How to design teams that don't suck (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

It was the 1980 winter Olympics in Lake Placid, and the U.S. men’s hockey team was facing off against the Soviets. 

On paper, the winner looked obvious. The Soviet team had won gold in four straight Olympics.

Just a year earlier, they’d beaten the NHL All-Star team. And just three days before the Olympics started, the Soviets had destroyed the U.S. team 10-3.

JOHN HARRINGTON: ​Yeah, \\ they were the best. you know, they could beat you at the top end of their lineup, or they could beat you at the back end of their lineup.

John Harrington was on the U.S. team. They knew the odds were stacked against them. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: At that time, \\ it wasn't like, Hey, we think we can win this thing. It was like, we're hoping to get to the medal round. 

And \\ I think we rallied around that feeling that we were underdogs. 

That might’ve given them an extra boost, because as the games began, the U.S. team started winning–and upsetting higher-ranked teams. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: And I think as games went on, each game went on, \\ we were getting better as a group. We're getting more confident as a group. 

All of a sudden, they found themselves in the medal round, facing down the Soviet team. 

[MUX] 

To have a shot at gold, they had to beat the best team in the world. 

Team captain Mike Eruzione remembers the anticipation in the locker room…

MIKE ERUZIONE: It was quiet. \\ this is the biggest game we'd ever played and it's quiet. \\ Nobody in the world thought we could win.   

The Soviets scored early on, the U.S. matched it – and the game continued neck-and-neck.  

JOHN HARRINGTON: and I remember as, as that game went on, \\ you're still almost thinking like, Hey, at any time, these guys \\ can fill up the back of the net. So it was like playing every second, \\ that we had to be at the top of bnbbbiour game or, or things might go wrong.

Then came the deciding moment in the last period. The game was tied 3-3. John passed to a teammate who passed to Mike, who took a shot and… 

[SFX - cheer] 

MIKE ERUZIONE: Well, I'm glad it went in. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: \\ and the arena went absolutely nuts. I mean, absolutely went crazy.

\\ And it was just like, holy smokes, like here we are, like this, \\ this dream we all had about going to the Olympics and, and being successful and winning a gold medal like we were– We were there, we were getting there and it was possible.

Somehow, the team managed to hang on for the last 10 minutes. Then announcer Al Michaels made his famous call: 

AL MICHAELS: Do you believe in miracles? YES!

MIKE ERUZIONE: Yeah, I always kid Al Michaels. I said, Al, you know, it wasn't a miracle, but that's a really catchy phrase. 

The game became known as the “miracle on ice.” You’ve probably heard the story or seen the movie. 

But what you haven’t heard is the science that helps to illuminate how the U.S. team won. It’s not just relevant to winning a gold medal–it can also bring out the best in us and make our own teams better.

[THEME]  

I’m Adam Grant, and this is WorkLife, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I’m an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. 

In this show, we explore how to unlock the potential in people and workplaces.

Today: Team effectiveness, and how to make a group more than the sum of its parts.  

[MUX OUT] 

SEG A

RICHARD HACKMAN OB: What I was really preoccupied with was, how come the groups that I am in always seem to suck so bad? And that I wanted to understand because there was possibly a personal relevance there… 

Richard Hackman was the world’s leading expert on teams… and even he couldn’t make them work!

Richard was one of my mentors. Back in 2001, I had no idea what to do with my psychology major. Then I took his class on organizational psychology, and I was hooked. He dazzled us with his studies of teams in a wide range of settings–from airline cockpit crews to symphony orchestras to government intelligence units. 

Richard passed away in 2013, so I couldn’t record a conversation with him. But we do have some archival audio. He once explained his struggles with teams on the People and Projects podcast:

RICHARD HACKMAN PPP 27:37: Well, of course it is widely known that people who study something can’t practice it. You know, shrinks are crazy, marriage counselors get divorced, shoemakers’ kids have holes in their soles, and people who study groups are probably terrible at actually leading or being in groups. I find them frustrating beyond belief. 

Many of Richard’s peers believed that the secret to improving groups was team-building exercises. 

