Think about the teams you’ve been a part of. A cross-functional department tasked with launching a new product. The family and friends who helped you pull off another great Thanksgiving dinner. Or maybe it was your high school swim team.
I swam the 50 freestyle, the 100 freestyle, and the 100 butterfly.
That’s Julia DiBenigno, a professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management.
I was part of this pretty amazing team that has not lost a swim meet in at least 30 years now.
Thirty years without losing is amazing. Maybe you’ve been part of a team whose success is measured by wins or by sales or by return on investment, but you probably know that there’s no one metric that can help you explain why some teams succeed and others fall flat. DiBenigno is a qualitative researcher. She’s spent her career listening to teams and teasing out the many factors that can contribute to a great outcome.
To really, in my book, count them as a high-performing team, I’d want to understand their entire process that led to that point.
Today’s lesson is about what it takes to build and maintain a high-performing team. Professor DiBenigno is an ethnographer, so her research is all about embedding in an organization. Maybe it’s a big corporation, a hospital, or the United States Army. She stays with them for months, sometimes years.
That usually means I am hanging out with the work group and going to social events, as well as conducting both formal and informal interviews with the people that I’m job shadowing or observing in a meeting, to really understand both what their day-to-day work is like but also give them a chance to reflect and for me to ask some questions. “Hey, what just happened? That was a confusing meeting. You said this, but what were you really thinking? That sounded different than what you told me you cared about, but you changed your mind.” That can unpack the fascinating social political dynamics that shape organizational life.
DiBenigno studies teams. She also heads up a team, a team of SOM professors who teach a course called Managing Groups and Teams. Now, Managing Groups and Teams is the very first course Yale MBA students take. Why? Because we humans are social animals, and most of what we do in work and in life requires working with other people.
The whole idea of why we even work in groups and teams versus just doing everything separately and individually is because there can be synergies. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
Managing Groups and Teams is one week long, and it can be intense.
It’s extremely experiential. Each class session is three hours long. And in every session, they are actually getting to work in groups and teams to basically personally experience whatever the lesson of that session happens to be. Of course, we know people learn best when they struggle and when things don’t go as planned. By design, these exercises are set up to really challenge them.
In most of these exercises, the students will work in small groups—groups of people they’ll continue to work with for the next year or two at SOM.
What’s very cool about this class is they’re starting fresh. This is an opportunity to launch a really high-performing team. We’re going to try to create this amazing environment for you in SOM, all these resources, bringing these amazing people together, and now in this class we’re going to help you create cohesion and create a space where you can learn and grow and try to create really high-performing cultures and learning spaces for people in a way that, when you enter an organization, a lot of these dynamics may not play out in such a positive way.
The students go through exercises in collaboration and negotiation. They may know what you’re supposed to do when you’re on a team, but they all have to watch themselves in action on video afterward to see what they actually did.
There’s another exercise where groups of students make a plan to build a complex structure, and each person takes a part of it. But if they don’t pick someone to keep an eye on the big picture, that can end up with what’s called coordination loss.
What happens is often we want to specialize, and what we forget is that we need people who can see the whole, who can be in integrator mode and see how the pieces all fit together.
DiBenigno runs an exercise in Managing Groups and Teams where students have to make the kind of decision that you might face choosing a new member of your team. In this case, they’re hiring an executive for a company on the rise.
We put them in groups of five, representing top roles in this organization. The SVPs of human resources, manufacturing, finance come together to make a hiring decision about another SVP.
Students get profiles of the three finalists, and the information in those profiles varies depending on the role you’re playing.
And they’re told up front that everyone has unique information about the three finalist candidates—what would be in their notes based on having done the interview.
The students read through the three profiles and take notes. Then they find their colleagues and set off to deliberate.
This is how a lot of groups start off, DiBenigno says. Everybody speaks their mind, approaching this as an exercise in persuasion—like a poker game, where you’re trying to get others to fold. But process is essential, starting with who goes first. Or, as DiBenigno calls it, the sequential impact of opinion sharing.
