From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor’s ‘traitorous eight’ in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.
Peter Thiel When attempting to increase tempo and momentum within organizations, teams that work in small multi-disciplinary units (or ‘pods’, as we might call them) can be disproportionately powerful in demonstrating new, agile, itera-tive ways of working and helping to drive transformation across the business.
Work by author, Harvard professor, and specialist in team dynamics Richard Hackman has shown the challenges inherent in attempting to accel-erate pace using large teams, the issues not only relating to the size of the team itself, but the number of links between people and the growing burden of communication.6 As group size increases, the number of unique links between people also increases, but exponentially. So while a small team of 6 creates 15 links between everyone, a larger team of 12 will generate 66 links, and a team of 50 has no fewer than 1225 links to manage. This exponential increase means that coordination and communication costs are soon grow-ing at the expense of productivity.
Leaders, says Hackman, may often create oversized teams in the faulty assumption that ‘more is better’ for team effectiveness, or due to emotional considerations such as sharing responsibility and spreading accountability across larger numbers of people, or for political reasons such as ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are represented. You may then have a politi-cally correct team, but likely one that is incapable of moving at pace towards its objective.
Hackman defined four key features that are critical to create an effective team in an organization:
1 Common team tasks that work towards fulfilling a compelling vision.
2 Clear boundaries in terms of who is in the team, information flow, and alignment with other resources, priorities, policies and teams.
3 Autonomy to work within these boundaries.
4 Stability.
These qualities take on a heightened level of significance when trying to move fast within the agile organization. The difference, for example, that Hackman delineates between a ‘co-acting group’ and a real team. A great deal of organizational work is performed by groups that are commonly called teams, but in reality are more like co-acting groups that have members who sit in close proximity, may have the same leader, but where each member has an individual job to do and the completion of that job does not depend on what the others in the group do. The hope is that managers can gain the benefits of teamwork while still directly managing the behaviours of indi-vidual members but this is, he says, misplaced: ‘If you want the benefits of teamwork, you have to give the team the work’.7
In the agile organization, far greater emphasis is placed on small multi-disciplinary teams where the interdependencies, work and individual responsibilities between team members intertwine in the course of concurrent working towards a common, shared objective. Work by Wharton Management School professor Jennifer Mueller8 has shown that individual performance in larger teams can suffer in comparison to those in smaller teams due to ‘rela-tional loss’, or the perception that individual team members are less able to get as much support, ease of access to information or recognition in a larger team. Momentum comes from teams becoming a real unit, improving itera-tively over time, focused on clear outcomes. As the UK Government Digital Service was always fond of saying: ‘the unit of delivery is the team’.9
Similarly, it is essential for the team to have clear boundaries in order to move fast. While the work doesn’t always need all team members to be in the same location at the same time for progress to be made, lack of clarity over who is on the team will act as a brake on momentum if key members are juggling multiple priorities or missing from key meetings. Attempting to establish new ways of working through a half-hearted adoption of cell-based working that sees key members allocating only part of their time to the new team is likely to be problematic. It requires commitment. The team needs to be sufficiently bounded to profit from clear direction and comprehensive
participation, while sufficiently porous to enable beneficial cross-boundary exchanges. More than ever, agile teams need focused objectives, clear ways of monitoring advancement towards achieving those objectives, and then the freedom to define how they will work to create that progress.
Stories from the frontline
Gareth Kay, Co-Founder, Chapter SF: The new unit of work
It’s been widely accepted for some time that the atomic unit that unlocks the potential of any organization is the team. What we’ve failed to realize is that the very nature of the team has changed dramatically as technology has allowed people to work together in new and better ways.
We are not unlocking the full potential of our teams because we are using the wrong map to understand organizational structures today. Despite all our talk of agile working processes and the democratization of the ‘bottoms up’ workspace, we still envision teams operating in a rigid, post-industrial hierarchy of command and control. Org charts are the still dominant way we shape and present those who work with us. We see teams being bounded, at best, by the organization and at worst by their department or discipline.
The organizations that unlock their potential see their teams quite differently. They see the team as a group of people who come together around a common goal. Yes, this could be a department but more likely it will be a group of people from different disciplines, potentially working in different countries and even different companies, who are working together to achieve something together they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
Research by Amy Edmonson at Harvard Business School shows that the nature of teams is changing dramatically in response to a more fluid world.
As much as we talk about them, stable, bounded, clearly defined teams are less and less in evidence. What she sees more of is ‘teaming’, a dynamic activity, not a static, bounded entity. A verb rather than a noun. If we use this map of the world, then some very different needs emerge about how to build a world class team (of teams).
First, we need to be far more radical in our approach to bringing different people together in different ways. We should be looking at how we can truly diversify the talent, skills and experience we bring around a problem. This means looking outside the ‘usual suspects’ inside an industry and looking for inspiration outside. We should look at how we can break the approaches