Teams Blog

People in my line of work don’t want to admit there is little objective evidence team building works. Reports that it does come from people like me, and the people who pay people like me, all of whom have a vested interest in it working. Few team builders bother to create metrics proving a measurable change occurred, as I like to, and fewer customers are willing to pay for tracking those metrics. It has bothered me that I could not point to a study done by scientists with nothing to gain showing for sure that team development impacts team performance. Then I cam across a promising study title from last year: “Does Team Building Work?”

An army of scientists from the Univ. of Central Florida and the U.S. Army Research Institute said in their article in Small Group Research that recent study results were mixed at best, with many studies showing no impact. So they searched for every study of team building interventions that measured performance from a 47-year period. Using data from the 103 studies they found, the researchers state that teams which had performed team-building activities also had better processes, and their members felt better about their teams.  Performance was stronger, too, but the correlation was not as high. You can have better satisfaction and processes without having better measurable performance, obviously. Team building had a weak impact on the team’s thinking processes (cognition). The overall impact of team building was much stronger for teams with ten or more members, probably because they had more problems and thus more room for improvement. For the specific numbers and source information, see my study summary.

Team building aimed at setting team goals and clarifying roles was better than activities that tried to improve interpersonal relations or problem-solving. This is consistent with my observations, though I am biased. My services focus on the first two; teach problem-solving only in context of solving the team’s task issues; and only target interpersonal problems directly as a last resort. Fixing group dynamics eliminates most person-to-person issues while providing more bang for the team’s bucks.

All of that is good news for anyone tying to convince someone to do team building. But don’t get too excited. There are many limitations to this encouraging study. As best I can tell after rereading the same paragraphs five times, it does not differentiate between the games- and ropes-courses method of team building and approaches like mine that help team members agree on formal structures and processes. This disappointed me, since it won’t help prospects choose between these approaches.

The study does not prove that the team building activities caused the positive outcomes. In theory, it could be that teams with high performance are more likely to do team building, perhaps because their efficiency gives them more time for it. Or other factors might encourage both better team performance and more team building, and thus be the root causes. Based on my experience, I think that is part of the story, but those factors are not enough to create high-performance teamwork.

Then there’s the problem of the “intervention effect,” the teamwork equivalent of the placebo effect in medicine. Drug studies can’t just compare people who took a drug with those who didn’t. They have to compare those who took the drug with, for example, people who took a pill that looked like the drug but was made of plain sugar (a “placebo”). Usually the people given placebos do better than those who took nothing. If the drug takers did no better than the placebo takers, it’s back to the lab for the drug maker. By the same token, there is some evidence that doing anything for a team makes the team perform better for a while, perhaps because the employees are happy just to be noticed. Have everybody stand on their heads for a minute and they might report higher morale (until they get back to work).

Nonetheless, all of you with managers or employees (or clients) who refuse to do team building now have some solid ammunition from nearly 50 years of research. In my experience, resistors have experienced something like a team rafting trip that brought no lasting results back at work. Or they were forced to take personality tests that were helpful but only addressed a tiny part of the overall problems, problems that remained unaddressed. Team building works, the UCF research team says. You simply have to choose the kinds that directly target the problems you are facing.

Action Item: If you have been thinking about doing some team building, contact TeamTrainers for a diagnosis of the issues prompting the thoughts. If we can’t help you directly, we’ll know someone who can.

In parts one and two of our walk through team-building history, researchers Skipton Leonard and Arthur Freedman showed us that much of what we think of as recent advancements actually date back as much as a century. We’ll finish up the journey with a look at the ’90s and what should have changed in the Aughts, according to them.

In the 1990s, the authors write, team-based structures became more commonplace in part because IT companies adopted them. “Owing to the spectacular success of these corporations in the global marketplace, organizations of all varieties—from low tech smokestack industries to governmental agencies and educational institutions—enthusiastically embraced team-based structures in efforts to improve productivity and quality,” they report.

However, almost all of the books on teamwork were based on the experiences of their authors as team developers, not on hard science about what works and what doesn’t. Even the book I most often recommend as a starting point for those interested in teams (other than my own teamwork book, of course), was based primarily on its authors’ work at consulting firm McKinsey and analysis of Gulf War logistics operations. (The Wisdom of Teams, 1994.) Solid research on teamwork had dropped by the wayside. Most university researchers even gave up membership in the National Training Laboratory, discussed in Part 1 as one of the birthplaces of modern teamwork efforts. This parallels my constant griping that many consultants seem out of touch with the science, which I’ll repeat shortly.

The journal article upon which this series of posts is based was published in 2000, so we can see if their advice for the “future” was heeded in the past decade, as quoted below.

“1. Don’t oversimplify the process.”

Leonard and Freedman recognize the need for easily understood concepts, but say team builders must know and address the complexity of group dynamics. Too often consultants try to make team development seem easy, and it simply isn’t. An example is the overuse of the “Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing” model first proposed in 1965. Unfortunately, this is still quoted as gospel by too many presenters and team builders. I use it as a frame of reference, but always add that teams can be in various phases at once and the curve through them is rarely smooth. Also, with proper development the “Storming” phase is not inevitable. On the down side, teams can drop out of the Performing phase after hitting it, so you can never completely stop your teamwork efforts.

“2. Start studying teams as they exist and function in real-life contexts today.”

This, I’m happy to say, has become more prevalent in research over the past decade. For example, research on business project teams in automotive and railway companies since I started TeamTrainers in 2000 has influenced my work. A study in a large bank showed that good teamwork was more important to branch performance than diversity training.

“3. Practitioners need to revive their historically active partnership with researchers.”

Amen. The biggest barrier to my marketing efforts are the myths that continue to be spread by many in the team building industry who don’t take the time to learn the science. On the research side, however, too many studies are still simply “correlational,” as Leonard and Freedman lament. That is, they merely describe high-performance teams at a given point of time or rely on participants’ recollections instead of using more sophisticated methods to detail what caused that high performance. A lot of my recommendations are built on likely results based on the science combined with my real-world experiences. I’d rather they were all based on studies that compared monetized performance of similar teams at Point A to performance of the same teams at Point B (and C) with just one change in the way those teams were operated. Then we’d know much better whether that change worked and was the difference.

“4. The research and theory regarding teams needs to move beyond the linear, homeostatic view of organizational systems.”

In other words, much of the research has viewed organizations as progressing in a straightforward way that works toward internal balance. Have you ever worked in one of those? I’m sorry to say there has not yet begun to be enough research into how the corporate culture limits team performance, or how teams react to and cause changes in the corporate environment, or the role of decisions by some upper managers. My definition of a high-performance team says that the team performs as well as it can given its environment. The classic example is when a company declares itself “team-based” but continues to give raises and bonuses based on individual performance. Said company should not be surprised when people then put their own agendas ahead of the team’s.

“5. Finally, researchers and practitioners need to have a better appreciation for the history of research and theory regarding teams.”

That’s part of the reason for this series of posts (and last week’s anti-”team-building” rant). Much of what we think is new is not, and much of what we need to know is known. If you’re a manager and want better teamwork, it’s just a matter of learning what really works and applying it. If you don’t want it, then you are wasting your company’s money and causing yourself and others unnecessary pain. Have the courage to admit team leadership is not your thing and find a position that will be healthier for you and the team.

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.

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.

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.

I thought I had finally found it: scientific evidence that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is worth the time and money for team building. You see, in all of my research, not once have I seen such evidence. I have heard people talk about how they improved their communications with one or two other people on their team after an MBTI exercise, and I believe them. Others have said it was “pretty accurate,” to use the most common phrase (not “completely accurate”). But the only unabashed support I have heard comes from the people who sell MBTI services, and managers who invested in them. Neither are very objective sources, and no one had return-on-investment (ROI) figures.So I went looking through two databases of peer-reviewed journals. “Peer reviewed” means the article was reviewed by anonymous experts in the field. One database focused on business and the other on psychology and related sciences. Together they cover hundreds of journals going back decades. The number of articles I found referring to MBTI in a team setting: 2. 

When I came across the first, I thought we had a winner: “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: A bridge between counseling and consulting.” But then I came across a second from the same journal which turned out to be a response to the first. Both are now summarized in TeamResearch News. It turns out the author of the first article, Mary H. McCaulley, co-founded the Center for Applications of Psychological Type with Isabel Briggs Myers, co-creator of the test. None of the references in her articles were tests of the effectiveness of the test. 

The study summary has the details, but there are many problems with the MBTI. The test itself is not as respected as other personality tests used by scientists. One problem is that its scoring pushes people artificially into extreme labels rather than recognizing people can fall in the middle. (Initially it did, but that neutral position was later dropped.)  

To illustrate, if you created a scale from 0 to 100 measuring how much someone likes bananas, the scoring method used by the MBTI would say you don’t like them if you scored a 49 and you do if you scored a 51. But two people who scored a 2 and a 98 are a lot more different than two who scored a 49 and a 51. Scientists would say the latter two are identical, while the MBTI would say they are different. 

It also does not provide reliable results. Even one of the MBTI manuals reports a 35% change in type over four weeks, and another study reported 50% over five weeks. Since you can’t be sure whether the first test or second is closer to the truth, you would have to take the test a minimum of three times, and preferably more, to nail down an accurate type reading. Even then, the article says, you have to be aware that personality is a relatively small contributor to work performance, and that behaviors differ according to the situation. No one who has seen me do a presentation or training would think me an introvert, but that’s what I am. I treat my public work as a performance to make it interesting.

Ms. Briggs was not a psychologist: she had only a bachelor’s degree, in political science. And the MBTI was based almost exclusively on the theories of Carl Jung. Though an influential theorist right up there with Freud, and the guy who came up with the terms “introvert” and “extrovert,” he is controversial within the scientific community and much of his theory work remains untested. Personality tests preferred by researchers are based on evidence guided by theory, not theory alone. 

Even if the MBTI consistently helps most takers get along better with two teammates (the highest number I hear people say), it would be aiding less than half of the total number of communication channels within a team. Within roughly the same time taken by the typical MBTI exercise, and for free, you could draft:   

• a communication plan covering who needs what information from whom by when, and in what form, and
• a set of group-created rules for how you will talk to each other, and what to do if someone breaks a rule.

These two tools, if backed by team and manager self-discipline, will eliminate the majority of your team’s communications issues. Well-supported by research, they also meet the standards of adult learning by providing concrete, relevant information. With MBTI exercises, you end up with abstract type information and general suggestions that users must try to project into the future, instead of clear behavior-based guidelines. 

In the movie Jerry MacGuire, a client of the title character makes him scream into the phone, “Show me the money!” I would say the same thing to the next MBTI practitioner who claims the test is a good way to spend your money for team building.

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