Teams, Germs and Tools or Why (Remote) Teams Fail

In the past week or so, we have all been witnesses to an incredible phenomenon on social media. Amidst the coronavirus breakout that has spurred a massive work-from-home, remote work experiment around the globe, we are observing a growth spurt in the number of remote-work experts offering advice on how to best deal with newly given circumstances. While the spread of the virus is logarithmic, it seems that the growing number of experts on remote work is not less than exponential. 

A few great articles emerged from people who genuinely care to help alleviate stress and provide support to managers in navigating through this crisis period. Still, I can't help but feel that many are just chasing the trending hashtag to get some visibility and sell their product, service, or brand. 

An abundance of advice focuses on the extensive usage of technology and tools in response to the sudden virtualization of teams. Overall, people embrace the advice positively; many social media posts are literal screenshots of people in video conference calls expressing genuine excitement, one likely similar to the thrill Mr. Watson experienced when he heard Alexander Graham Bell over the first telephone wire uttering: "Come here, I want you." 

Communication-wise, we have been distancing progressively from face-to-face conversations to online discussions over the past several years, and chat apps and video calls have become a part of our daily routine. As a matter of fact, according to a Gallup study from two years ago, more than 68% of millennials and 47% of Gen Xers say they prefer texting to speaking. There's not a single trend indicating that in-person communication is not being reduced to a bare minimum. We check emails in the evenings and during weekends; we check emails when we are with our closest family and friends. According to Forbes in 2017, over 205 billion emails are sent on a daily basis. That's 30 emails a day for every single living person on Earth, a figure that has likely risen to 40 or 50 emails by now. 

Even though we work (and sometimes live) in open offices that are intended to spark more face-to-face communication, we are still progressively distancing. A study by Ethan Bernstein from Harvard Business School suggests that open offices actually inhibit personal communications. According to his study, employees spent 72% less time interacting in person, 56% more time sending emails, and 67% more time using instant messaging when they switched to an open office plan. Whether you are working remotely, or in an open office, chances are you will communicate with people using the same medium anyway. 

When it comes to productivity tools, we are already using a plethora of them daily. In 2018, the productivity software market was valued at 33B, with the U.S. dominating market share at 60.7%. It is growing at a rate of 16.5% per year. Whether used remotely or in the office, productivity apps have the same purpose - to help us track and maximize the usage of all the necessary resources and information needed to run projects. 

Such tools, however, are not actually helping us become more productive. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports declines in U.S. workforce productivity over the past three years. With the U.S. market as the prime consumer of productivity apps, it seems that the country’s data is a fair test sample to pull correlations. 

Tool obsession might be a part of the human condition. A Princeton investigation suggests that there is a neurological and evolutionary reason for our excitement with the usage of tools; apparently, our parietal cortex reacts with increased activity when presented with the image of a tool. Other independent philosophers online find gadget or software app fascination to be a form of our elaborate procrastination schemes. A quote by David Liedle on Quora perfectly summarizes an average experience of any software tool usage nowadays:

Extensive usage of familiar technology or the addition of new ones to your stack is certainly not going to make your teams flourish in a time of instant digitalization. Nor will a pile of extra tools help you manage your teams more efficiently. Beyond superficial advice, leaders and staffers across the globe need awareness of the fundamental conditions of team dynamics that distinguish well-performing units from those that lag in performance. No matter if you are an orchestra, a flight crew, an IT scrum unit, an NBA all-star team, or a remote team of any sort, the basic principles of team effectiveness apply.

As there is a growing tendency to over-consume online content in times of social isolation, I find this to be a fitting moment to reflect upon the topic of team fundamentals. Maybe the social distancing experiment will help us become more introspective and produce some enlightened leaders for the time that is to come. 

What's a real team? 

One of the first things I learned from J. Richard Hackman, a giant of social psychology with whom I was lucky enough to work early in my student days, was that research continues to show that teams underperform and underdeliver, despite the pervasive myth that teams are great vehicles for getting the job done. Richard was most famous for the following statement:

As I continue to participate in, build, lead, study, and advise different teams, these words have been forever etched in my memory. 

Many things are indeed called a team, but not every team makes a real team. 

Together with Dr. Ruth Wageman - a brilliant researcher and a domain expert on the topic of teams - Richard discovered something that I found hard to believe when I first read it. Through the study of more than 120 top leadership teams around the globe, they found that fewer than 10% of team members cohesively recognized who is and who is not a team member. Moreover, the majority of studies found that teams find it hard to agree on what the team is supposed to be doing at all. 

The first showstopper for team development is a lack of boundedness. A threshold for a group to be considered a real team is that team members know, at a minimum, who is and who is not a member of the team. 

The second criterion is interdependence, meaning that team members need to work jointly in order to accomplish a common goal. Quite often, you have a group that you call a team, but the tasks of individual team members are completely independent. If your team members do not need to interact and utilize their unique skills to drive solutions to your team's problems, then you are likely not at all utilizing your team's performance capacities. 

