm possible uses for a brick. Some
teams came up with dozens of clever uses; others kept describing the same ideas in
different words. Another had the groups plan a shopping trip and gave each teammate a
different list of groceries. The only way to maximize the group’s score was for each
person to sacrifice an item they really wanted for something the team needed. Some
groups easily divvied up the buying; others couldn’t fill their shopping carts because no
one was willing to compromise.

What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one
assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing
seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what
distinguished the ‘‘good’’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates
treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ab/Salon/research/Woolley_et_al_Science_2010-2

intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the
members were exceptionally bright.

But what was confusing was that not all the good teams appeared to behave in the same
ways. ‘‘Some teams had a bunch of smart people who figured out how to break up work
evenly,’’ said Anita Woolley, the study’s lead author. ‘‘Other groups had pretty average
members, but they came up with ways to take advantage of everyone’s relative strengths.
Some groups had one strong leader. Others were more fluid, and everyone took a
leadership role.’’

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the
good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the
same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of
conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others,
leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case,
by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as
everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or
a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying
they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their
expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity
is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the
people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test.
People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on
the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling
upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They
seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

In other words, if you are given a choice between the serious-minded Team A or the free-
flowing Team B, you should probably opt for Team B. Team A may be filled with smart
people, all optimized for peak individual efficiency. But the group’s norms discourage
equal speaking; there are few exchanges of the kind of personal information that lets
teammates pick up on what people are feeling or leaving unsaid. There’s a good chance
the members of Team A will continue to act like individuals once they come together, and
there’s little to suggest that, as a group, they will become more collectively intelligent.

In contrast, on Team B, people may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize
instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual

observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to
one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While Team B might not
contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.

Within psychology, researchers sometimes colloquially refer to traits like ‘‘conversational
turn-taking’’ and ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ as aspects of what’s known as psychological
safety — a group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson
defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for
interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team
will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a
study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust
and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological
safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer,
for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward,
which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was
among Google’s accomplished groups. By contrast, another engineer had told the
researchers that his ‘‘team leader has poor emotional control.’’ He added: ‘‘He panics over
small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him being in
the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the steering wheel and crash
the car.’’ That team, researchers presumed, did not perform well.

Most of all, employees had talked about how various teams felt. ‘‘And that made a lot of
sense to me, maybe because of my experiences at Yale,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘I’d been on
some teams that left me feeling totally exhausted and others where I got so much energy
from the group.’’ Rozovsky’s study group at Yale was draining because the norms — the
fights over leadership, the tendency to critique — put her on guard. Whereas the norms of
her case-competition team — enthusiasm for one another’s ideas, joking around and
having fun — allowed everyone to feel relaxed and energized.

For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are
vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making
sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data
indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team
work.

‘‘We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’’ Rozovsky told me.
But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘‘People here are really busy,’’ she said. ‘‘We needed

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clear guidelines.’’

However, establishing psychological safety is, by its very nature, somewhat messy and
difficult to implement. You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen
to one another more. You can instruct employees to be sensitive to how their colleagues
feel and to notice when someone seems upset. But the kinds of people who work at
Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid
talking about feelings in the first place.

Rozovsky and her colleagues had figured out which norms were most critical. Now they
had to find a way to make communication and empathy — the building blocks of forging
real connections — into an algorithm they could easily scale.

Illustration by James Graham

In late 2014, Rozovsky and her fellow Project Aristotle number-crunchers began sharing
their findings with select groups of Google’s 51,000 employees. By then, they had been
collecting surveys, conducting interviews and analyzing statistics for almost three years.
They hadn’t yet figured out how to make psychological safety easy, but they hoped that
publicizing their research within Google would prompt employees to come up with some
ideas of their own.

After Rozovsky gave one presentation, a trim, athletic man named Matt Sakaguchi
approached the Project Aristotle researchers. Sakaguchi had an unusual background for a
Google employee. Twenty years earlier, he was a member of a SWAT team in Walnut
Creek, Calif., but left to become an electronics salesman and eventually landed at Google
as a midlevel manager, where he has overseen teams of engineers who respond when the
company’s websites or servers go down.

‘‘I might be the luckiest individual on earth,’’ Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘I’m not really an
engineer. I didn’t study computers in college. Everyone who works for me is much smarter
than I am.’’ But he is talented at managing technical workers, and as a result, Sakaguchi
has thrived at Google. He and his wife, a teacher, have a home in San Francisco and a
weekend house in the Sonoma Valley wine country. ‘‘Most days, I feel like I’ve won the
lottery,’’ he said.

