Teams Blog

When you are tempted or told to do some “team building,” you have a stark choice:

1. Fix the issue that prompted the thought, or
2. Waste your time and money.

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that standard team building does not work, and given how adults learn, could not work. The team building industry is built on the quicksand of mass delusion among purveyors and buyers.

By “team building,” I am referring to occasional exercises, games, personality tests, drum circles, scavenger hunts, ropes courses, and so on. When I say it “does not work,” I mean the activity has no lasting positive impact on the team. In other words, standard team building provides less return than you invest even if all you invest is time (i.e., you get zero or negative ROI). Worse, when team members see managers resort to these activities rather than fixing the problems, that is seen as “lip service” or a “Band-Aid approach” and drives morale downward.

I have found zero scientific studies showing that any of the actions I listed above provide a benefit. I can say this, first, because I have now gone through more than 475 sources, most of them studies or analysis of multiple studies by researchers, and exactly one asserted support for team building as defined here. That one was thoroughly debunked later in the same journal (see blog post). Second, to double-check, I searched two databases of journal articles covering hundreds of journals and going back decades, one focused on psychology and the other on business articles. I used every relevant keyword I could think of: not just team building, but ropes, games, exercises, and such. No articles supporting team building turned up.

Of course, there are plenty of supporting claims in the popular business literature—the books and magazines you can pick up at any bookstore. You will also hear managers and consultants weave tales of successful team-building events. But as I detail in ”About Business Stories” on TeamResearch News, these have to be taken with a grain of salt for several reasons. One, clearly, is self-interest: a company or consultant who earns money selling these things, and a manager talked into spending money on one, both have reasons to:

• interpret team actions after the event as “changes,” positive ones at that;
• assume those changes were due to the team building;
• assume the team members see them as positive (or that members asked directly are willing to speak honestly); and
• assume the changes will last.

Studies that put self-serving perceptions up against measurement by objective outsiders routinely show the perceiver is wrong. It’s a built-in bias, which is why I double-checked my anti-team-building stance using the database review even though my opinion grew out of my in-depth literature review, not just personal experiences.

Success stories are ”anecdotal evidence,” which has often been proven inaccurate when tested scientifically. Along with the other problems, even if team building worked in one instance, that doesn’t mean it usually does. Give the worst hitter on a baseball team enough at-bats, and eventually they’ll get a hit. When a lottery winner says, “I just knew I was going to win,” no one asks how many of the non-winners thought the same thing… or how many times the winner thought they would win and didn’t… or whether the winner is unconsciously creating that memory based on prior weeks.

What I have never seen in one of these business stories about a team-building event are data from measurable goals or analysis to show the success was not due to other factors. If a sales team did a team building event last month, March 2010, and their sales went up this month, is that due to the team building or the fact that the economy is picking up? At least sales teams have quantifiable performance measures. I have yet to see a team of software engineers create objectively measurable performance standards before a team building event, then retest them immediately after and three months after (as scientific studies often do) to see if there were lasting positive changes.

One reason team building does not work is it violates the most basic tenets of adult learning. A pioneer of the field, Malcolm Knowles, said adults require among other traits that the training be relevant and practical. Unless your team is a troupe of drummers, a drum circle is not going be relevant to their work. Lessons arising from a scavenger hunt are not practical because they are not easily recognized and applied when a similar issue arises at work.

Life experience provides other reasons team building can’t work. Did you master golf or cooking after a single lesson? Do you want to fly with a pilot who has only played Flight Simulator? Of course not. Taking a team out for a “morale boosting” day of go-kart racing, when the next day you’re going to put them right back in the situation that is lowering their morale, simply defies logic. Even if you can remember the results of someone’s personality test during a conflict, that abstract knowledge isn’t easily translated into a specific situation. Much easier to apply is a list of agreed-upon behaviors with a safe enforcement method, plus a formal plan for what will be communicated and when. Why? Humans are not great at applying the abstract to the specific, but we learn and apply behavior-based rules every day. 

