The massive shift in the business world is seeing more employees engaged in collaborative work. As employees we are now on twice as many teams as we were five years ago[i] . With the introduction of technology that encourages us to work collaboratively (e.g. Trello, GoToMeeting, Slack, Google Drive, GitHub etc.), we need to ensure this is managed. According to an HBR research paper 20% to 35% of value added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees[ii].
So as much as I am in support of teams, not all teams create dreams. I recently faced a cross roads in my career where I had to make a choice to either form a business that was run by a team or go on my own as a consultant. Having just left a company that had a team with some clear skill deficits, I didn’t want to repeat the mistake. I believe having the right skills at the right time in the right structure and environment is critical to modern day business.
The other consideration in our time poor society is, not everyone has to be involved in everything. Max Ringelmann, a French engineer identified the effect that people have on an outcome or result through the game of tug of war. He had individuals compete one–on-one and then in teams. What he discovered is twice as many people did not lead to twice as much effort. In, fact as the number of team members increased, individual contributions tended to decline.
Allison Vallancourt from the University of Arizona explains, “At first Ringelmann speculated that more participants in a group effort made coordination more challenging. That certainly makes sense. But his later experiments showed something quite different. He eventually concluded that people in large groups fail to exert exceptional effort because they are saving their energy for work that will lead to individual recognition.
In short, as humans, we make every effort when all eyes are on us, but we tend to take it easy when (a) we think our colleagues can do the hard work, (b) we know we will not be held accountable for the outcome, (c) we suspect our effort is not truly necessary, or (d) we anticipate that our time and energy will not be rewarded.”
Getting leaders of organisations to challenge traditional business and team structures is going to be a leadership skill set in the future. The acceleration and pace for strategic change driven by technology and disruption of industries. As McKinsey Consulting point out in one of their guidelines for redesign, “Go beyond lines and boxes. A company’s reporting structure is one of the most obvious and controllable aspects of the organisation. Many leaders tend to ignore other structures, processes and people elements that are part of a redesign. It is like rearranging the deck chairs but failing to see that the good ship Titanic may still be sinking.”.
I look forward to bringing the Cyan people simulation to leaders who want to test their knowledge and skills in some of the scenarios I have spoken about. The key thing about business is every decision has a consequence, the great thing is achieving outcomes that help and grow individuals, leaders, industries and communities.
[i] Microsoft: U.S. Information Worker Survey
[ii] https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload