Why teams dont work

In his book Leading Teams , J. Richard Hackman sets out five basic conditions that leaders of companies and other organizations must fulfill in order to create and maintain effective teams:. People have to know who is on the team and who is not. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.

The organizational context—including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system—must facilitate teamwork. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does not significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes—especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project. In those studies, we found that the things that happen the first time a group meets strongly affect how the group operates throughout its entire life.

Indeed, the first few minutes of the start of any social system are the most important because they establish not only where the group is going but also what the relationship will be between the team leader and the group, and what basic norms of conduct will be expected and enforced. If the launch of a team is as critical as Professor J. Richard Hackman says, then Barack Obama has done pretty well.

Given the monumental crises that faced him the moment he was elected, he had to move quickly. Obama has certainly brought onto his team people of strong temperaments and contrasting views, starting with Hillary Clinton at the State Department and Jim Jones at the National Security Council. This suggests that we have a president who is unusually sure of his own ability to absorb differing opinions. Appointing people like Clinton also shows his eagerness to harness the talent of his former opponents.

Compare that with the record of George W. Of course, Obama is taking a risk by hiring so many strong and contentious personalities.

He will inevitably have to spend a lot of time and energy serving as referee. This is what happened with Franklin Roosevelt, who also brought strong-minded figures into his government. One difference with Obama, however, is that FDR temperamentally loved the infighting. He liked to pit people against one another, believing that competition evoked the best performance from everyone.

At times FDR actually enjoyed making his underlings suffer. Most presidents prefer a happy ship, and in some cases their definition of loyalty includes not rocking the boat on major administration programs. Johnson would cite Ball when people complained that he surrounded himself with yes-men, but in fact Ball had little influence when LBJ met with top officials on Vietnam.

If you really want dissenting views, better to use the Roosevelt-Obama model, where they can come from almost any member of the team—and not just from one designated rabble-rouser. Like Obama, Kennedy was a young president with little national security background and thought it might reassure people to have the previous defense secretary stay on at the Pentagon.

Like Obama, JFK also suspected that a number of things might go wrong with national security during his first year as president. He felt that Americans might be less likely to blame the Democratic president if a Republican secretary of defense was there at his side.

In the end Kennedy did not have the stomach for the risk of keeping a Republican appointee at the Pentagon. Obama did. Obama argued that it did, and he was right. Imagine how much more anxious they might feel now if Obama did not do this so effectively. I do think there is one thing leaders such as Hogwood and others can do to improve the chances that a team will become something special, and that is to embrace their own quirkiness. If a team has no idea what their purpose is, how can they ever have a chance of being successful?

It is important to outline key objectives for the team and as well as a method to assess whether these goals are being met. A team without clear leadership often lacks direction. The belief that teams make us more creative and productive--and are the best way to get things done--is deeply entrenched. But Hackman, a professor of organizational psychology at Harvard and a leading expert on teams, is having none of it. Research, he says, consistently shows that teams underperform despite all their extra resources.

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