It’s not you, it’s them: Why your brilliant team is failing
Stig Brodersen
The moment a major deal landed on your desk, you knew instantly that you needed your best employees to get the job done. So, you go gather them to create your brilliant super team.
Yet, nothing seems to be going right. Your “best” employees – the cream of the crop – are failing to give you the results you expected them to churn out.
What’s wrong?
Is your team sick? Or are your leadership skills hurting your members?
Looking at the mess you now have in your hands, do you find yourself asking these questions: Is it me? Am I pulling this team down? Am I an ineffectual boss? Do I have a management conundrum? Am I the weak link?
Don’t worry!
These kinds of concerns are perfectly normal and completely understandable. In fact, it’s crucial for leaders to experience these moments of self-reflection when it comes to their management style and skills.
However, there’s another equally significant (if not more important at times) point that every leader must come to terms with when leading a team. It’s the fact that the problem might not be caused by them, but by their team members.
Although this seems like the perfect scapegoat for all the issues plaguing a group, a good leader doesn’t stop when he/she realizes that his/her team might just be dysfunctional.
A good leader strives to dig deeper and find ways to fix the issues that are messing with the dynamics and functionality of what could be a promising team.
Throughout my career, I have had the privilege of working with so many teams. While there were definitely people I would love to collaborate with again, there were also instances when I couldn’t wait for the project to finish. Looking back, I realized that the teammates I had were not exactly the problem – in fact, I actually liked them a lot.
This idea boggled my mind, prompting me to find out why sometimes even the most brilliantly gathered people fail to function properly as a team. As it turns out, this has long been an issue for a lot of companies. Interestingly, I discovered that there’s a science behind the various instances of team dysfunctionality we experience.
1. Your team is cross-functional
Theoretically, teams tagged as “cross-functional” seem to be the ideal situation. Having these kinds of teams to work on projects should be able to help their companies maximize the time and effort put in by their workers.
However, 75% of cross-functional teams interviewed and surveyed for a Harvard Business Review report revealed that this system resulted in dysfunctional working relationships.
To better measure the functionality of a team, Behnam Tabrizi of HBR utilized the following criteria:
1. meeting a planned budget
2. staying on schedule
3. adhering to specifications
4. meeting customer expectations
5. maintaining alignment with corporate goals
Upon checking with the survey participants, Tabrizi found out that the dysfunctional teams failed to fulfill at least three of these factors. Explaining why cross-functional teams fail, he said that the groups often lack a “systemic approach” on things.
“Teams are hurt by unclear governance, by a lack of accountability, by goals that lack specificity, and by organizations’ failure to prioritize the success of cross-functional projects,” Tabrizi shared. That is, these teams fail to envision a singular goal to achieve. More often than not, they can’t even figure out where and how to start.
Without clear guidance, any cross-functional team has the capacity to turn into one blubbering mess.
2. Your team is failing to collaborate
Collaboration is a key ingredient in creating a successful team. However, we’ve all been at the receiving end of a “deadweight” in our teams. Because of these people, some teams turn into several individuals instead of working as one cohesive unit.
So, why does collaboration even matter? Shouldn’t it suffice that every member of the team can just do their part and leave it at that?
No.
For one, collaboration can actually save you time and money.
According to Insight, enterprise social network Yammer revealed that “38% of employee time is lost duplicating work, and 58% of people waste an hour a day looking for information.”
Teams that fail to collaborate have members who are solely focused on completing their individual roles. Their poor or even nonexistent communication with the other members of the team contributed to their downfall.
In fact, a study by Salesforce disclosed that 86% of employees believe the failure to collaborate could be a significant factor in a company’s collapse.
If these facts still can’t convince you of the importance of collaboration, then perhaps this age-old adage would: “Two heads are better than one.”
Remember, a single team member could always come up with awesome ideas and innovations. However, these ideas could reach their maximum potential when tossed around in a team meeting with feedback and comments from their teammates.
3. You have too many team members
Since collaboration is crucial in teamwork, there comes an understandable confusion when it comes to forming a group. That is, some leaders tend to believe that bigger teams are better. After all, more hands on deck mean getting the job done faster. Right?
According to Maximilien Ringelmann, adding too many people could significantly damage the productivity and motivation of the members of the team – and he proved this in his 1913 experiment.
In this experiment, Ringelmann used a rope to test his idea. First, the French professor asked the individuals to pull the rope on their own. Then, he instructed them to do the same but with the rest of the group.
This classic social experiment unsurprisingly revealed that the participants exerted less effort when asked to pull the rope with others. Interestingly, their efforts noticeably diminished as more people were added to the group.
Expanding the size of a team was found to be directly proportional to the declining work contributed by the individual members.
In today’s parlance, I think we could comfortably call them corporate “free riders.”
In an Elsevier-published study by Bradley Staats, Katherine Milkman, and Craig Fox, the researchers noted that individuals tend “to increasingly underestimate task-completion time as team size grows.”
To illustrate their point, the researchers asked participants to build a Lego figure. The results showed that teams with only two members took 36 minutes to complete the task. Meanwhile, teams that had four members took 52 minutes to accomplish the same goal. This amounts to 44% more time spent by the larger team doing the same task as the smaller group.
These studies prove that a small group of people working together fosters an environment of self-sufficiency and innovation. It also combats the tendency of a bigger team to groupthink. More importantly, it minimizes the possibility of any member loafing around.
In our discussion with fellow investor Hari Ramachandra, we talked about Bezos’ secrets to success and tried to identify the key factors behind the journey of the Amazon founder to the top – with him only $4 billion away from dethroning the great Bill Gates.
While Bezos’ relentless determination to emerge as the best in his field impressed us most, I discovered yet another gem of an advice from the billionaire: always follow the two-pizza rule for maximum productivity in team meetings.
According to Bezos, small teams encourage better communication and higher efficiency as opposed to large groups.
So, how many people should you have?
For Bezos, the ideal team size would be one that can be sufficiently fed by only two pizzas. If your team requires more than this, then it’s too big to be highly effective.
Conclusion
Being part of any team means getting involved in a complex structure. A group is a machine with several moving segments, and all those have to work as one unit.
We can embark on various ways to solve these problems, but more importantly, it’s crucial for us to fully comprehend why these issues are cropping up.
Understanding the reasons behind our team’s dysfunction could help us both solve the issues and ensure that these do not come back to haunt us ever again. But, we must strive to constantly look in the right places.
Team dysfunctionality is a reality faced by a lot of companies. Instead of self-flagellating for your team’s shortcomings, do your best to learn from them —evaluate the issues and pursue ways to solve them.
Check out this article and other similar posts on my Finance Blog.