They assumed that icebreakers and bonding activities fueled liking and helped groups collaborate effectively. 

I'm guessing you probably know a few managers who still have the same theory, and you've probably had to suffer through a lot of name games and escape rooms as a result.

But Richard wasn’t sold. He thought we had cause and effect backward.

RICHARD HACKMAN PPP 14:30: A lot of people will go out and say, the problem with this team is there’s a lot of conflict, and there’s mistrust with one another. So what we will do are trust exercises to build trust. // And there really is a cart-horse problem here, because trust really is important, I agree with that. But trust emerges from a team that is operating well. It doesn’t work the other way around.

Sure enough, the evidence shows that teams don’t have to sing kumbaya together to start excelling together. 

It’s not liking that drives performance– it’s often high performance that leads people to get along. 

And high performance is the result of good team design. Richard explained this in a Lifetime Achievement Award speech: 

RICHARD HACKMAN OB: \\ this is a caricature, but there's an enormous, the basic message is true.

60% of the variance in how well a team is going to do is determined before the group members even meet, okay? It's whether you've got the right conditions in place.

Let that sink in. Team design is more important than team dynamics. And many groups aren’t designed to be real teams.

[MUX] 

Think about the teams you’ve been in at work… 

How often are they built for collaboration, with everyone working towards a shared purpose – versus just happening to share an office and some projects?

Some of Richard’s key design conditions aren’t common practice, but they are common sense. For starters, you need a clear who, what, and how. 

The “who” is stable membership: a group of people who stay together. The “what” is a compelling goal that creates a sense of purpose. And the “how” is a unique role well suited to each member. 

But there are a couple design conditions that aren’t intuitive. And you can see them in the miracle on ice.

JOHN HARRINGTON: Mike Eruzione was the captain of our 1980 Olympic hockey team \\ And, uh, \\ of course, uh, known to all of us on our Olympic team as, \\ Mike Holiday Inn Eruzione, because he is America's guest. He has been for going on 43 years now. 

MIKE ERUZIONE: I swear to God, I've never heard him say that or anybody. \\ I don't know where he came up with that. It must be a way to promote himself. 

ADAM GRANT: He– he made some kind of comment about how \\ you’ve never had to pay for a hotel given your, your hero status. 

MIKE ERUZIONE: Oh, I have to have a talk with him. He should see \\ my expense bill.

JOHN HARRINGTON: No, he seriously has, uh, done a, a tremendous job and, uh, and was a, a great leader for us and a great captain, and certainly somebody who's, uh, still as great a team player with, with all of our guys as he was in 1980.

Mike was 25. That made him one of the two most seasoned guys on the team. The U.S. didn’t have the luxury of recruiting the most experienced players. The team was full of amateurs– most were still in college, and several were as young as 19 and 20.

MIKE ERUZIONE: // you know, we were the youngest Olympic team I think at this point we'd ever put on the ice. 

Our first instinct is often that a great team should be full of experienced players. If you’re in tech, you want to form a crew of seasoned coders. If you’re in sales, you hope to assemble a group of salespeople with decades of practice under their belts. 

But when you’re designing a team, you actually don’t need the most experienced individuals. You want to design a group around shared experience, as Richard explained.

RICHARD HACKMAN PPP 09:12: the one that often gets overlooked is // we need to learn how to work together. // and there is really a liability to newness.

Research shows that teams are more likely to excel when they’ve spent more time training and working together. 

You can see it in studies of software development teams: they do faster, higher-quality work after they’ve collaborated for months or years. 

The stakes of shared experience can be very high. 

[MUX] 

Take flight crews. There’s evidence that well-rested crews that haven’t flown together before make more potentially catastrophic errors than exhausted crews that have just flown together. Even if you’re tired, shared experience improves communication.

And cardiac surgeons who do all their procedures with a core team at one hospital are about ten percent less likely to lose a patient than surgeons who split their time between different teams at different hospitals.

RICHARD HACKMAN PPP 13:11: There’s a general view that after a team has been together for a while, they’ll start to get a little too relaxed and too accepting of each other’s foibles and errors, and so forth. 