Sakaguchi was particularly interested in Project Aristotle because the team he previously
oversaw at Google hadn’t jelled particularly well. ‘‘There was one senior engineer who
would just talk and talk, and everyone was scared to disagree with him,’’ Sakaguchi said.
‘‘The hardest part was that everyone liked this guy outside the group setting, but

whenever they got together as a team, something happened
that made the culture go wrong.’’

Sakaguchi had recently become the manager of a new team,
and he wanted to make sure things went better this time. So
he asked researchers at Project Aristotle if they could help.
They provided him with a survey to gauge the group’s
norms.

When Sakaguchi asked his new team to participate, he was
greeted with skepticism. ‘‘It seemed like a total waste of
time,’’ said Sean Laurent, an engineer. ‘‘But Matt was our
new boss, and he was really into this questionnaire, and so
we said, Sure, we’ll do it, whatever.’’

The team completed the survey, and a few weeks later,
Sakaguchi received the results. He was surprised by what
they revealed. He thought of the team as a strong unit. But
the results indicated there were weaknesses: When asked to
rate whether the role of the team was clearly understood and
whether their work had impact, members of the team gave
middling to poor scores. These responses troubled
Sakaguchi, because he hadn’t picked up on this discontent.
He wanted everyone to feel fulfilled by their work. He asked
the team to gather, off site, to discuss the survey’s results.
He began by asking everyone to share something personal
about themselves. He went first.

‘‘I think one of the things most people don’t know about me,’’
he told the group, ‘‘is that I have Stage 4 cancer.’’ In 2001, he
said, a doctor discovered a tumor in his kidney. By the time
the cancer was detected, it had spread to his spine. For
nearly half a decade, it had grown slowly as he underwent

treatment while working at Google. Recently, however, doctors had found a new,
worrisome spot on a scan of his liver. That was far more serious, he explained.

No one knew what to say. The team had been working with Sakaguchi for 10 months.
They all liked him, just as they all liked one another. No one suspected that he was dealing
with anything like this.

‘‘To have Matt stand there and tell us that he’s sick and he’s not going to get better and,
you know, what that means,’’ Laurent said. ‘‘It was a really hard, really special moment.’’

After Sakaguchi spoke, another teammate stood and described some health issues of her
own. Then another discussed a difficult breakup. Eventually, the team shifted its focus to
the survey. They found it easier to speak honestly about the things that had been
bothering them, their small frictions and everyday annoyances. They agreed to adopt
some new norms: From now on, Sakaguchi would make an extra effort to let the team
members know how their work fit into Google’s larger mission; they agreed to try harder
to notice when someone on the team was feeling excluded or down.

There was nothing in the survey that instructed Sakaguchi to share his illness with the
group. There was nothing in Project Aristotle’s research that said that getting people to
open up about their struggles was critical to discussing a group’s norms. But to
Sakaguchi, it made sense that psychological safety and emotional conversations were
related. The behaviors that create psychological safety — conversational turn-taking and
empathy — are part of the same unwritten rules we often turn to, as individuals, when we
need to establish a bond. And those human bonds matter as much at work as anywhere
else. In fact, they sometimes matter more.

‘‘I think, until the off-site, I had separated things in my head into work life and life life,’’
Laurent told me. ‘‘But the thing is, my work is my life. I spend the majority of my time
working. Most of my friends I know through work. If I can’t be open and honest at work,
then I’m not really living, am I?’’

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a
‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality
and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we
must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us
without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to
have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused
just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of
engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a
conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that
work is more than just labor.

Which isn’t to say that a team needs an ailing manager to come together. Any group can
become Team B. Sakaguchi’s experiences underscore a core lesson of Google’s research
into teamwork: By adopting the data-driven approach of Silicon Valley, Project Aristotle

has encouraged emotional conversations and discussions of norms among people who
might otherwise be uncomfortable talking about how they feel. ‘‘Googlers love data,’’
Sakaguchi told me. But it’s not only Google that loves numbers, or Silicon Valley that shies
away from emotional conversations. Most workplaces do. ‘‘By putting things like empathy
and sensitivity into charts and data reports, it makes them easier to talk about,’’
Sakaguchi told me. ‘‘It’s easier to talk about our feelings when we can point to a number.’’

