A recent article in Harvard Business Review titled "6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You're Frustrated with Your Team" provides some excellent advice about how you might change your own behavior as a team leader. But like so many articles on managing people (either as teams or as individuals), it focuses almost entirely on managing interpersonal interactions and not nearly enough on the importance of creating a context that sets people up for success.
A former mentor of mine, Harvard University psychologist Richard Hackman, once opened a keynote speech by saying that managers shouldn't try to motivate people to change. Instead, he said, managers should focus on putting in place conditions that made positive outcomes more likely, and negative outcomes less likely. He described what he meant by this in his book Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, in which he described what he found through his research on teams in a variety of different industries and settings, from airline crews to intelligence teams to symphony orchestras. Through his research, Hackman identified several critical conditions that supported successful teams across all these very different contexts. In this blog post, I will focus on the first three, which Hackman termed "The Essentials".
- Having a Real Team. Real teams have well-defined, stable membership. The team and its members have the authority to conduct their work and make critical decisions without always needing "permission" from someone at a higher level. Finally, real teams conduct their work in an interdependent manner - meaning they do much of their work together, as opposed to coming together in periodic meetings to share updates. So as you look at an underperforming team, ask yourself questions like - do they have a core, stable membership that gives them the consistency needed to learn over time? Do they have the authority they need to complete the task without constantly waiting for external approval? If this appears to be the problem, consider helping the team stabilize its membership. This is often done by reducing the size of the team.
- Having a Compelling Direction. Team members are motivated by having a shared task that is clear, challenging, and consequential. They have been charged with completing specific goals, but have not been told to use specific means to reach those goals. As you look at the team, ask yourself if there is a clear, shared endpoint at all the team members are working towards? Will the challenge of reaching that goal require the team members to work with and learn from each other? Does the team have the authority to manage their own work in terms of how they meet the goal? If this is an issue, help the team by providing clarity around the end goal, and explaining the importance of the project to the organization.
- Having the Right People. A major reason that teams work well is that they bring together a diverse group of people in terms of backgrounds, perspectives, and skill sets. But to do that, team members need to have (and trust that all other team members have) certain base levels of skill and competence in their own specialties. When teams don't have the right people, it sometimes is because one or more individuals don't have the knowledge, skill, and ability you thought they had. However, just as often it is because there are too many team members who are just too similar in terms of the skills they bring to the table, their training and the way they solve problems, or the perspectives that they bring. Take a close look at how people were selected for this team, who was chosen, and why? Was it truly based on their knowledge, skill, and ability? Or have some individuals become the "go-to" people for your team?
