Professor Richard Hackman

Source: Team Diagnostics

I heard the sad news this morning of the passing of Harvard Professor Richard Hackman.  Widely acknowledged as one of the giants in the study of teams, the social psychologist influenced and advised many young scholars over the years.  Hackman earned the Distinguished Educator Award and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Academy of Management during his career.  Perhaps more importantly, he had a vast influence on practitioners as well.   He advised and presented to many organizations in the private and public sector, offering them useful insight on how to make their teams more effective.  His book - Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances - influenced the thinking of many managers and executives and earned him the Academy of Management’s Terry Award for the best management book of the year. Here are just a couple of terrific excerpts from an HBR blog post that Hackman wrote in 2011.   In the post, Hackman explained some of the common misperceptions about teams. 


Misperception #1: Harmony helps. Smooth interaction among collaborators avoids time-wasting debates about how best to proceed.

Actually: Quite the opposite, research shows. Conflict, when well managed and focused on a team's objectives, can generate more creative solutions than one sees in conflict-free groups. So long as it is about the work itself, disagreements can be good for a team. Indeed, we found in our earlier research on symphony orchestras that slightly grumpy orchestras played a little better as ensembles than those whose members worked together especially harmoniously. 
  
Misperception #4: Face-to-face interaction is passé. Now that we have powerful electronic technologies for communication and coordination, teams can do their work much more efficiently at a distance.
Actually: Teams working remotely are at a considerable disadvantage. There really are benefits to sizing up your teammates face-to-face. A number of organizations that rely heavily on distributed teams have found that it is well worth the time and expense to get members together when the team is launched, again around the midpoint of the team's work, and yet again when the work has been completed.

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Delicate Leadership Balance: Creative Tension vs. Crushing People

Fortune recently interviewed Nobel-prize winning chemist Roald Hoffmann. They asked him how his experiences translate at all to leadership in the business world.  Hoffmann talked about his work leading groups of researchers, managing large grants, and maintaining a high level of productivity.  I found this particular excerpt quite interesting:

In science, almost all the papers we publish are written together with several people in research groups. But within that research group, somehow, we have mastered the ethics of collaboration.  There's something about the way that the group leader tells people that an idea made by one of the other people in the group is not good or not right. The criticism is made in a way which allows the person, first of all, to come up with further evidence, but more importantly, doesn't shake them so that they're afraid of making another idea.
 Hoffman has hit the nail on the head when it comes to describing that delicate balance.  We all can recall bosses who crushed someone during a meeting, leaving that person reluctant to express their ideas at future team meetings.   We also know that some teams are simply too polite.  People avoid conflict, and therefore, the teams don't generate and discuss enough creative alternatives.

How does a leader strike that delicate balance?   No magic formula exists.  Leaders need to constantly keep their fingers on the pulse of a team.  They need to read body language, ask for feedback, and meet one-on-one with team members to see if they might have additional input to add.  Leaders also need to conduct periodic "after-action reviews" with their teams - not about the task only, but also about the group process.  How is it going? How can we perform better as a team?  How can our dialogue and collaboration improve?  Leaders will never get the balance perfect... but they can monitor the team aggressively so as to determine when they may have tipped the scales too far in one direction or another. 

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The Two-Pizza Rule! How To Make Your Teams More Effective

Source: Forbes.com

At the Forbes website, David Williams recently published an interview with Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit.  The interview focuses on the entrepreneurial skills required to lead a successful firm of any size or scope.   Here is one excerpt that I found fascinating:

David: How does being an entrepreneur at the helm of a very large enterprise differ from entrepreneurial leadership of a small startup or growth company?

Brad: Regardless of whether you are leading a large enterprise or a small team, you need to remove barriers to innovation and get out of the way. At Intuit, we operate like a company of startups. We create and foster a culture where our nearly 8,000 employees worldwide have the courage to take risks and grow by learning from success and failure. Idea Jams and unstructured time give passionate employees opportunities to collaborate on new ideas to solve customer problems. To keep ideas moving and teams nimble, we embrace the “Two-Pizza rule,” making sure product development teams are no larger than two pizzas can feed.

I absolutely LOVE the two-pizza rule.   If everyone eats 2 slices of pizza, then we are talking about an eight-person team.  That sounds just about right for me.  I constantly find organizations building teams that are far too large to be effective at accomplishing a creative task.  The two-pizza rule provides a simple heuristic for helping leaders keep their teams small and nimble.  Every organization should consider embracing this powerful rule of thumb.  

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When Hierarchy Helps?

Richard Ronay, Katherine Greenway, Eric Anicich, and Adam Galinsky have produced a new study titled, "The Path to Glory Is Paved With Hierarchy: When Hierarchical Differentiation Increases Group Effectiveness." Chris Shea writes about it in this weekend's Wall Street Journal. The scholars primed some people to think of a time when they had high power, while others were primed to think of an occasion when they wielded low power. Still others were not primed at all. In a cooperative task, the mixed groups outperformed those with folks only from one of the three conditions. The results suggest that a power hierarchy seems to improve productivity. Interestingly though, the results do not hold for other kinds of tasks. These results are consistent with another study by Galinsky, in which he found that NBA teams with larger salary disparities outperform those with more equal pay. Again, those results suggest a power hierarchy improves team effectiveness. We have to take these results with a grain of salt though. First, the type of task does matter. Second, this study examines "informal" hierarchies within teams. It does not examine formal hierarchies within larger, more complex organizations. Most importantly, we should not interpret the results to mean that efforts to flatten organizations are ill-advised. While some hierarchy may have benefits (it helps to have some who are clearly in charge), many organizations have such rigid hierarchies that many negative effects ensue.

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