The Science of Teamwork
A Much of the important work in the modern world is done by teams. Hospitals depend on groups of doctors, nurses and technicians, aircraft are built by thousands of engineers, and even a small shop is run better when its staff work together. Yet a group of capable people does not always make a good team. Researchers who study work have spent years asking what separates the teams that succeed from those that fail.
B One finding is that a mix of skills is useful. People with different training tend to notice different parts of a problem, so a team that includes, for example, an engineer, an accountant and a designer is less likely to miss something important. The benefit appears only when the members listen to each other. A team of experts who ignore each other can do worse than a team of ordinary people who share what they know.
C A second factor is whether members feel safe to speak. In some teams, people hide their mistakes because they fear blame or embarrassment. A researcher at a business school found that the best hospital teams reported more errors, not fewer, because their members felt able to admit them. Teams that learn from mistakes improve faster, and a leader can help by thanking people who raise problems and by admitting his or her own errors.
D The size of a team also matters. As a team grows, the number of links between its members grows much faster. Five people have ten possible links between them, but ten people have forty-five. Each extra link is another conversation that may be missed or misunderstood. For this reason many managers prefer to divide a large project among several small teams, each with a clear task, instead of putting everybody in one large group.
E Psychologists have also described a problem known as social loafing, which is the tendency of some people to put in less effort when they work in a group than when they work alone. It is most likely when the result is shared and when individual contributions are hard to see. Giving each member a clear role, and making the work of each person visible to the others, reduces the problem.
F Many teams now work at a distance, using video calls and shared documents. They face the same difficulties as other teams, and some others, because small signals such as a smile or a pause are lost. Successful remote teams usually agree on their goals at the start, hold short regular meetings, and write down decisions so that everyone has the same information.