CONTINUING ARTICLE Project 7

sions on team effectiveness for thousands of team leaders and members; their stories and experiences have also shaped our thinking. June 2016 Harvard Business Review 73 THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMWORK HBR.ORG leaders can do this by fostering a common identity and common understanding. In the past teams typically consisted of a stable set of fairly homogeneous members who worked face-to-face and tended to have a similar mindset. But thats no longer the case, and teams now often perceive themselves not as one cohesive group but as several smaller subgroups. This is a natural human response: Our brains use cognitive shortcuts to make sense of our increasingly complicated world, and one way to deal with the complexity of a 4-D team is to lump people into categories. But we also are inclined to view our own subgroupwhether its our function, our unit, our region, or our culture more positively than others, and that habit often creates tension and hinders collaboration. This was the challenge facing Alec, the manager of an engineering team at ITT tasked with providing software solutions for high-end radio communications. His team was split between Texas and New Jersey, and the two groups viewed each other with skepticism and apprehension. Differing time zones, regional cultures, and even accents all reinforced their dissimilarities, and Alec struggled to keep all members up to speed on strategies, priorities, and roles. The situation got so bad that during a team visit to a customer, members from the two offices even opted to stay in separate hotels. In an effort to unite the team, Alec took everyone out to dinner, only to find the two groups sitting at opposite ends of the table. Incomplete information is likewise more prevalent in 4-D teams. Very often, certain team members have important information that others do not because they are experts in specialized areas or because members are geographically dispersed, new, or both. That information wont provide much value if it isnt communicated to the rest of the team. After all, shared knowledge is the cornerstone of a system that provides access to the data needed for the work, an educational system that offers training, and lastbut not leastsecuring the material resources required to do the job, such as funding and technological assistance. While no team ever gets everything it wants, leaders can head off a lot of problems by taking the time to get the essential pieces in place from the start. Ensuring a supportive context is often difficult for teams that are geographically distributed and digitally dependent, because the resources available to members may vary a lot. Consider the experience of Jim, who led a new product-development team at General Mills that focused on consumer goods for the Mexican market. While Jim was based in the United States, in Minnesota, some members of his team were part of a wholly-owned subsidiary in Mexico. The team struggled to meet its deadlines, which caused friction. But when Jim had the opportunity to visit his Mexican team members, he realized how poor their IT was and how strapped they were for both capital and peopleparticularly in comparison with the headquarters staff. In that one visit, Jims frustration turned to admiration for how much his Mexican colleagues were able to accomplish with so little, and he realized that the problems hed assumed were due to a clash between cultures were actually the result of differences in resources. Shared mindset. Establishing the first three enabling conditions will pave the way for team success, as Hackman and his colleagues showed. But our research indicates that todays teams need something more. Distance and diversity, as well as digital communication and changing membership, make them especially prone to the problems of us versus them thinking and incomplete information. The solution to both is developing a shared mindset among team memberssomething team The problems that the team leader assumed were due to culture clash were actually the result of differences in resources. 74 Harvard Business Review June 2016 SPOTLIGHT ON MANAGING TEAMS Returning to Alec, the manager of the team whose subgroups booked separate hotels: While his dinner started with the Texas colleagues at one end of the table and the New Jersey colleagues at the other, by its close signs had emerged that the team was chipping away at its internal wall. Over the following weeks, Alec stressed to the members of the important role the two offices played in achieving the teams exciting and engaging goaldesigning new software for remotely monitoring hardware. He emphasized that both subteams contributed necessary skills and pointed out that they depended on each other for success. To build more bridges, he brought the whole team together several more times over the next few months, creating shared experiences and common reference points and stories. Because of his persistent efforts, team members started to view the team not as us and them but as we. effective collaboration; it gives a group a frame of reference, allows the group to interpret situations and decisions correctly, helps people understand one another better, and greatly increases efficiency. Digital dependence often impedes information exchange, however. In face-to-face teams, participants can rely on nonverbal and contextual cues to provide insight into whats going on. When we walk into an in-person meeting, for example, we can immediately sense the individual and collective moods of the people in the roominformation that we use (consciously or not) to tailor subsequent interactions. Having to rely on digital communication erodes the transmission of this crucial type of intelligence. Some effects of incomplete information came to light during a recent executive education session at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Japan. The audience was split roughly 50/50 between employees based in Japan and those based in the United States. One of the U.S. managers took the opportunity to ask about something that had puzzled him. Takedas share the pain strategy for dealing with time zone differences alternated the scheduling of conference calls between late nights in America and late nights in Asia, and he wondered why his Japanese colleagues seemed to take their late-night calls in the office, while he and his U.S. colleagues always took them at home. His Japanese colleagues responses revealed a variety of motivations for this choicea desire for work/life separation, a need to run language questions by coworkers, and the lack of home office space in a typical Osaka apartment. But the result was the same: Though Takeda executives had intended to share the pain, they had not. The Americans left the office at a normal hour, had dinner with their families, and held calls in the comfort of their homes, while their Japanese colleagues stayed in the office, missed time with their families, and hoped calls ended before the last train home. In this case, however, the incomplete information wasnt about the task; it was about something equally critical: how the Japanese members of the team experienced their work and their relationships with distant team members. Fortunately, there are many ways team leaders can actively foster a shared identity and shared understanding and break down the barriers to cooperation and information exchange. One powerful approach is to ensure that each subgroup feels valued for its contributions toward the teams overall goals. Does Your Team Measure Up? Then score your team on the following aspects of the conditions for effectiveness: COMPELLING DIRECTION Do we have a common goal that is clear, challenging (but not impossible), and consequential? STRONG STRUCTURE Do we have the right number and mix of members? Are people responsible for tasks from beginning to end?