The authors of the influential team development book The Wisdom of Teams wrote elsewhere, “Sending a bunch of men and women on an (outdoor) course to simulate teaming may be fun, but it doesn’t accomplish much.” Adult learning is enhanced by fun, and the teams I work with get plenty of laughs. But fun should not be the emphasis when you are trying to accomplish something serious. And if you don’t accomplish that something, don’t permanently solve the issue, you’re going to be killing a lot more fun at work over the course of a week than you can give them in an afternoon of Lego play.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” psychologists Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman wrote in Consulting Psychology Journal, as quoted in an earlier post. But a set of handbooks published that year for non-professional facilitators set the tone most people still think of when they hear the term “team building.” Let’s continue our somewhat disturbing look at how much or little has changed in teamwork training by covering the 1970s and ’80s.

The authors write, “many participants experienced team building as enjoyable, enlightening, and useful in improving intragroup relations but much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations… Line management considered these programs to be mostly irrelevant because they used so-called touchie-feelie exercises that were perceived as merely fun and games.” The journal article includes a Dilbert cartoon in which Dilbert asks, while cutting out paper dolls blindfolded, “Are you sure we’ll cry and hug?” Facilitator Dogbert replies, “Actually, hugging is iffy.”

Organizational development (OD) experts recognized the limitations of the touchie-feelie approach, which grew out of 1960s “encounter groups” (see Part 1), and noted a disconnect between team builders and managers. The former focused on relationships and how people were working together, such as their norms and decision-making processes. Managers “were more interested in setting goals and priorities and analyzing or allocating the way work was performed,” Leonard and Freedman write. I’ll note that these priorities do not have to be mutually exclusive; in fact, high-performance teams usually invest time in both.

The sense that people will play nice if they are taught to, ignoring the realities of competition and power struggles in the working world, came under challenge, a good thing. But corporate culture harmed teamwork in ways that seem depressingly current. Read these quotes about the 1970s from the article and tell me how much has changed:

• “The typical organization… was hierarchically organized, with firm boundaries between functional silos and a compensation policy that rewarded individual rather than team performance.”
• “Excited team builders frequently turned despondent” upon seeing positive team changes “evaporate within weeks (sometime days or hours) of the return of participants to their work units.”
• “Furthermore, the typical reward systems provided incentives for individual rather than team-oriented behavior and contributions. Employees and managers did what was inspected and measured…”
• “Many managers gave lip service to teamwork but were reluctant to walk the talk.”
• Deep down, people were and are afraid of teamwork because they “‘think it will render them anonymous, invisible…’”

Leonard and Freedman assert that the economic realities of the 1980s turned things around. The U.S. was in the worst recession prior to the current one, plus inflation was high, while former enemies Germany and Japan became economic powerhouses. Businesses responded by changing their basic models, eliminating lifelong employment expectations, and reducing layers of middle of management. “The span of control for most managers reached levels that ruled out the old command and control style of management,” the article says. “Without the guarantee of employment, management needed to develop new approaches to motivate and empower employees.”

Team approaches became more common, including “self-managing production teams,” cross-functional teams, and the quality circles of Total Quality Management. (As the article notes, TQM started in America, was ignored, and came to favor here only after Japan used it in that country’s spectacular rebirth.) Silo-busting, team-focused organizations became more typical and switched to team-based pay and rewards.

As the old personnel departments morphed into “human resources” and added OD to their responsibilities, some team builders came to realize they had to be more strategic in their approach, Leonard and Freedman write. Researchers “called for more consultation with teams in the process of doing their work” and stressed the need to do team development within the context of company goals and issues. How sad it is that 20 years later, some HR managers still resist this idea (see HR study summary) and HR and training groups have to continue to sponsor workshops on “strategic alignment.”

Frankly, any top manager would be foolhardy to support efforts that don’t feed the company’s goals. That means, in turn, HR and training folks are foolish to push such efforts without creating measures that show alignment.

We’ll finish up with the ’90s and beyond in Part 3. Perhaps we’ll find that the team building industry has learned something from the past, but I fear the Santayana quote remains in effect.

Go to Part 3.

Source: Leonard, H. S., and A. Freedman (2000), “From scientific management through fun and games to high performing teams: A historical perspective on consulting to team-based organizations,” Consulting Psychology Journal 52(1):3.