The person who goes first often anchors the conversation in a way that, if other people disagree, they’re less likely to share their disagreement. We don’t want to be rude, and we don’t want to rock the boat, and so we go along with them in ways that, when you study this, you realize can lead us astray.
DiBenigno mentioned earlier that each student has some unique information about the finalists, but there’s also plenty of information that all of them share. And that shared information can be a trap.
What will happen is humans fall prey to what’s called the common knowledge problem, where we overweight information that is shared and underweight information that is novel. The groups that overcome the common knowledge problem have a group process that allows them to get out all the independent information—the raw data—before they go into judgment and voting and deciding mode.
A dozen groups are doing this hiring exercise at the same time, but they’re going about it in really different ways.
Many groups will find this very easy. They’ll go in there, and they’ll just vote, and they’ll be done fairly quickly. Other groups will take longer deliberating. Groups follow different processes.
The groups that crack this case go around and, instead of voting right away and seeing it as a exercise in influence and fighting for your chosen candidate, they get all the information out there. Maybe on the whiteboard, they start writing everything down. And as they go through that, they realize, whoa, this one candidate actually has much better information. We just had to make sure we tapped into all five group members’ notes to figure that out.
Most of the groups did not crack this case. And even for the groups that did, this one smart decision isn’t enough to say that they make a good team.
Did they just get lucky? Or if you give them a new task, are they going to also perform incredibly well because they actually have a replicable process that they’d want to follow again? And that not only did they achieve something great, but that the individual members are better off for having been a part of that team—that they’ve grown and stretched themselves and aren’t all in therapy because of the experience
And a process like this isn’t something where you set it and forget it. It’s going to have to change.
That’s one way to judge a great team—that they repeatedly, over time, in different circumstances, are able to adapt their structure and process as conditions change to continuously perform well. That’s what we’re trying to impart.
Managing Groups and Teams is a great opportunity to learn about process, to tap into all the expertise in the room, or to avoid pitfalls like the common knowledge problem and coordination loss. But this hiring exercise is just three hours long, and Managing Groups and Teams lasts only one week.
As an ethnographer, DiBenigno watches how teams work together over time. And those organizations often face challenges well beyond an exercise that her students can do in the classroom. For one study, DiBenigno spent two and a half years examining different ways that the Army tried integrating mental healthcare into their teams to help soldiers struggling with PTSD.
There was one superordinate goal. Mission-ready, mentally healthy soldiers should be in everyone’s best interest, right? But commanders were focused more on the mission-ready part, and mental health providers were focused on the mental health part, and both sides were pursuing these sub-goals in ways that led them to stereotype one another. The commander’s thinking was that the providers were Berkeley hippies, and they’re being duped by soldiers, while mental health providers saw some of these commanders as bullies who didn’t care about their soldiers’ long-term health and recovery.
DiBenigno found that just a small shift in team structure—assigning individual mental health providers to specific battalions—helped everyone communicate more effectively.
For example, soldiers would need to go often on training events to be able to be cleared to deploy. Mental health might say, “This person, they’re having panic attacks when they’re in tanks. They can’t go on this training.” That would be a recommendation before having these assigned relations.
After having the assigned relations, they might talk to the captain and say, “Well, the soldier really wants to go and wants to progress in their career.” There’s this therapy called prolonged exposure therapy and actually facing your fears is part of it. Is there a way we can work together? Maybe we could assign them to a role where they don’t have to go in a tank, where they play a different role in the exercise. Working out these win-win solutions where the soldier, the mental health side, and the mission side would all be accounted for.
Both sides started learning one another’s lingo and seeing each other as well-intentioned parties, rather than the stereotyping that was happening before.
Another factor that DiBenigno looks at in her research is hierarchy. Now, sometimes hierarchy can be really useful in an organization.
You could think about, say, a restaurant needing to execute on a very busy dinner shift or a military expedition or a climbing expedition. In those cases, having a clear hierarchy, roles, and responsibilities is going to result, often, in more seamless execution. In the military, you want to socialize everyone in the same way so people are thinking similarly in those execution modes. Now, when you’re, say, designing the menu for the dinner or the strategy for the expedition, that’s when you want a flatter structure. You want to de-emphasize hierarchy. You want to make sure people feel comfortable fully participating, getting all ideas on the table without judging them first. Just getting them out there so that you can be maximally creative.