Sakaguchi knows that the spread of his cancer means he may not have much time left.
His wife has asked him why he doesn’t quit Google. At some point, he probably will. But
right now, helping his team succeed ‘‘is the most meaningful work I’ve ever done,’’ he told
me. He encourages the group to think about the way work and life mesh. Part of that, he
says, is recognizing how fulfilling work can be. Project Aristotle ‘‘proves how much a great
team matters,’’ he said. ‘‘Why would I walk away from that? Why wouldn’t I spend time
with people who care about me?’’

The technology industry is not just one of the fastest growing parts of our economy; it is
also increasingly the world’s dominant commercial culture. And at the core of Silicon
Valley are certain self-mythologies and dictums: Everything is different now, data reigns
supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are cleareyed enough to
discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms and search out the disruptive and the new.

The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching
have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best
teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

The fact that these insights aren’t wholly original doesn’t mean Google’s contributions
aren’t valuable. In fact, in some ways, the ‘‘employee performance optimization’’
movement has given us a method for talking about our insecurities, fears and aspirations
in more constructive ways. It also has given us the tools to quickly teach lessons that
once took managers decades to absorb. Google, in other words, in its race to build the
perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection
and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety
faster, better and in more productive ways.

‘‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to
sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky
told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and
operating language.’’

Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s

sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional
interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and
how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized. Rozovsky herself was
reminded of this midway through her work with the Project Aristotle team. ‘‘We were in a
meeting where I made a mistake,’’ Rozovsky told me. She sent out a note afterward
explaining how she was going to remedy the problem. ‘‘I got an email back from a team
member that said, ‘Ouch,’”’’ she recalled. ‘‘It was like a punch to the gut. I was already
upset about making this mistake, and this note totally played on my insecurities.’’

If this had happened earlier in Rozovsky’s life — if it had occurred while she was at Yale,
for instance, in her study group — she probably wouldn’t have known how to deal with
those feelings. The email wasn’t a big enough affront to justify a response. But all the
same, it really bothered her. It was something she felt she needed to address.

And thanks to Project Aristotle, she now had a vocabulary for explaining to herself what
she was feeling and why it was important. She had graphs and charts telling her that she
shouldn’t just let it go. And so she typed a quick response: ‘‘Nothing like a good ‘Ouch!’ to
destroy psych safety in the morning.’’ Her teammate replied: ‘‘Just testing your
resilience.’’

‘‘That could have been the wrong thing to say to someone else, but he knew it was
exactly what I needed to hear,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘With one 30-second interaction, we
defused the tension.’’ She wanted to be listened to. She wanted her teammate to be
sensitive to what she was feeling. ‘‘And I had research telling me that it was O.K. to follow
my gut,’’ she said. ‘‘So that’s what I did. The data helped me feel safe enough to do what I
thought was right.’’

MEETINGS

Plan a Better Meeting with
Design Thinking
by Maya Bernstein and Rae Ringel

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

DANIEL DAY/GETTY IMAGES

“Sometimes, when I sit in meetings, especially ones in which people don’t seem engaged, I

calculate the cost in staff time. I’ve estimated that one standard weekly meeting in my

bureau — 50 people sitting in a cookie-cutter conference room, looking both bored and

https://hbr.org/topic/meetings

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https://hbr.org/search?term=rae+ringel

https://hbr.org/

anxious — costs around $177,000 annually, and surely this scenario occurs throughout the

[organization] hundreds of times a day. It drains us, and it breeds cynicism. So many

meetings are lost opportunities.”

Do these sentiments — expressed by an applicant to the course on meeting facilitation we

teach at Georgetown University — sound familiar to you? They should, according

to these statistics on meetings:

Organizations hold more than 3 billion meetings each year.

Executives spend 40-50% of their working hours — or 23 hours per week — in meetings.

90% of meeting attendees admit to daydreaming in them.

73% acknowledge they do other work during meetings.

25% of meetings are spent discussing irrelevant issues.

At the same time, the right kind of meetings can be key to advancing a team or

organization’s agenda. So how do you ensure that the gatherings you host are productive,

not destructive?

By applying design thinking, a concept popularized by IDEO founder David Kelly and

Stanford’s d.school, which was first applied to the design of physical objects, then other

products, such as technological tools, and now to more complex challenges across a wide

variety of industries. The idea is to put the “user” at the center of the experience — an

approach that works with meeting design, too.