One of my favorite blogging activities is showing that many of the buzz words of management are nothing new, are unproven, or both. The latest to stumble a bit is “transformational leadership.” For a study summary I recently posted in TeamResearch News, I described this as “a popular management style focused on the leader’s charisma and extolling of shared values.” According to About.com, the term was coined by presidential biographer James MacGregor Burns in 1978 and popularized by a researcher in a 1985 book. That popularity is gauged by the 1 million links turned up by a Yahoo search on the exact phrase.

I advocate all of the behaviors attributed to transformational leaders. These include encouraging people to try new things, supporting individuals emotionally, articulating “the vision thing” (yes, there are hard numbers to support that recommendation), and being a role model. But whenever I saw transformational leadership discussed in the popular literature, I was left with the uncomfortable feeling that the writers saw it as an either/or style that did not address lower levels of human motivation. A sense of mission is important to a team, but people always end up wanting to know, “What’s in it for me?” You may consider this selfish. I don’t, because it is basic human psychology. It becomes selfish when getting what you want is taken to the extreme of blocking others from getting what they need.

The study was a kind called a “meta-analysis” in which researchers pull data from all relevant studies on a topic to see what the consensus seems to be. This team looked at more than a thousand data points from nearly 90 studies. The researchers concluded that transformational leadership overlaps so much with a goal-and-reward style of managing, it is fair to say the former is a layer atop the other that cannot stand alone. It is a good addition, linked with higher satisfaction from workers with the leader and higher job performance by the leader. But it is no better than the reward system for group performance, and worse on a couple of the leadership measures they found in the studies.

Clear losers in the study were managers whose only leadership efforts are to try to anticipate problems; worse were those who merely fixed problems after the fact; and worst of all were those who didn’t manage at all. On the other hand, if you try to get by with management by cheerleading alone, that won’t work. As if in support of this, another study I just posted found student teams in a lab experiment who used “we” and “success” a lot as they talked through their work did worse than their competitors. The communications scientists in that study, who did not expect that result, speculated people talk about teamwork and performance when they don’t have them. In response to the insipid line, “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’” I have always pointed there is no “we,” either.

On the history front, the meta-analysis found that the traits attributed to transformational leadership are so similar to an earlier style called “charismatic leadership,” there was no point to separating the styles statistically. Charismatic leadership dates as far back as a book published in 1921.

The study reinforces what I teach in my teamwork training about how to create high performance, such as:

• Create a mission and/or vision for the team.
• Set measurable goals for achieving it.
• Let the team take the lead in creating a plan to meet those goals.
• Set rewards for achieving the plan milestones and goals.
• Let the team figure out its roles, internal rules, and processes.
• Ask what it needs from you and supply that.
• Monitor progress, praise profusely, and nudge the team when needed.

The words may change, but more often than not, the group management methods that work have been around for decades. It’s up to you to decide whether you’ve had enough of firefighting to do some fire prevention by putting them in place.

The benefits of empowered teamwork are one subset of the benefits of Agile software development. Having served as a project manager in an Agile company, I have seen this firsthand, but a talk by an “Agilista” last night confirmed my belief.

If you know about Agile, you might want to skip down three paragraphs as I explain it to newcomers. Traditional “waterfall” methods start a software project with an attempt to capture everything the end user needs to do and estimate the time and money needed. Once that information is approved, next comes design of the software. Then the software is created (“coded”). Next comes the testing phase, during which mistakes (“bugs”) are fixed until the client accepts the software. Finally comes rollout of the product. Each step flows downward into the next, hence the “waterfall” allusion.

In Agile, an initial set of requirements is collected and prioritized by a “product owner” working with the client. These are broken into small chunks, feature by feature, and captured in a “product backlog.” The product owner, a facilitator, and the other team members take a short period to do some initial design work. Then they decide how many of the features they can finish within a pre-selected time, usually two to four weeks. In perhaps the best known Agile method, the period is a “Scrum” and the facilitator is a “Scrum Master.” Once the team decides what to do, that set cannot be changed short of an emergency. The team then does a mini-waterfall of sorts, finishing the selected set of features to the degree they could be released to the customer (whether or not they are right then). After a demo and lessons-learned review, they repeat the whole process with the next set of features, starting the next business day. They’re done with the whole thing when the customer says they’re done.