There really isn’t empirical evidence for that. What you see instead is the team continuing to get better–at a decreasing rate, but continuing to get better over time.

Shared experience allows people to leverage each other’s strengths, compensate for each other’s weaknesses, and build effective routines. 

It’s especially clear in sports. NBA basketball teams win more games once they’ve played multiple seasons together—in part because they get better at coordinating their plays. You can see that up close in the miracle on ice.

[MUX OUT] 

Leading up to the 1980 Olympics, many members of the Soviet team had played together before. But even though the U.S. team was new, one of their secret weapons was that they had a lot of history together. 

The U.S. Olympic coach, Herb Brooks, recruited players with shared experience. Of the 20 guys on the final roster, 9 had played for Herb at Minnesota, and 4 more had played together in Boston. 

MIKE ERUZIONE: Well, I think the big thing for us to play with the Minnesota kids is they had played under Herb. So they, you know, when we thought Herb was, you know, \\ bat crazy, they would just kind of laugh at us and explain this is what he does. 

So it was very helpful being with the Minnesota kids because they knew Herb's antics and what Herb was like.

\\ And on the other side of the coin, it was great to have the, you know, the, the four Boston guys there because we knew each other. We played against each other. We grew up in the same, basically pretty much the same neighborhoods. 

You know, I, I'd known Jack O'Callaghan since he was 14 or 15 years old. So, uh, you know, having that atmosphere, uh, for us as, as local guys was helpful. 

They had experience together before the whole team even met for the first time.

What Herb did is called a liftout: recruiting an intact team. This is effective far beyond sports. In startups, instead of just launching a company with their friends, co-founders get along better if they’ve worked together in the past. 

And on Wall Street, research shows that if you poach a star security analyst from another firm, it takes an average of five years for them to recover their outstanding performance. But if you hire their team with them, they maintain their star status from day one. 

Of course, you don’t always have the opportunity to recruit a team with shared experience. But you can build it by having the team practice and perform together. 

If you’re setting up a team of data scientists, have them go through training together. If you’re forming a board committee, role-play some decisions together. And if you’re building a hockey team, form a line that stays together.

[MUX] 

MIKE ERUZIONE: Uh, nobody could play with those three clowns. Harrington, Schneider, and Pavlich. \\ 

They were the only line I think that stayed together all year because they each knew each other so well and where they were going and what they were doing.

They became known as the Conehead line. John was one of them.  

JOHN HARRINGTON: Yeah, that, that, that was a funny thing, you know, \\ 

I think Mark Pavlich said at one time, he goes, you know, we might as well be cones out here, because we never get to play on a power play, you know, and maybe they could use us for cones. \\ 

ADAM GRANT: Why did your line play together so well? 

JOHN HARRINGTON: like I don’t know, Adam. Like, certainly I had played with Mark Pavlich in college and we had– we had played together \\ and both were \\ kind of rink rat guys and outdoor hockey guys who understood how to play in small spaces and move the puck. 

And then \\ Mark Pavlich, his hometown was like four miles from mine and Buzz Schneider's was like 20 miles from my hometown.

So we're all from the same area up there and grew up playing the same way, as the season wore on in that Olympic year and, and, and stuck together. so we got to understand each other's games a little bit better and certainly gain confidence in our ability to, to play the game for Herb.

ADAM GRANT: That's so interesting. I never thought about that. You know– it was pretty clear to me that the guys who had been on a college team together would have benefited from shared experience. They had some familiar routines. They knew each other's strengths and weaknesses. 

It did not dawn on me that the fact that a lot of you guys grew up playing basically the same style of hockey in the same places also kind of spoke the same language.

JOHN HARRINGTON: Yeah. It, it did, you know, \\ And I knew as a younger player too like, I mean, when I'm learning the game, when you're playing with friends and playing \\ on an outdoor rink or on a pond, I mean, you're watching the older guys and going, how are they playing? I want to be like them.

Another design condition that many people miss is shared responsibility.

Extensive evidence reveals that the bond between people is less important than their bond around a mission. 

In other words: mission cohesion matters more than social cohesion. And what creates that cohesion around a mission is shared responsibility.