Start by putting your own expertise and agenda aside and thinking about the people who

will be affected by your meeting. Develop empathy for them by asking three sets of

questions:

1. Who is going to be in the room and what are

their needs?

2. Who won’t be in the room but will nevertheless be affected by the meeting and what are

The economic impact of bad meetings

YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES

Meetings

their needs?

3. In what broader culture and environment are you operating and what are some of the

overarching challenges and opportunities?

Actively seek out individuals who will attend the meeting, or who will be affected by it, and

speak with them — ideally in person. Even if you run regular meetings with the same group

of people, these individual brief check-ins can help build trust, surfaces hidden issues and

ensures that participants feel more invested.

Next, set a frame for the meeting. Once you’ve attentively listened and observed, you’ll

want to suggest an overarching purpose for the meeting and articulate clear outcomes that

will connect to achieving it. We recommend that you ask yourself: If this meeting is wildly

successful, what will people feel, know, and do as a result? Include these desired outcomes

in your agenda, so that participants know why they’re attending and can gauge with you

whether or not the time has been productive. In our experience, people rarely spend enough

doing these things. Meetings are often put on the calendar without a particular goal in

mind — simply to hold the time — and, as a result, the cart often drives the horse; people

meet simply because they feel they must. Even — perhaps especially — short meetings

deserve a clear purpose and clearly articulated desired outcomes. This keeps people on task,

and ensures that people feel that their time is well spent.

The third step is to creatively design the

meeting. Once you know the core question to

address, and what success might look like,

you should create your agenda. People tend

to throw agendas together at the last minute,

if at all. We compare the design and execution

of meetings to the driving navigation app

Waze: what is the quickest, safest, most

effective way to get to your destination? The

The Seven Imperatives to Keeping
Meetings on Track
by Amy Gallo

How to Design an Agenda for an Effective
Meeting
by Roger Schwarz

Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting?
by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

first step, immersing yourself with people,

was about understanding where you need to

go (the beach? the city? the mountains?). The

second step was about identifying your

desired destination — your exact address and

location. This third step is all about the route.

Should you get there as fast as possible? Do

you need to take a detour? What is the most

scenic route? Are there roads that you’ve traveled so many times before that are perhaps

best to avoid? What might you need to watch out for — your team’s equivalent of potholes or

traffic jams? This is the phase where we encourage people to be playful, to put reality on

hold for a bit and push past their initial, “go-to” ideas. What would it look like for you to

infuse your meetings with a bit of fun? To begin and end in an unexpected way? To use film,

images, poetry, or music to spark ideas? To create an opportunity for personal sharing and

connection? While this might sound frivolous, it is actually extremely important. Meetings

are opportunities not simply to get things done, but also foster a positive team culture.

Finally, test-drive your plan, in the same way that a product designer would put an early

prototype into users’ hands. In a meeting context, this might be a draft agenda shared with

participants. Their responses will help you gain more empathy, frame new questions, get

even more creative in your meeting design, and increase your potential for success at the

actual gathering.

People who have applied this design process to their meetings tell us that it has radically

affected both the efficacy of those gatherings, and the attitude people in their organizations

have about them. Each phase has its benefits. Immersing helps people feel heard, and it

ensures that meeting leaders are connected to participants. Framing pushes the meeting

leaders to ensure that there are clear goals for each meeting. Imagining leads to more

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creativity and experimentation in the meeting design. Finally, prototyping—something as

simple as getting feedback on your plan from a few people — makes people feel valued, more

accountable in the meetings, and more invested in their success.

This may seem onerous for every meeting but, with practice, you can learn to cycle through

these stages in less and less time, and you’ll find that small investment upfront saves

significant time in the long run. You’ll have fewer meetings, and those you do have will be

more productive — even sometimes fun.

Maya Bernstein is an independent consultant working in the areas of innovation,

leadership, and creativity. She is a faculty member at the Georgetown University Institute for

Transformational Leadership and co-director of the Executive Certificate in

Facilitation program.

Rae Ringel is the president of The Ringel Group, a leadership development

consultancy specializing in facilitation, coaching and training. She is a faculty member at the

Georgetown University Institute for Transformational Leadership and co-director of the

Executive Certificate in Facilitation program.

