Teams That Work

High-performing management teams are essential for the delivery of significant change within complex organisations. Yet most such teams are far less than the sum of their parts. They fail to produce to their full potential. How can organisations make their management teams more effective?

We believe the answer lies in allowing teams to do real work together, but in a reflective way that allows them to understand what they are doing well, and why. The best way to learn how to work well as a team is to work as a team. Group psychology and outward bound courses have limited value.

"Teams that work" do so on three levels:

They work well together as a group of people. They generate results. They do real work on the ground, and learn from it. Working Well Together What was it that made the difference for the Scotland rugby football team that soundly beat England in 2006? It was certainly not the quality of the individual players. None of the Scots had been selected for the full British and Irish "Lions" rugby test-match team six months earlier against the New Zealand All Blacks. Yet most of the English players had been. The difference on the day of the England-Scotland match lay in the fact that the English team was considerably less than the sum of its parts whereas the Scots team was more.

The way in which teams can be more than the sum of their individual components is perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the relay race. Here, teams with the fastest runners can be (and indeed often are) beaten by teams with less able runners. The relay races in the Olympics attract some of the largest audiences of the games because they have the greatest potential to throw up surprises.

Teams with less able individual runners win because they are better at the processes involved in a relay race – the baton changing, for example. One piece of research into a French Olympic team that performed well above its potential suggested that the runners had a different attitude to their task. They seemed prepared to hold back their running effort in order to make a smoother passing of the baton. The fastest individual runners, on the other hand, found it difficult to restrain themselves for the benefit of their teammates. As a consequence, they more frequently made mistakes during their baton changes.

In organisations, the same principles can be seen to apply. The most technically talented well-established teams are sometimes outflanked by inexperienced upstarts. Invariably, when the upstarts win it is because they are closely aligned behind a motivating goal or idea, and they are dedicated to getting results. The growth of the internet has thrown up many such examples.

Effective teams, it seems, can not only be more than the sum of their parts, they can be more even than the sum of the parts of the most experienced specialists at the tasks they are undertaking. Peter Drucker, one of the most down-to-earth of management writers, once said, with reference to knowledge-based organisations: "A great orchestra is not composed of great instrumentalists, but of adequate ones who produce at their peak."

Unfortunately the hierarchical nature of traditional organisations does not favour the formation of good teams. Many companies still have military-style organograms and structured lines of command where rank, as it were, gets in the way of the more egalitarian environment required for teams to work at their best. Most managers climb the corporate ladder by successfully defending their turf, not by deferring its narrow interests to the larger interests of the organisation as a whole. When they get near the top of the structure they are rarely well prepared for the more collaborative approach required by higher level strategic decision-making.

Companies put very little effort into helping management teams to achieve the extraordinary outcomes of which they are capable. In our experience, this is particularly true of top management teams. Middle managers are more likely to get coaching. Partly this is because organisations are afraid that coaching will take up too much of their top managers' expensive time, often assuming that it necessarily involves countless weeks of rock-climbing and group bonding in extravagant country retreats.

Our approach to team-building makes no such assumptions. We believe that the best way to learn how to work as a team is on the job, by doing things in teams. We never ask teams to commit more than one day and the preceding night to any particular learning programme. And we insist that participants not think of it as "losing a day's work". During that time they work together on some of the toughest problems that they face. We merely encourage them to do what they should be doing anyway. But in a more reflective environment.

"Away days" and outward-bound courses may have a role to play, but we believe it is secondary to the role of actually working together. Teams learn how to improve through a process of action and reflection: doing things together and then thinking about what worked and what did not.

Communication, Communication, Communication Fundamental to good teams is good communication among members of the team. A really good team recognises that each of its members sees things differently and communicates differently. To get their messages across, members must tailor their communication for their particular audience. They must learn how to package information in the most appropriate way. For instance, some people prefer to grasp things by going from the general to the specific ("big chunk" types who, once they see the big picture, are then happy to home in on the details). Others prefer to start with the details ("small chunk" types), building up the whole from a collection of facts, lists, etc.

More particularly, the nature of managers' jobs influences to an extent the way they communicate with other managers. "In contrast to activities performed by most non-managers," wrote Henry Mintzberg, a Canadian academic, in what has become a classic study of managers at work, "those of the manager are characterised by brevity, variety, and fragmentation. The vast majority are of brief duration, of the order of seconds for foremen and minutes for chief executives. The variety of activities to be performed is great, and the lack of pattern among subsequent activities, with the trivial interspersed with the consequential, requires that the manager shift moods quickly and frequently. In general, managerial work is fragmented and interruptions are commonplace."

This fragmentation and short attention span does not encourage understanding within teams. Members of management teams spend a lot of time talking to one another, yet often fail to communicate. In...