This is one of the reasons why team bonding activities are often ineffective. 

If you and your teammates don’t have a shared goal that you’re invested in together, your team will still flounder no matter how much you like each other. 

Herb Brooks didn’t worry much about the relationships between his hockey players. He focused on their responsibility to the team.

JOHN HARRINGTON: Yeah, I think that's, uh, that was certainly, uh, one of the things that he had to do early on in our season was \\ to convince everybody that, you know, \\ what's on the front of your jersey, the U.S.A., is more important than what's on the back, your own name. And that we have to play together. 

\\ and he certainly did a great job of making us believe that as the season went on. 

ADAM GRANT: I love the, the front of the jersey is more important than the back. It sounds like, just, it's such a powerful illustration of what we often talk about in my world, of putting your mission above your ego. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: Well, exa–exactly. \\ and we certainly had to do that on our team, Adam. I mean, \\ we had great individual players, but we had to play together. And when we played together, I think we needed to be greater than those individual parts. 

They had an important mission of representing America. To reinforce that the outcome was in their hands, Herb gave them an extra common enemy. Him.

MIKE ERUZIONE: Herb always stressed to us, everybody has a job and a role and understand what that is and we’ll be a team. Um, and I think Herb created that chemistry for us, because it was always us against him.

He started out from the beginning when he said, I'll be your coach, but I won't be your friend. So it was really upon us to bond and come together knowing that it was going to be us against Herb. \\ 

He was very demanding and, and that, I think the way he coached us made us come together even, even quicker. 

[MUX] 

One key moment happened after an exhibition game.

MIKE ERUZIONE: So we played Norway in Norway. Um, the game ended, it actually ended in a 3-3 tie. 

And we started to skate off the ice and then all of a sudden Herb's out there and he blew the whistle and he brought us down to one end of the rink and we started to proceed to do the Herbies.

Herb wasn’t happy with their performance, so he gave them a challenge to face together. A tough skating drill that became known as the Herbies. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: It was goal line to the near blue line and back to the goal line and then to the red line and back to the blue line and then to the far blue line and back to the goal line and then all the way down to the end boards and all the way back.

MIKE ERUZIONE: Then we'd stretch. Then he blew the whistle and we did ‘em again for 15 minutes. And then we stretched, then he blew the whistle and we did ‘em again.

JOHN HARRINGTON: \\ It was tiring and it was tough. But I think that was, uh, you know, that that was a drill that could be was always somewhere between doing conditioning and doing punishment.

So, uh, he kept everybody out there. \\ And then the, I remember the arena guy, the arena ice guy was up in the corner, screaming in Norwegian, and I think he wanted to go home. He turned the lights out. \\ 

MIKE ERUZIONE:  And then I remember the drill ending, cause guys were smashing their stick against the boards.

We were pretty pissed off. \\ and Herb said, if I hear another goddamn stick smash against the boards, you'll skate till you die. 

Well, nobody said a word and we finished the drills, we went back in the locker room and we had to play Norway the next day. And Herb said, if you play this way again tomorrow, you're gonna skate again.

They didn’t play that way again – the next night, the U.S. crushed Norway 9-0. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: So maybe Herbie made his point. 

ADAM GRANT: \\ I wonder if, you know, some of that was, let me, let me put these guys under adversity together and see if that brings them together.

JOHN HARRINGTON: Yeah, I I think it does. \\. And I think, \\ he wanted to show everybody he was going to treat everybody the same, that there weren't going to be any favorites on the team, that we're all in this together. And that

\\ Everybody played for everybody else. That they understood that, that we wouldn't be successful if we didn't try to play together. 

\\ And I also knew that, uh, you know, he expected us and wanted us to be the best conditioned team. \\ but he also wanted us to be the mentally toughest team too. \\ 

And I think that everybody would always remember that lesson in Oslo there, that \\ we have to be able to bring it when we're in the heat of the battle, because eventually, we were going to get to Lake Placid where you wouldn't get a second chance.

It wouldn't matter if you did stops and starts or herbies or lightnings after the game. If the game was lost, you couldn't get it back.