You can say that you’re de-emphasizing hierarchy, but it doesn’t just go away.
Imagine you come into a meeting, and you have an idea for something, but the first person who speaks shares a completely different idea, and then the next person agrees with them. And then imagine that first person was your boss. What are you going to say?
DiBenigno did a study with colleagues at Harvard and New York University where they looked at primary care clinics where the doctors in charge said they wanted input from everyone on how to improve care—nurses, administrative assistants, even patients. But despite those doctors’ best intentions, the ideas of people lower in the hierarchy had trouble breaking through.
We talk about ways to overcome those kinds of group decision-making biases, such as having people write things down beforehand. And maybe before a really important meeting, people anonymously share or post things. Or the leader shares their opinion last.
These are ways to encourage what DiBenigno calls upward voicing.
It’s basically how you can foster the ability for frontline people or employees to share ideas that they might have to improve operations with their managers. There’s a big literature that puts it mostly on the leader, and we talk about this in Managing Groups and Team—as a leader, it’s really important to create climates where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas upwardly.
But DiBenigno and her colleagues found that everyone can have a role in promoting overlooked ideas.
It doesn’t all have to be on the leader. It can be your fellow team members who amplify your good ideas, bring them up later, develop them, legitimize them. It doesn’t just need to be about the heroic voicer being brave enough to speak up, which is what a lot of that literature is about. It can be a more social process that we all can play a part of.
There was an interesting article during the Obama administration about some of the senior women using this tactic. If they noticed a good idea being overlooked, that they’d bring it up later and say, “Susan brought that point up a few meetings ago. It’s a great idea. We should do it”— backing each other’s ideas so that they stay alive as part of the conversation, particularly if people have a background that might be not as well represented and may be easier to be talked over or overlooked.
The new MBA students in Managing Groups and Teams may not be dealing with rigid hierarchies or clashing professional cultures, but with all of their individual achievements, they bring their own challenges to team building.
I tell students, “For you to be here, many of you are probably very charismatic, extremely smart, persuasive. That’s a superpower that you need to learn how to use responsibly because sometimes you’re going to be in a group situation where you don’t actually have the most expertise. Can you hold back? Can you sit on your hands? Can you let somebody else speak first before jumping in, to help the group as a whole reach the best possible decision?”
Managing Groups and Teams give students some new tools to use when they’re part of a team.
These exercises are designed to create problems and surface conflicts and disagreements and things that don’t go well. We’re trying to bring out all the issues in this first week so that you can work through them. Whereas if things played out on a slower timescale or with less of the intensity and stress that we put into this one week, you might not discover the issues until pretty far along, things are more normalized and it’s harder to course correct. By creating these experiences of failure, you’re going to surface issues so you can work them out and move beyond them, and use a better process going forward.
Even if you never take this course, DiBenigno has offered us plenty of ways to work on group process out in the real world. Maybe you’re president of the PTA at your child’s school, but you’re hearing from only a small slice of the community.
Let’s launch an anonymous survey, or let’s find other ways of hearing from our broader membership on how things are going.
Or maybe you’re hosting a Thanksgiving dinner, and there are too many cooks involved. The challenge is to figure out how to steer clear of coordination loss.
You’re getting all the inputs to then maximize creativity and quality and then creating some kind of division of labor that’s going to work with having an integrated role like somebody who’s overseeing the whole and making sure the timing comes together. Maybe some of those best practices could potentially be applied to coordinating Thanksgiving.
Now you know several ways to encourage upward voicing and to avoid the traps that teams can fall into so you can get better at group process. The thing is, every team is different, so there’s no strict formula.
I’d say one of the big lessons of this whole week is there’s no secret sauce to the perfect team and structure and process. Your structure and process depends on what the task and goal is, and you want to be able to flexibly adapt based on how those tasks change and what the needs of the different members are.
I think a big part of being a high-performing team is also thinking about the growth opportunities of each member so that everyone is better off at the end of it.
“The Yale School of Management is the graduate business school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut.”
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