At a meeting of the local chapter of the Association of IT Professionals, Robert Galen spoke on “Mature Agile Teams–Sixteen Essential Patterns.” Galen is director of research and development at iContact, an e-mail marketing company, and also has his own Agile consulting practice. Along with making me feel better about two points over which I parted ways with the aforementioned company–for those keeping score, I was right on one and half-right on the other–he provided a number of points about teamwork that work in any environment.

One of his 16 “patterns” was “Truly Collaborative Work.” Examples on his slide included, “Developers willingly engage in Testing.” This is not common in waterfall projects, and I have witnessed how it improves quality and cooperation. Another point was, “Members help each other out.” Science has shown that “organizational citizenship behaviors” improve team performance. “Listening to each other; mutual respect” appeared as well. In poorly performing teams, people listen at each other, listening but not really hearing (hence my Active Listening class).

“Behaving Like a Team” was another of Galen’s patterns. I especially liked his point about “Providing each other congruent feedback.” Agile promotes a practice I suggest for all teams in my teamwork book, daily “stand-up” meetings. These are conducted literally standing up, for a maximum of 15 minutes. Each member reports on only three things: what I did in the prior work day, what I plan on doing the next day, and any blocks I’ve run into. The last item becomes a top-priority action item for the facilitator. Galen said members of effective teams also participate in “Passionate debate.” He added “conflict,” but I later suggested the word “confrontation.” The scientific evidence shows that conflict of any type harms teams, but members must be willing to confront each other to make better decisions. Galen also said members will spend personal time together and succeed or fail “as a team.”

The research literature supports the use of self-managed or self-directed teams in most circumstances. Under his pattern, ”Quality on all fronts,” Galen said Agile teams are “Self-inspecting; self-policing; self-learning.”

He did an excellent job of defining the role of the supervisor of a self-managed team. My oft-repeated summary is, ”Tell the team what direction you need it to go, give it its boundaries, and get out of the way.” Then you fall in behind, making sure the team has the resources it needs and nudging it to stay on course. A previous speaker last night had a great analogy. Josh Anderson, Agile Coach at Teradata, likened this to raising the bumpers when you take kids bowling, so their balls stay out of the gutters. Galen’s related pattern was “Saying NO as a Leader.” He emphasized that managers can’t just walk away from the team, and added in bullet points:

• “Sometimes direction is required.”
• “Courage to tell it like it is.”
• “Behind the scenes, 1:1 Coaching…”

Finally, he emphasized, members’ first loyalty must be to the team. This made me uncomfortable, because plenty of teams have failed by focusing too much on themselves. But Agile’s emphasis on including at each step the customer’s representative (the product owner), and often the customer, is a perfect way to align team cohesion with business goals.

After five months of writing informational posts, I hope you will do me the honor of reading a marketing one. I’ll keep it brief.

First, I have added a free service you may find useful, a Twitter account that is not about my lunch plans. As I have blogged about before, the thought techniques of “mindfulness” training can help you reduce workday stress and be more productive by focusing on the work at hand. I have started sending out one tweet most U.S. workdays to help you do so. See:

• MindfulWork Twitter Page
• More information

Second, in this economy, you probably need to do more with the people you have right now without overstressing them. My services provide that benefit, but you may not have the cash flow for them. So I have created the limited-term ”Refer or Defer Offer.” You get six-months free financing on my teamwork training and team coaching services. Plus, if you refer me to someone who can pay now, I will discount your billing by 50 cents per dollar they pay, up to half of your total bill (except for expenses). Click here for more information, and please forward this post to anyone troubled by teamwork issues.

Thank you for reading this. Now back to your regularly scheduled teamwork blogging.

—Jim

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.