Herb’s methods were a little… intense. But there’s something to be said for creating collective challenges as one way to design for shared responsibility. 

[MUX] 

A second approach is to flesh out a common identity. This means focusing on what’s central, distinctive, and enduring to the team. 

For example, you could invite members to create a team name, a vision, and a set of shared values. 

Evidence from nonprofit professional theaters suggests that which identity the team chooses is less important than whether they’re aligned together around it.

A third option is to reinforce the importance of the goal and of each person’s unique contribution. I’ve found in my research that it’s not enough to just talk about how the work makes a difference.

It’s more effective to bring in a customer, a client, or an end user to speak firsthand about why the work matters. 

That underscores the meaning of the task and reminds the team that others are depending on them to succeed.

[MUX OUT] 

The U.S. hockey team had a whole country counting on them. 

Their shared responsibility and shared experience helped them bring out the best in one another, which enabled them to beat the Soviets– and then win gold. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: It's… Honest to God, I sit there and watch that and I, I, I get goosebumps when I watch that. 

ADAM GRANT: I could see you getting chills. It's– I mean, it's amazing even just to watch your reaction watching it 43 years later. 

JOHN HARRINGTON: Yeah, it's, uh, \\ you never get tired of watching that and never get tired of what happened in the games or that– \\ that experience, and having to be a part of it is certainly the \\ greatest thing that happened to me \\ as a hockey player.

\\ We had individual parts and we had players that played different ways and different systems and came from different areas of the country.

But over that course of the year, \\ we grew together as a team and we grew together as you know, as, as teammates and people who just, when we played together, we somehow could make it greater than we, than we could do individually. 

You could see it at the medal ceremony, when Mike went up to accept the gold medal as the team captain…  

MIKE ERUZIONE: ​I’m, I'm standing on the podium after the flag and after the anthem, and my teammates are looking at me and I'm looking at them. \\ 

[MUX] 

So for me, it was a reaction just to call them up and, uh, we all fit on it. Um, I don't, I don't think we'd all fit on it today, but we all fit on it then. 

Good design is only part of the recipe. 

Once you have shared experience and shared responsibility in place, how do you launch a team to set them up for success? 

And if they start to struggle, how do you intervene to turn things around? 

More on that, after the break. 

– 

AD BREAK

– 

In college, I did my senior thesis on team effectiveness. 

The first time I went to meet with Richard Hackman about it, he was sitting at his desk with his feet on the table. 

No shoes, just socks.

ANITA WOOLLEY: So he liked to take off his shoes, so he would be frequently, you know, viewed \\ walking with his shoes off. Uh, he had a sweet tooth. So to get him to read my paper, I would clip a candy bar to it with a note saying, don't eat this until you're reading my paper, you know, to get his feedback. \\ 

ADAM GRANT: Sounded like you were describing a dog more than a human. No shoes. Must use treats to motivate.

ANITA WOOLLEY: Exactly. Well, you know, there's some of those things in all of us, probably.

Anita Woolley is an organizational behavior professor at Carnegie Mellon. 

She was one of Richard’s proteges, and she’s now one of the world’s foremost authorities on teams.

When Anita started working with Richard, they were fascinated by team beginnings.

RICHARD HACKMAN (archival): the quality of the launch of the group. That is what happens when the members first come together.

Anita and Richard collaborated on a study to see if a simple intervention at launch would help teams work better together.

They pre-screened thousands of people and formed teams. Some teams were staffed with multiple experts. Others were given no experts at all.

Then, they gave all the teams a task.

ANITA WOOLLEY: \\ and it was a counterterrorism scenario that we came up with based on a \\ combination of cases that we had seen in our intelligence community work.

So, so there was a ground truth. We knew what happened. 

Each team was supposed to solve the case. 

And surprisingly, when teams of experts were left to their own devices, they actually performed worse than teams without experts that had one little design advantage.

Instead of diving right into the task, the successful teams had been randomly assigned to do a collaborative planning exercise. 

They talked about who would be responsible for what, and how they would integrate their knowledge.

Team planning led to a successful launch.