Related Topics: COLLABORATION | LEADING TEAMS

This article is about MEETINGS

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Summer 2003 35

Virtually every executive staff I’ve ever come across believes in teamwork. At
least they say they do. Sadly, a scarce few of them make teamwork a reality in
their organizations; in fact, they often end up creating environments where

political infighting and departmental silos are the norm. And yet they continue to
tout their belief in teamwork, as if that alone will somehow make it magically appear.
I have found that only a small minority of companies truly understand and embrace
teamwork, even though, according to their Web sites, more than one in three of the
Fortune 500 publicly declare it to be a core value.

How can this be? How can intelligent, well-meaning executives who supposedly set
out to foster cooperation and collaboration among their peers be left with organiza-
tional dynamics that are anything but team-oriented? And why do they go on pro-
moting a concept they are so often unable to deliver?

Well, it’s not because they’re secretly plotting to undermine teamwork among their
peers.That would actually be easier to address.The problem is more straightforward—
and more difficult to overcome. Most groups of executives fail to become cohesive
teams because they drastically underestimate both the power teamwork ultimately
unleashes and the painful steps required to make teamwork a reality. But before ex-
ploring those steps, it is important to understand how the compulsory, politically cor-
rect nature of teamwork makes all of this more difficult.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, teamwork is not a virtue in itself. It is merely a stra-
tegic choice, not unlike adopting a specific sales model or a financial strategy. And cer-
tainly,when properly understood and implemented, it is a powerful and beneficial tool.
Unfortunately, management theorists and human resources professionals have made
teamwork unconditionally desirable, something akin to being a good corporate citizen.

B Y P A T R I C K M . L E N C I O N I

The Trouble
with

Teamwork

Leader to Leader36

As a result, many of today’s leaders champion teamwork
reflexively without really understanding what it entails.
Pump them full of truth serum and ask them why, and
they’ll tell you they feel like they have to promote team-
work, that anything less would be politically, socially,
and organizationally incorrect.“What choice do I have?
Imagine me standing up in front of a group of em-
ployees and saying that teamwork isn’t
really all that important here.”

Ironically, that would be better than what
many—if not most—leaders do.By preaching
teamwork and not demanding that their peo-
ple live it, they are creating two big problems.

First, they are inducing a collective sense of
hypocrisy among their staff members, who
feel that teamwork has devolved into noth-
ing more than an empty slogan. Second,
and more dangerous still, they are confusing
those staff members about how to act in
the best interest of the company, so they
wind up trying at once to be pragmatically
self-interested and ideologically selfless.The
combination of these factors evokes in-
evitable and sometimes paralyzing feelings
of dissonance and guilt.

Executives must understand that there is an
alternative to teamwork, and it is actually
more effective than being a faux team.
Jeffrey Katzenbach, author of The Wisdom of
Teams, calls it a “working group,” a group
of executives who agree to work indepen-
dently with few expectations for collaboration.The ad-
vantage of a working group is clarity; members know
exactly what they can, and more important, cannot ex-
pect of one another, and so they focus on how to ac-
complish goals without the distractions and costs that
teamwork inevitably presents. (For guidance on decid-

ing whether teamwork is right for your organization,
see sidebar,“To Be or Not to Be a Team.”)

Of course, none of this is to say that teamwork is not a
worthy goal. There is no disputing that it is uniquely
powerful, enabling groups of people to achieve more
collectively than they could have imagined doing apart.

However, the requirements of real team-
work cannot be underestimated.

The fact is,building a leadership team is hard.
It demands substantial behavioral changes
from people who are strong-willed and often
set in their ways,having already accomplished
great things in their careers.What follows is
a realistic description of what a group of ex-
ecutives must be ready to do if they under-
take the nontrivial task of becoming a team,
something that is not necessarily right for
every group of leaders.

Vulnerability-Based Trust

The first and most important step in
building a cohesive and functional team

is the establishment of trust.But not just any
kind of trust.Teamwork must be built upon
a solid foundation of vulnerability-based
trust.

This means that members of a cohesive, func-
tional team must learn to comfortably and
quickly acknowledge, without provocation,
their mistakes,weaknesses, failures, and needs

for help. They must also readily recognize the strengths
of others, even when those strengths exceed their own.

In theory—or kindergarten—this does not seem terri-
bly difficult. But when a leader is faced with a roomful
of accomplished, proud, and talented staff members, get-

Patrick M. Lencioni is
president of The Table
Group, a management
consulting and execu-
tive coaching firm in
the San Francisco

area. He is the author
of three best-selling
books, “The Five
Dysfunctions of a
Team,”“The Four
Obsessions of an

Extraordinary Ex-
ecutive,” and “The
Five Temptations of
a CEO.” He has

worked with hundreds
of executive teams and
CEOs to strengthen

teamwork.
�

Summer 2003 37

ting them to let their guard down and risk loss of posi-
tional power is an extremely difficult challenge.And the
only way to initiate it is for the leader to go first.

