Teams and Team-Building

Ethan Mollick, business professor at Wharton, tweets out about two team-performance studies:

The collective intelligence of a team depends on more than the intelligence of individual members. It is limited by the emotional intelligence of the least sensitive team member

 

But adding folks with high social skills to a team & improving process boosts collective intelligence

Links to the papers are in the tweet.

We all have an intuitive suspicion that this first one is correct. We have all seen a single neighbor ruin a neighborhood, one difficult personality ruin a family gathering (and the three-year followup of everyone trying to fix it and disagreeing about how that should be done), one deacon ruin a church, one spoiled player ruin a team, etc. So that this is also true for work and projects makes sense. But not so fast. How are they measuring this, both the individual emotional skill and the team productivity? Haven't we all also seen that a group continues to have problems even when The Problem goes away?* That the difficult person was only the person brave/entitled/responsible enough to give voice to the group's discontent?

And now that we think of it, don't the same questions come up for the second study?  What are we measuring? Isn't this lauding of social skill as a solution possibly only a downstream effect itself? Mightn't it be that teams that are winning feeling better about each other and get along, rather than the getting along creating the winning?

I read the papers and they look to me like they transcend those objections, rather than bury them. Let me know if you think otherwise.

A story.

I took a small-group communication class in college and one of the first exercises was to take that supposed NASA test of a list of items you were stranded with on a moon** landing and had to prioritise what to bring to get back to some safe place. I wrote it up in a post last year, Teamwork. Basically, a little humility goes a long way toward making good people better, but nothing makes bad people work all that well.

A story.

In the mid-90s the people at my hospital who smoked were a loose network of people who had inappropriate conversations about everything when out on break.  Such joys make it hard to give up smoking. One running conversation was the hospital would run better if the few worst people in the building were gone - and that everyone knew who they were. If we had a hospital-wide secret ballot of who the problems were, the same names would come up, regardless of unit worked or department specialty or shift. So the game would start, department by department, and brief gossip would come forth about each suggestion.

So who's the worst psychiatrist? "Larry, by far.(Insert three incidents illustrating how bad Larry is.)" "Eh, you're not wrong, but Dr. K is a passive-aggressive bitch who keeps writing people up." "Evan?" "Yeah, maybe. But he's mostly just useless.  He does what we (the nurses) tell him."

Who's the worst nurse coordinator? "Cindy." "No, she's really good at defending her people." "Only some of them. Don't get on her bad side." "Lila." "Oh God, yes." "I keep thinking Linda is good, but whenever I cover there all of her nurses are getting into control arguments with borderlines."

I am uncharacteristically silent, smirking, at this point - and with different smokers, we had this conversation about a dozen times, and I grew to love waiting for the moment.

Worst psychologist? Myron. Celia. "They're mostly all nuts themselves anyway."

Worst social worker? Peter. Ted. Pat. Universal agreement, with no additional nominations.

Rehab/OT? "All of them are pretty good, really. I don't like their directors much, but they're mostly good.." "Maybe Barbara, who is always whining and sort of passive-aggressive." "Yeah, maybe her."

And as I stubbed out the cigarette I would say "My team is Dr. K, Cindy, Myron, Pat, and Barbara." "Holy F--, you're right. How do you get through rounds every morning?"  "We don't. I always said I could work with anybody and smooth good work out of them but I have no idea what we are accomplishing." "Yeah, I covered for you last summer and told Al I would never do it again.  If he assigns me, I'm quitting." "So which one's the biggest problem?" "Pat. The others would sort of figure it out if she weren't there."

1998 was my year of vindication when I transferred, and all my teams did well for twenty years, but that's another story. As with many of us in life, I would not have told you that teambuilding difficult people was my superpower, not in 1978 or 1988. Nor did I know that my best role in life was to be The Dad, not until my two oldest were both launching and I had displayed alternating brilliance and failure in that role to that point, about two-thirds of the way through my life. I guess that is only a variation of teambuilding, of getting the three younger boys to fit into a Family after nightmarish starts. They will live another forty years after I am gone, and they'll all be fine.

I thought I was someone else.

*An engineer friend has a wealth of sayings, one of which is "We the big ones are gone, the big ones remain."

**A good place to force in my mnemonic for deciding whether the moon is waxing or waning.