Teams may not be all they’re cracked up to be

Great interview in HBR (“Why Teams Don’t Work” – $$) this month of J. Richard Hackman, a longtime expert on teams (and co-author of one of my favorite books of 2008, “Senior Leadership Teams“).

Hackman spends much of the interview demolishing myths that have developed around the power of teams:

- Teams usually deliver less than the sum of their resources.

- Team makeup should be changed infrequently if you want to develop a strong team.

- Harmonious teams are not necessarily more effective than disagreeable ones.

- Poor team players can still be excellent contributors (just don’t put them on teams!).

There’s much, much more. Every manager must read this before setting up that next team.

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Tags: management, organizational behavior, reading list, teams

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 1:53 pm and is filed under management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

John Larrere

Teams work when a team is required. I remember consulting to the top team of a holding company that had diverse businesses – wine, packaging, and large appliances which had very little in common. The group of executives did not have a common task and very little inter-accountability. Their duty was to deliver profitable growth in their own businesses, period. Yet the perception that they should be a team led them waste time on an approach that did not fit the operating model for their business. Often when “teams” fail, it is because they are a group, not a team. It is a wonderful answer to the wrong question.

Kent Frese

Here are some surprising statistics from a study of about 60,000 people that I use in my work as a consultant in this area:

- A group produces higher quality decisions than 87-90% of its members alone
- Group decisions are better than the best individual decision 40% of the time
- Group decisions are superior to the average member’s decision 98% of the time.
- Individuals improve their own decision quality through discussion with members 97% of the time.

Kent

jmcaddell

Kent, you bring up some good points. I agree with the study that groups make better decisions than individuals (a point the recent book "Think Again" also discusses, never mind "The Wisdom of Crowds"). I'm not sure that Hackman is talking about decisionmaking as much as using teams to get things done (which was a point I didn't make clearly in the post). If you get a chance to read the interview, I'd be interested in how you view his arguments.

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