Showing vulnerability is unnatural for many leaders,who
were raised to project strength and confidence in the
face of difficulty. And while that is certainly a noble be-
havior in many circumstances, it must be tempered when

it comes to demonstrating vulnerability-based trust to
hesitant team members who need their leader to strip
naked and dive into the cold water first. Of course, this
requires that a leader be confident enough, ironically, to
admit to frailties and make it easy for others to follow
suit. One particular CEO I worked with failed to build
trust among his team and watched the company falter
as a result. As it turns out, a big contributing factor was

To Be or Not to Be
aTeam

So how do well-intentioned lead-
ers go about deciding if teamwork
is right for their staffs? They can
start by recognizing that organiza-
tional structure is not nearly as im-
portant as behavioral willingness.

Most theorists will call for team-
work in organizations that are
structured functionally, but may not
do so for those that are organized
divisionally or geographically.

In other words, if the work can be
organized in departments that op-
erate largely independently (with
regional territories, distinct prod-
uct divisions, or separate subsid-
iaries), then the executives at the
top can follow suit and function as
what Jeffrey Katzenbach, author of
The Wisdom of Teams, describes as
“working units.”These are groups
made up of individuals who,

though friendly and cooperative at
times, are not expected to make
willing sacrifices to one another to
achieve common goals that lead
to joint rewards.

However, when executives run an
organization that is made up of de-
partments that have structural
interdependencies, teamwork is
usually presented as the only pos-
sible approach for the leadership
group. But although this is a sound
and reasonable theory when all
other factors are considered equal,
it is not necessarily advisable in the
messy and fallible world of real
human beings. Before deciding
that teamwork is the answer, ask
these questions of yourself and
your fellow team members.

• Can we keep our egos in
check?

• Are we capable of admitting
to mistakes, weaknesses, insuffi-
cient knowledge?

• Can we speak up openly when
we disagree?

• Will we confront behavioral
problems directly?

• Can we put the success of
the team or organization over
our own?

If the answer to one or more of
these questions is “probably not,”
then a group of executives should
think twice about declaring them-
selves a team.Why? Because more
than structure, it is the willingness
of executives to change behav-
ior—starting with the leader of
the organization—that should de-
termine whether teamwork is the
right answer.

Leader to Leader38

his inability to model vulnerability-based trust. As one
of the executives who reported to him later explained
to me, “No one on the team was ever allowed to be
smarter than him in any area because he was the CEO.”
As a result, team members would not open up to one
another and admit their own weaknesses or mistakes.

What exactly does vulnerability-based trust look like
in practice? It is evident among team members who
say things to one another like “I screwed up,” “I was
wrong,”“I need help,”“I’m sorry,” and “You’re better
than I am at this.” Most important, they only make one
of these statements when they
mean it, and especially when
they really don’t want to.

If all this sounds like mother-
hood and apple pie, understand
that there is a very practical rea-
son why vulnerability-based
trust is indispensable. Without
it, a team will not, and probably
should not, engage in unfiltered
productive conflict.

Healthy Conflict

One of the greatest inhibi-
tors of teamwork among executive teams is the

fear of conflict, which stems from two separate con-
cerns. On one hand, many executives go to great
lengths to avoid conflict among their teams because
they worry that they will lose control of the group and
that someone will have their pride damaged in the
process. Others do so because they see conflict as a
waste of time.They prefer to cut meetings and discus-
sions short by jumping to the decision that they be-
lieve will ultimately be adopted anyway, leaving more
time for implementation and what they think of as
“real work.”

Whatever the case, CEOs who go to great lengths to
avoid conflict often do so believing that they are strength-
ening their teams by avoiding destructive disagreement.
This is ironic, because what they are really doing is sti-
fling productive conflict and pushing important issues
that need to be resolved under the carpet where they will
fester. Eventually, those unresolved issues transform into
uglier and more personal discord when executives grow
frustrated at what they perceive to be repeated problems.

What CEOs and their teams must do is learn to identify
artificial harmony when they see it, and incite produc-

tive conflict in its place.This is a
messy process, one that takes
time to master. But there is no
avoiding it, because to do so
makes it next to impossible for a
team to make real commitment.

