How to Get Teams Performing Faster

 

Teaming is important to the success of projects yet we don't formalize the practice enough. We don't institute best practices around teaming or spend time to resolve intra-team interaction issues when they are behind delays.  Maybe we just want  to avoid the drama. Whatever is behind the missed opportunities, we know it is better to get teams up to speed quickly and keep them performing at a high level. Internal problems on one team have a domino effect on other teams.

There are many potential barriers that need to be addressed and this may be part of the problem.  Perhaps if we had key barriers listed for us we could respond appropriately.

Lucky for us this recent Harvard Business School working paper* (pdf) can help out. These researchers were able to come up with a solution to a very difficult teaming problem in a hospital emergency room where members of teams might not know each other or not see each other for months. Team members might be switched out after a few hours of a shift. Yet they had to be immediately effective in a heterogeneous team (doctors of two experience levels and a few nurses) under time pressures and significant stress: saving lives one after another. If researchers could make these teams work better, we project managers should be able to glean some important lessons.

Of particular interest are barriers surmounted by the techniques used. We need to know those team arriers.

Team Obstacle #1:  Members not knowing specific duties in new team or duties not divided appropriately within the team.

Many factors are involved in members getting certain duties - and they aren't necessarily good for your project as are expertise and ability. For example, intimidation and prestige may distort work distribution.

What can you do?  Apply many techniques and controls.

• Make sure team standards and expectations are clear and documented even if they should be obvious. People with different backgrounds, experience and corporate cultures may disagree on the "obvious."
• Include in expectations that the teamis responsible for producing results, thereby supporting a team identity which will counter individual efforts to misuse power and prestige. (More on team self-regulation later.)
• Enable easy escalation of intra-team work distribution issues. Communicate your desire to deal with these early and get them settled.
• Communicate the expectation of mutual accountability, so when individual team members share information needed to complete a task, there is an implicit expectation that both are needed to complete the task and that the task will be completed. This will help mitigate two situations
  (1) where a more "powerful" team member chooses not to assist a less powerful team member
  (2) where a team member working a task finds it difficult to engage a team member to assist with a task because the other is unknown, in a different demographic group,  or  just difficult to communicate with. (More on this barrier later. It's important.)

This will be continued in my next post in a couple of days. There are several other obstacles and they are interrelated, each response helping make the other responses more effective.

*It's pretty interesting and definitely requires another look in the future.