If these two conditions are met, a team supposed to work together on a long-term product/project delivery requires stability in membership. This means that the core of the team, at the very least, needs to continue working together in the long run. It is only through time that social bonds are created and that the group collectively learns how to best work together. 

Richard and Ruth called the real team factor the essential and primary in the row of conditions of team effectiveness. Chronologically, it is the first element in the team design that you need to address or clarify with the group you are participating in or leading. 

As we move forward, I will touch upon the works of Ruth, Rich, and a few other notable researchers in order to sequentially point you in the right direction as you are composing and leading your teams. 

Designing purposes

Given that you have already created a real team by making sure it is bounded (i.e., everyone knows who is and who is not in the group), interdependent (i.e., people need each other to accomplish work), and stable (i.e., team members don’t fluctuate all the time), your next focus should be to clearly define the purpose of the team - what is the team's raison d'etre?

A solid purpose sets the right direction for the team and, as such, supports a practical framework that makes it easier for the team members to develop task-appropriate performance strategies. The litmus test for whether you have a well-articulated purpose is your team's agreement on whether the purpose is consequential, challenging, and clear.  

A consequential purpose is one that is connected with the significant organizational objective, as well as with team members' personal goals. Team members want to contribute with their best to help the team succeed and make a difference. Sometimes, even when the tasks of team members are menial, such as filling data in spreadsheets or taking care of admin work, a proper framing gives the task a higher purpose and makes the experience more bearable. 

A challenging purpose is one that energizes the team to accomplish a feat; it is easy to get the challenging part wrong. Achievement-motivated effort is highest for people when they perceive odds of success at about 50/50. (This is an actual finding from a study done at the University of Michigan by Jack Atkinson, one of the pioneers of the scientific research of human motivations.) This means that your purpose statement needs to be challenging, but not over-challenging. If it is too easy for the team to accomplish the purpose, its members will not engage as hard as they can. If it is too hard, on the other hand, they'll be tempted to give up earlier than you want. 

The most important aspect of a good purpose statement is its clarity. As Ruth asserted in her book Senior Leadership Teams, "challenge without clarity hurts performance." Outstanding teams are the ones with well-articulated purposes that are as clear as they are challenging. 

Mission statements are not purposes. Mission statements do not provide information about what your team is explicitly aiming to accomplish as a group. Clear purpose statements for your team require information about your team's unique responsibilities, closely tied to how they contribute to the overall success of your organization. 

Sound structure driven by clear norms

A crucial aspect of smart team design that is often overlooked is the creation of coherent team norms; this holds especially true among laissez-faire leaders commonly present in the ICT industry sector. Even if you lead a team of highly responsible, highly educated individuals, behavior in a group needs to be managed. Many team leaders trap themselves into leading multiple one-on-one conversations trying to resolve conflict or to align people around a common goal. As a result, they burn much energy. An easier and more efficient way to manage collective behaviors is to create shared agreements about valued behaviors in the team. Making the creation of team norms a group process can help keep your members accountable for maintaining them. 

Whether you actively manage them or not, team norms will arise: behaviors during team calls, meetings that are tolerated, the level of transparency in communication, punctuality in meeting times and deadlines, and the quality of work that you want to deliver. If these norms are not explicitly stated, they will be reduced to the lowest naturally acceptable behavior by the group. If your colleague on the team openly misses a deadline and no one in the group ever addresses it, then the team norm becomes that it is entirely okay to miss deadlines.

One of the things that you'll note in the graph above is that outstanding teams, other than clear norms, have the right size. What does that mean?

Social media has recently been covered with screenshots of video conference team meetings, and it is surprising to see how many double-digit teams exist out there. The bigger the team, the harder it is to establish any sort of engagement rules or meaningful joint tasks. The complexity of communication nodes in groups beyond seven people rises exponentially. That means that, once you pass the double-digit team size, your decision-making becomes much less fluid and processes slow down. Therefore, you need to spend the majority of the time as a leader intervening with individuals rather than with the whole group.  

Coaching comes last

Contrary to conventional wisdom, research tells us that, as a leader, you do not need to be a fantastic coach. Coaching is a powerful tool that leaders can hold in their utility belts, but the most effective coaching comes after you have created a real team with a compelling purpose and explicit norms. 

Great coaching has a minimal positive impact on poorly designed teams, almost as insignificant as poor coaching hurts well-designed units. On the other hand, poor coaching delivered to a poorly designed squad can send the team down the drain. 

If great coaching, however, is introduced to a well-designed team, its positive effects can amplify team effectiveness.

Well-timed interventions

"I swear to God I would have made it in the nineties, ninety percent of everything comes down to timing" - Eliquate

Some ten years ago, I accidentally stumbled upon those lyrics from a somewhat obscure, but brilliant rapper. Ever since I was waiting for an appropriate place to share his wisdom. It is funny because it is true. 