Prior to the 1800s, “With the exception of music (i.e., orchestras) and the theater, there are few examples of the high levels of specialization of labor, interpersonal communication, integration of effort, cooperation, and problem solving that characterize modern teams,” the authors write. I smiled when I saw that. My first introduction to project teamwork came as a backstage “techie.” For the record, I wasn’t doing that prior to the 1800s.

Otherwise, the “work environment” was a line of orders from the king down, along with jostling for power by everyone who wasn’t trying simply to survive. Only in families was there some level of cooperation and division of labor, though again one spouse or the other usually ruled. That said, “Researchers who have studied group dynamics in the past often note the parallels with family dynamics…” Leonard and Freeman write.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim made fairly accurate predictions about group norms—informal rules people naturally create, usually without knowing it, as they do things together. Freud touched on groups as well, but the authors credit American psychologist William McDougall as the first “teambuilder,” based on his 1920 book The Group Mind. He offered five bases for better group effort, they write:

• “continuity of existence…”
• “development of an emotional relationship to the group as a whole by defining the nature, composition, functions, and capacity of the group”
• “interaction… with other groups similar to the group but differing in some key aspects”
• “traditions, customs, and habits that define the relationships between members”
• “a definite structure…”

Let’s stop right there. All of this perfectly matches what I said yesterday in a talk for a Chamber of Commerce event and that I create through The SuddenTeams Program. It is backed up by decades of subsequent research after McDougall. None of it matches what most “team builders” force work groups to do. And most managers still refuse to address these 90 years after McDougall first wrote about it. Okay, rant over.

The middle of the last century saw the growth of “social psychology,” so-called to differentiate it from the previous focus on individuals or pairs of people. What we now call social norms, groupthink, and peer pressure were first identified. A center for group dynamics research was founded around 1946. (The center’s Web site disagrees with the authors on the date.) That year, founder Kurt Lewin and his students also hosted “a conference on intergroup relations focusing on racial and religious discrimination” sponsored by a state agency and diversity groups. It attracted a number of people who would later be important researchers in the teamwork field, including names that appear in my bibliography. It may well have been the first use of the participatory training style so common today, and Leonard and Freeman say it was the birth of the field of group dynamics.

In another theatre reference, they write that Lewin conducted “shop-floor group meetings in a pajama factory (the play and then the movie Pajama Game reputedly were based on these experiences).”

Lewin was involved in the founding of the National Training Laboratory (NTL) in Bethel, Maine, but died before he could participate in its first conference. The idea of ”training groups” (“T-groups”) began there. These, too, looked a lot like modern facilitated trainings (versus lectures) and presented the first diversity trainings. Many future teamwork researchers passed through the NTL. “Leaders from educational, religious, community, and business organizations came to Bethel each summer for several intense weeks of training aimed at improving… their effectiveness as individuals and change agents in society and organizations,” the authors write. “Bethel converts returned to their institutions and introduced flip-charts, innovative seating arrangements, and programs that balanced theory input with experiential learning modules.”

Ideas prevalent today moved from the lab into businesses. “Herb Shepard and Bob Blake, in their work with an Esso refinery, developed a managerial grid based on structured, leaderless groups in the late 1950s and called their approach ‘organization development’” (OD). I had to bite my tongue a few years ago when an HR person called self-directed teams ”passé” as if they were a recent fad.

The upheavals of the 1960s caused in the U.S. a cynicism about the possibility of large system change. Social psychologists focused more at the small group level where change seemed reasonable, the authors write. Researchers began to note the effect that job tasks had on organization (instead of the other way around), and developed a “sociotechnical” approach to OD that recognized how tasks, technology and organization evolve together.

“By 1972, the necessary theory and methodologies for practical, large-scale team-building programs were in place,” Leonard and Freeman write. Unfortunately, a series of handbooks on team building introduced the “touchie-feely” approach that was fun but ”much less effective in accomplishing significant personal or team transformations.” Sound familiar? It would if you had been at my talk yesterday!

More in a future post.

Go to Part 2.

Source: Leonard, H. S., and A. Freedman (2000), “From scientific management through fun and games to high performing teams: A historical perspective on consulting to team-based organizations,” Consulting Psychology Journal 52(1):3.