Best Practices

Any dip into history reminds me how poor we humans are at learning from the past. An article I came across on the history of teamwork by consulting psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman proves the point. So many of the lessons I try to get across in my practice have been known to work for decades, yet remain largely ignored by "team builders" and many managers.

In 1986, when I dropped out of my first attempt at grad school, my best friend Steve Charry was taking another stab at a bachelor's degree. We met during his first try at what I still call North Carolina School of the Arts despite its name change; another was at the University of Wisconsin; and he was trying again at Washington State University.

A used college textbook I picked up at the unfortunate end-of-life sale of a Durham, N.C., bookstore has been feeding me some interesting insights into the book's namesake, Human Motivation (Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.: Belmont, CA, 1994). Written by Univ. of Calgary psychology professor Robert Franken, for a study wonk like me it is a pleasant way to get my research fix without having to work quite so hard.

I am working as a volunteer stagehand for the City Ballet of Raleigh production of The Nutcracker Suite, and it reminded me how I got started as a team leader. My undergraduate degree was in that kind of work from North Carolina School of the Arts (as it was called then), which may seem to have little to do with team coaching. But it was there I first led a team, ten students working as the lighting crew.

In last week’s post we starting looking at what science knows about virtual teams. To recap: Virtual and regular “collocated” teams are more alike than different, working with the same dynamics. Scientists have come to define virtual teams (VTs) as those whose members do all or almost all of their communication by phone and computer, regardless of where they sit. Research findings make clear that VTs take longer to make decisions and get work done, in part because they have more communication problems.

One of the myths of team building is the idea that leadership is a set of well-identified traits that work in most situations. But scientific research says this is false in several ways. I became more convinced as I finished reading a book chapter reviewing the current state of team science by J. Richard Hackman and Nancy Katz of Harvard Univ., which I first wrote about two weeks ago. I hadn’t intended to return to them here, but I think what they have to say about this is too important to sit on.

Richard Hackman and former Harvard University colleague Nancy Katz are leading researchers in the psychology of small groups. (You should click his name just for the picture caption.) Though written for other scientists, their chapter on “Group Behavior and Performance” in the latest edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology points to some practical advice for nonacademics like you and me. But mostly it should raise questions about whether you are asking the right questions when you think of team best practices.

If you got a special holiday gift—a promotion to your first team leader position—this post is a congratulations present from me to you. If you've been a team leader a while, but received no training in the role, you'll want to open it too.

"Survey finds mostly grumps," the headline said in the Raleigh News & Observer recently. According to a report by The Conference Board (the same organization that reports Consumer Confidence numbers every month), employee satisfaction is at its lowest level "in more than 22 years of studying the issue." Only 45 percent said they were happy with their jobs, down from 61 percent back in 1987, according to the Board's press release. The decline has occurred fairly steadily over time, so it's not just related to the recession.