ANITA WOOLLEY: And it was just a matter of setting the groundwork and the norms and giving them a, a kind of script to follow for how to work together. And I think it's played out a lot actually in other teams I've been part of. 

\\ you know, and I have– make all the student teams do that. Students regularly will say, wow, this was one of the best teams I've ever been on. I don't know what you did. All the magic and composing.

And I'm like, it's actually, it's not, there's, it's not really magic. \\ it's kind of pretty basic, but it's pretty powerful. 

[MUX] 

Anita guides them to create a team charter together. 

This is basically a team manual–a document that maps out goals, roles, and routines. Does your team have one?

The not–so-magical-formula for a good charter is the same as the one for good team design: Who, what, and how. 

ANITA WOOLLEY: So when we think about team design, we think about who's in the team, uh, what they're trying to do, and how they're gonna work together. How are they gonna be structured in terms of decision making? How are they gonna, you know, actually combine their inputs?

And even if you assume everybody is on the same page about all of those things, I think often you're surprised as you start to talk about them, you realize \\ that you're not. You know, people had different assumptions and, uh, it's just hugely valuable to clarify that as, as early as possible.

We all know the value of post-mortems when things don’t go right. 

But my favorite part of a team charter conversation turns that idea upside-down.

Before the work begins, you do a pre-mortem: imagine that your team has crashed and burned, and discuss the most likely causes. 

There’s evidence that a pre-mortem can help to prevent overconfidence and promote better routines.

ANITA WOOLLEY: you know, you kind of think, visualize the future and \\ you failed and how did you fail? Why did you fail? \\ what did you do wrong?

You know, it's, it's really powerful how that change in perspective can really reveal new ideas, uh, that, that you wouldn't have thought about before. So, uh, absolutely kind of trying to project forward, um, I think is a, a very important piece. 

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, I'm a, I'm a big fan of them and I think it's, it's so much more effective to, to anticipate problems and prevent them than it is \\ to have to solve them later. 

ANITA WOOLLEY: Ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. 

ADAM GRANT: Benjamin Franklin. 

ANITA WOOLLEY: There you go. And he's still right.

[MUX] 

Once your team is off and running, it still needs help to thrive. Sometimes it’s clear when a team is struggling, but not always. 

Richard Hackman found that if you want to know how your team is doing, it’s not enough to consider performance. 

A manager or coach should also monitor learning and well-being– are people growing together and enjoying the experience? Or are they hating each other’s guts, and feeling like they’re stagnating? 

And you need to look at viability: is the team going to be capable of working together in the future, or are they burning bridges as they go?

If your team isn’t quite there, you might need an intervention. 

[MUX OUT] 

Often when we think about fixing a team, our first impulse is to swap people in and out, or coach specific members. 

But what’s more useful is coaching people together as a team, and looking at problems with collaboration.

ANITA WOOLLEY: Absolutely. And I mean, \\ clearly there could be individual deficiencies in sort of a technical skill or, or whatever. So, you know, those \\ should definitely be addressed. But sometimes when we're looking at a group, even if we're talking about conflict or \\ pick your favorite group disease.

Um, sometimes there is a system level \\ contributor that would take care of a lot of things that seem individual level, right? 

So for example, there could be somebody who has skills that are not being utilized and, uh, and because of, you know, other norms in the group. And so then that person gets to be difficult.

They start being, you know, very \\ irritable. They don't show up, they don't deliver what they are supposed to do because they feel disrespected and whatever. 

And so if you were gonna try to coach that person, you know, to fix the problem, it wouldn't probably fix the problem, right? Uh, so at least considering the system level issues is an important piece to really getting at the heart of what might be happening.

ADAM GRANT: Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of like, like saying to a conflict mediator, like you have two people who are having a fight. \\ You can talk to each of them, but you're never gonna talk to them together. Not gonna work. 

ANITA WOOLLEY: And probably like, \\ even more difficult, there's probably some other pieces to their shared context that are contributing that are gonna be hard to really detect or figure out, yeah. 

[MUX BEAT] 

DOM: just can we just go around and introduce ourselves? 

ALEX: Sure. My name is Alex \\.