The accomplished researchers, Connie Gersick and Deborah Ancona are just a few (but notable) organizational psychologists who dedicated portions of their careers to studying the temporal role of context on team behavior. It turns out that interventions do not have the same weight and impact on team outcomes when randomly introduced to teams at different times.

In an interview article that appeared in Harvard Business Review back in 2009, Richard Hackman shared a great story. It was a vignette from a conversation he had with a distinguished conductor, Christopher Hogwood, who once told him that there is nothing that he pays more attention to than the way he starts the first rehearsal with an orchestra. That's when, as Mr. Hogwood noted, the orchestra members make a quick assessment about whether or not they are going to produce great music. 

Hogwood's wisdom has been empirically framed by Connie Gersick in a theoretical framework of punctuated equilibrium. 

There are three critical points in any team's project lifecycle: the beginning, the midpoint, and the end. In team dynamics, the starting point of a team's life is reserved for successful launching (or re-launching!) of the group, the midpoint review for course corrections, and the endpoint reflection for members to learn from previous experience and better prepare for another cycle. 

According to Gersick's model, during phase one of the project development, most groups are getting used to working together and devising the framework of interactions that, in well-managed units, radically shifts at about the midpoint of a team's life. The midpoint is a powerful time for altering the course of the group as, once the team is past the half-life, it is unlikely it will alter the basic plans again. 

At completion, it is essential to make reviews of accomplishments and expectations, for this kind of debriefing promotes team bonding and learning, as well as sets the team right for the next project or phase in its development. 

Real teams vs. teaming?

As our organizations become more complex and market expectations require greater adaptability, sometimes it is hard to do work in real teams. Various complex problems and problems that should be managed on the fly require quick solutions and expertise from different fields. In such situations, we simply cannot afford to have teams working together for a long time. Another Harvard professor, Amy Edmondson, calls this phenomenon  “teaming.” 

Teaming is when people work on a shifting mix of projects with many different colleagues, whom they might not have worked with before or never will again. In such cases, Prof. Edmondson found that the personal characteristics of leaders, such as curiosity, passion, and empathy, play a significant role in team success. 

These personal values of leaders often lead to a translation of positive norms in teaming formations: 

• situational humility - the ability to stay humble in the face of challenge and admit the limits of your knowledge 
• curiosity about others - genuine interest in what other team members bring to the table and how everyone can help 
• psychological safety - willingness to take a risk to learn quickly

Teaming is one type of group formation that is becoming increasingly popular, but it has its own set of limitations and should be used for particular sprint-like purposes. If you want to ship something fast, you'll have no other choice then to team up. However, if you're going to win championships, then you better build a few mission-critical teams to take you there.

Is there anything specific about remote teams?

Remote or virtual teams are just one form of organization that follows the basic principles of group dynamics present in any given team. As our communication is becoming increasingly impersonal, teams that are sitting together in the same office can behave like a fully virtual team. 

Whether you have a remote team or a team that sits together in the office, you still need to make sure it is a real team, with a compelling purpose and, most importantly, a clear set of norms to ensure that the team does not fall apart. Norms hold an especially important place in your team design arsenal when the majority of your team members are working from home.  

I recently read a great post by Dr. Keith McNullty from McKinsey, who reflected on his experience of working from home and the type of limitations employees tend to have in such scenarios. This kind of experience is further amplified by government crisis responses that have led to a complete shutdown of nursery and education systems.

There are also other experiences of work from home.

Remote work and crisis management are two different things altogether. Times of crisis require more understanding and compassion towards your individual team members and accommodations that might challenge your standard norms. However, disaster is a temporary state and, as such, needs to be addressed with a temporary set of norms. 

While introducing new tools to your work might be lucrative, if you have not intentionally addressed the basics of your team design, then chances are that your team is either not a team at all or that it is gradually decomposing. Adding new tools to a team that doesn't have the proper architecture work done will add another layer of complexity to group dynamics that can further slow down processes and even hurt your team development. 

Jared Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology, whose famous book title I shamelessly twisted to name this piece. In “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” he argues that civilizations are not a product of ingenuity, but rather of opportunity and necessity. I found that such a definition of the genesis of civilization is perfectly juxtaposed to team development processes.

Teams are rarely created as a product of intentional design; instead, they are predominantly the result of a chain of developments in a given context. Most of our organizations, likewise, develop as a necessity through moments of inertia.

Luckily, some years of team science can help us learn from past collective experiences and accordingly prioritize a few elements of intelligent design that can help our teams thrive, no matter the circumstances. 

Thanks for sticking with me until the end. If you would like to learn more about Richard Hackman's or Ruth Wageman's work and the conditions of team effectiveness, I highly suggest the following resources: 

Leading Teams by Richard Hackman

Senior Leadership Teams by Ruth Wageman

Here's more on Amy Edmondson and her work on teaming:

Teaming by Amy Edmondson

And a novel paper by Connie Gersick on the punctuated equilibrium paradigm:

Reflections on Revolutionary Change by Connie Gersick