Sports teams and other work teams

It’s the middle of October and two of my favorite sports teams (the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots) are both playing this weekend (the Sox are hoping to head to the World Series and the Patriots are in the middle of their season). So I thought I would spend a little time talking about some of the differences between the teams that we see on TV and the teams that make up the majority of our working lives.

You may think there are many differences between your team of co-workers and (for example) the New England Patriots. For example: chances are that none of your team members are making in the neighborhood of $10M annually, none of you regularly host televised press conferences, and none of you are married to super-model.  And you probably think that is just the tip of the iceberg.

From my perspective though, the differences between your team and the Patriots, the Red Sox, or any other professional sports team can be summed up in one word: design.

Team design, how the team is tasked, structured, staffed, supported and rewarded can encompass a slew of different variables and several studies suggest that team design is vastly more important to team performance than interpersonal variables such as cohesion, trust, or leadership. However when we talk about what is going right or wrong with our work teams, we often phrase it in terms of these interpersonal variables. Why?

Interestingly, part of the reason we tend to focus on the variables is probably because those are the variables we hear about when we attend to professional sports teams. Broadcasters and color commentators will talk about “the chemistry” between individuals on the team, about the tensions between coaches and key players, about rivalries between players and between franchises, etc. This makes sense for them, partly because this more interesting to listen to than insightful conversations about team design, but mostly because when watching a sports team in action all of the teams share essentially the same design. Think about it, when was the last time you saw a professional basketball team put 12 players on the court at the same time, or baseball team field 3 pitchers at once? Nearly all of the aspects of team design (with the notable exception of actual skill/talent of individual team members) are clearly articulated as “the rules of the game”.

However in our workplace teams, there are no clearly agreed upon “rules of the game”. Your team is tasked with designing a new product. You may know that your competition is trying to design a similar product; but you don’t know what their time frame is, what the size of their team is, what their budget is, what sort of political support they have from their management, or even if they are collaborating with another organization. Additionally within your own team, roles are not always clearly assigned, team members may or may not have the skills that they need, you may or may not have the resources you need to meet your deadline, and team members may not even have the same definition of success.

Imagine what this scenario would like in a sports arena. “And in tonight’s match, we have Tom Brady, Muhammed Ali, Mary Lou Retton, and the entire pitching staff of the Boston Red Sox against Tiger Woods, LeBron James, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.  The match will begin 3 hours ago and will last until the concession stand sells $40,000 worth of diet soda.” In a situation like this, would you be primarily concerned about the disagreements that Tiger and LeBron have been having about which of them is the best at the pole vault? Of course you wouldn’t. You would be concerned about finding out how “success” is going to be measured, and what you can do to help your team turn it’s apparent disadvantage (only 3 players, Tiger, LeBron and Dale) into some sort of advantage (perhaps through faster decision making, making sure that points can only be scored by dunking a basketball, or trying to earn extra points by posting the fastest average lap time at Daytona).

What does this mean for teams in our day to day lives? It means that time and careful consideration up front to make sure all team members are in agreement about appropriate goals (for both the team and individual team members), clear role assignments, performance measures, and the procedures or norms team members will be expected to follow will lead to high payoffs in terms of team success and team member satisfaction.

Learn the rules of the game, then play ball!