Unwavering
Commitment

To become a cohesive team,
a group of leaders must

learn to commit to decisions
when there is less than perfect
information available, and when
no natural consensus develops.

And because perfect information and natural consensus
rarely exist, the ability to commit becomes one of the
most critical behaviors of a team.

But teams cannot learn to do this if they are not in the
practice of engaging in productive and unguarded con-
flict.That’s because it is only after team members pas-
sionately and unguardedly debate with one another and
speak their minds that the leader can feel confident of
making a decision with the full benefit of the collective
wisdom of the group. A simple example might help
illustrate the costs of failing to truly commit.

�

Becoming a team

is not necessarily

right for every

group of leaders.
�

Summer 2003 39

The CEO of a struggling pharmaceutical company de-
cided to eliminate business and first class travel to cut
costs. Everyone around the table nodded their heads in
agreement, but within weeks, it became apparent that
only half the room had really committed to the deci-
sion. The others merely decided not to challenge the
decision, but rather to ignore it.This created its own set
of destructive conflict when angry employees from dif-
ferent departments traveled together and found them-
selves heading to different parts of the airplane.Needless
to say, the travel policy was on the agenda again at the
next meeting, wasting important time that should have
been spent righting the com-
pany’s financial situation.

Teams that fail to disagree and
exchange unfiltered opinions are
the ones that find themselves re-
visiting the same issues again
and again. All this is ironic, be-
cause the teams that appear to
an outside observer to be the
most dysfunctional (the arguers)
are usually the ones that can ar-
rive at and stick with a difficult
decision.

It’s worth repeating here that
commitment and conflict are not possible without trust.
If team members are concerned about protecting them-
selves from their peers, they will not be able to disagree
and commit. And that presents its own set of problems,
not the least of which is the unwillingness to hold one
another accountable.

Unapologetic Accountability

Great teams do not wait for the leader to remind
members when they are not pulling their weight.

Because there is no lack of clarity about what they have

committed to do, they are comfortable calling one an-
other on actions and behaviors that don’t contribute to
the likelihood of success. Less effective teams typically
resort to reporting unacceptable behavior to the leader
of the group,or worse yet, to back-channel gossip.These
behaviors are not only destructive to the morale of the
team, they are inefficient and allow easily addressable
issues to live longer than should be allowed.

Don’t let the simplicity of accountability hide the diffi-
culty of making it a reality. It is not easy to teach strong
leaders on a team to confront their peers about behav-

ioral issues that hurt the team.
But when the goals of the team
have been clearly delineated, the
behaviors that jeopardize them
become easier to call out.

Collective Orientation
to Results

The ultimate goal of the
team, and the only real

scorecard for measuring its suc-
cess, is the achievement of tan-
gible collective outcomes. And
while most executive teams are
certainly populated with lead-

ers who are driven to succeed, all too often the results
they focus on are individual or departmental. Once the
inevitable moment of truth comes, when executives
must choose between the success of the entire team
and their own, many are unable to resist the instinct to
look out for themselves.This is understandable, but it is
deadly to a team.

Leaders committed to building a team must have zero
tolerance for individually focused behavior.This is eas-
ier said than done when one considers the size of the
egos assembled on a given leadership team. Which is

�

Identify artificial

harmony; incite

productive conflict

in its place.
�

Leader to Leader40

perhaps why a leader trying to assemble a truly cohe-
sive team would do well to select team members with
small ones.

If all of this sounds obvious, that’s because it is. The
problem with teamwork is not that it is difficult to
understand, but rather that it is extremely difficult
to achieve when the people involved are strong-willed,

independently successful leaders.The point here is not
that teamwork is not worth the trouble, but rather that
its rewards are both rare and costly. And as for those
leaders who don’t have the courage to force team
members to step up to the requirements of teamwork
(see Figure 1, above), they would be wiser to avoid the
concept altogether. Of course, that would require a dif-
ferent kind of courage; the courage not to be a team. �

FIGURE 1.
THE ROLE OF THE LEADER IN BUILDING TEAMS

Inattention to
RESULTS

Avoidance of
ACCOUNTABILITY

Lack of
COMMITMENT

Fear of
CONFLICT

Absence of
TRUST

The Role of the Leader

Focus on outcomes.

Confront difficult issues.

Force clarity and closure.

Demand debate.

Be human.

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