EMILEE: my name is Emily. 

KAELI: Kaylee. 

JAVIER: Hi, my name’s Javier.

JUDY: I'm Judy \\ and I’m based out of the Bay Area. 

This is a marketing team at Atlassian– the company behind software like Jira and Confluence. 

Their specialty is collaboration: they make tools for teams. 

So it’s not surprising that they have an international reputation for their excellence in running their own self-managed teams. 

This team has gathered for a coaching session, led by the company’s resident “work futurist,” Dom Price. 

DOM: Awesome. \\ And just to wrap things up, I'm not in this team, but I'm your facilitator for today, Dom Price. I’m joining you from sunny Sydney. 

The team just started working together a few weeks before this call. 

On a recent offsite, they did what Atlassian calls a team health monitor. 

DOM:  The health monitor is our diagnostic that teams do to get a feel for how they're working.

This is similar to the kind of team monitoring that Richard Hackman suggested.

The Atlassian team found they were struggling with coordination and communication. 

Most crucially, they hadn’t decided where and how to make decisions. They wound up retracing each other’s steps and relitigating choices that were already made. 

To make this more difficult, they were scattered across different time zones. 

DOM: And because they're so spread out around the world, they were just missing those conversations.

They all arrived with the assumption of going, I assume we'll just work the way my old team worked and you're like, yeah, no, that, that– unfortunately, you've now glued together seven different ways of working and it doesn't work. And so it's like, okay, timeout, let's have an agreement.

Specifically, they needed agreements on where to have different types of conversations. 

ALEX: Like, I don't think we have any of those standards in place. So we're all over the place right now. Me, especially. I'm, I'm number one guilty. I'm, I'm terrible at Slack. So, uh, short conversations, really long conversations, like full text posts, like decisions, like all of that happens on Slack.

Some team members liked casual spur-of-the-moment calls… 

JAVIER: I will choose to Slack huddle over write anything, but I am– there is a method to the madness. 

If I don't think it needs to be documented, and if I don't think there's certain steps to getting to whatever the discussion is, I will always choose to Slack Huddle.

I feel a little bit closer to the person, and then it's a little bit less formal than Zoom. \\ I tell people it's like speaking on a walkie talkie. And you're just going back and forth and just getting, getting ideas flowing or just catching up. 

Other team members wanted more official communication – because without it, they ended up redoing a bunch of work.  

JUDY: Sometimes I get nervous with huddles or like these quick Zoom chats. It's because you– there's no way for me to document or reference back. If you know what I mean? 

Like we might've aligned on something and then what I have to do anyway, is if it's a bigger thing, is recap what we just said, and so that's just an extra step. 

DOM: Yeah. So Judy, make that a standard for me. Let's, let's give Javier a role that says, Javi, you, you can do your slack huddles cause they work for you. And we, we want you to be the best version of you, Javi. We want you to have those chats– 

JAVIER: Thank you, Dom. 

DOM: – but I can't have those decisions sat in secret. Sat in a, sat in a brain bubble somewhere. 

So the Atlassian team came to a compromise.   

DOM: So we're going to give everyone the law– the rule, not the law. We can't make laws–Everyone the rule that if we're in a slack huddle and we make an impromptu decision, that's a good thing, but not if no one else knows about it.

So any decision needs to be documented decisions and shared with impacted. Yeah? Cause none of us want a team with an upset program manager who doesn't know the decision that we've made. They'll make our life hell. 

These kinds of conversations could happen individually. 

But when they happen as a team, there’s an opportunity to bring out the best in everyone’s working styles. 

DOM: If you do it individually, what tends to happen is the leader decides the communication channel in the meetings. \\ And you're like, \\ okay, if you say that's how we're doing it, I think it's terrible, but we'll do it and I'll pretend it's fine. Right? It's very top down. 

What you would have noticed in that exercise is sometimes I got Javier to lead. Sometimes I got Alex to lead. Sometimes I got Emily to lead. You know what? It's a team activity. The team turns up to these meetings. The team is in these channels communicating. So we're always solving for the team.

[MUX] 

Think of the multiverse where this Atlassian team doesn’t pause and have this conversation. (Maybe you’ve been in that multiverse). 

They get stuck in loops, wasting time redoing work. Resentment builds. 

A team intervention can help to head off tensions before they start to fester.

DOM: Suddenly everyone goes, ah. Like, you can even see during the session, people going, ah. Like stuff that we just thought, I thought I'd said that out loud already and I hadn't. And then when you say it out loud, people really recognize it. So that's, that's how a lot of these plays go.

It's, it's stuff that you already knew that you just get to surface, that you then get to resolve, that gives you a better way of working.

Empirically, team coaching tends to be most effective at inflection points. And these tend to happen at certain predictable times. In particular, the midpoint. That’s when teams become more open to changing up their strategy and process.

ANITA WOOLLEY: they also have enough information about the work to have insights about maybe what changes would be useful. But you really have to force that process too. 

\\ So when I do it with, um, teams that I work with, \\ I have the members individually do an evaluation of things and then I give them an aggregated report that sort of compares them to, you know, some norm, uh, and says, okay, you know, are we using, uh, member skills very well?

\\ do you feel like your skills are utilized or, or where are we falling short? Do we all agree on what we're still trying to do? Uh, do we still think that's the right direction? And how about the ways we're working together, you know, are they effective? 

The key to better teams isn’t magic. It’s also not a miracle. Sometimes it just takes a little prompt to reflect and evolve. 

ANITA WOOLLEY: \\ humans kind of have these sources of inertia, you know, where they don't wanna bring things up or maybe they don't wanna open conversations, but it doesn't take much to get them to do it.

[MUX]

Richard Hackman would be the first to tell you that he never really mastered working in groups. 

But thanks to his research– and the work of his proteges– we know a lot about how to help teams work better. 

Richard believed passionately that designing a great team wasn’t just about producing great results. It was also about creating meaningful experiences.

RICHARD HACKMAN PPP 7:33: What happens to the team itself over time? Does it grow in capability? Is it a better performing unit? // And what happens to the individuals? Do they learn something– do they grow and develop professionally, or was this a waste of their time or something that frustrated and alienated them. 

// The greatest teams of any kind are the ones that // get better over time and that provide a setting in which individual members can continue to learn and grow.

CREDITS 

This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our team includes Courtney Guarino, Constanza Gallardo, Dan O'Donnell, Gretta Cohn, Grace Rubenstein, Daniella Balarezo, Ban Ban Cheng, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar and Roxanne Hai-Lash. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Our show is mixed by Ben Chesneau [shay-no]. Original music by Hahnsdale Hsu and Allison Layton Brown.

Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Studios. 

Gratitude to the late, great Richard Hackman for all his wisdom. We miss you, Uncle Richard. For Richard’s audio clips, big shout outs to Andy Kaufman’s People and Projects Podcast and the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior Division. And thanks to Kristine Parker and the Atlassian team for letting us listen in.

For their research, appreciation to the following lead researchers and their colleagues: Rebecca Grossman on team cohesion; Clayton Foushee on flight crews; Ralph Katz and Robert Huckman on shared experience and software teams; Huckman and Gary Pisano on cardiac surgery teams; Shawn Berman on NBA teams; Boris Groysberg on Wall street analysts and lift-outs; Noam Wasserman on founders; Kris De Jaegher on common enemy effects; Stuart Albert and David Whetten on identity, Zannie Voss on identity alignment; Beth Veinott on premortems; Connie Gersick on midpoint transitions; and Ruth Wageman on team coaching. Also John Gilbert for writing about the miracle on ice.

EASTER EGG 

ADAM GRANT: The nostalgia's gotta be tricky. \\ I guess I've met some people over the years who feel like, okay, you know, I had a peak moment that I will never experience anything like it again. 

And there's a part of me that always wants to be back there, but there's a part of me that also appreciates how rare and special that was. Like, how do you think about that?

JOHN HARRINGTON: Yeah. Um, well the first thing I say about that is like, it happened so long ago. People ask me about that and about talking about it, and I say, well, you know, the older we get, the better we were. You know, so…