SPECIAL
COLLECTION
FROM THE LEADERSHIP ARCHIVE
How
Winning
Teams Work
Learn how to identify the best
individual for each position and the
best methods for working with your
groups.
CONTENTS
SPECIAL
COLLECTION
How Winning Teams Work
1 How Leaders Can Optimize Teams’ Emotional Landscapes
By Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Christina Bradley, and Lindred Greer
6 It’s Time to Tackle Your Team’s Undiscussables
By Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux
15 Why Teams Still Need Leaders
Lindred (Lindy) Greer, interviewed by Frieda Klotz
18 A New Approach to Designing Work
By Nelson P. Repenning, Don Kieffer, and James Repenning
28 Improve the Rhythm of Your Collaboration
By Ethan Bernstein, Jesse Shore, and David Lazer
36 How to Lead a Self-Managing Team
By Vanessa Urch Druskat and Jane V. Wheeler
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How Leaders Can Optimize
Teams’ Emotional Landscapes
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Christina Bradley, and Lindred Greer
Employees bring a diversity of moods to work each day. Trying to smooth
them out into one shared mood isn’t always the best idea.
can help their organizations function at their best.
Emotions are running high. The disruptive events
characterizing 2020 — a global pandemic, climate-related
disasters, economic uncertainty, and social discontent — are
leading employees to bring a higher level of emotionality to
work than ever before. This is clashing with the culturally
ingrained norm that an appropriate “professional” demeanor
minimizes emotional expression.
At the same time, work on emotional suppression suggests
that there are long-term costs to keeping emotions buried
and that, if stifled, they will erupt in counterproductive ways.
For that reason, leaders can no longer avoid taking an active
role in architecting emotional landscapes — the collective
composition of employee sentiments. Because emotional
landscapes directly influence how employees make sense of
situations, tasks, and what actions to take, they can help or
hinder the pursuit of organizational strategic objectives. By
supporting emotional expression within their teams, leaders
The tools available to leaders for navigating such emotional
landscapes with their teams are largely outdated strategies
such as encouraging general suppression of emotions at
work or offering generic pep talks. Leaders need a playbook
for responding to employees’ emotional states with more
nuance and, critically, in ways that are tailored to the
situation. We offer four plays — to nurture emotions, to
align them, to acknowledge them, and to diversify them —
that allow leaders to manage the loaded emotional settings
they’re working in and help creativity and productivity
thrive.
Limits of the Traditional
Emotions Playbook
Based on our executive leadership development work with
global Fortune 100 companies as well as our ongoing
research in this area, we’ve noticed that leaders tend to overly
rely on two plays from the old, traditional playbook of
emotional management of teams and organizations: giving a
pep talk and sounding the alarm.
Many managers remain enamored with the notion that
rallying a positive, high-energy mood in a team is an
effective strategy for obtaining exceptionally high
performance. Accordingly, many managers adopt this play
when kicking off meetings by pumping up their team to
elevate everyone’s mood. Former Microsoft CEO Steve
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Ballmer famously illustrated this approach with the fervor of
a rock singer at a music festival. Though that’s admittedly an
extreme example, we have seen many other leaders deploy
an only slightly down-tempo cover version of Ballmer’s
routine before meetings, by playing uplifting music, asking
everyone to share a piece of good news, or getting everyone
to stand up and move around before diving into the agenda.
Alternatively, other managers rely on the mood-darkening
strategy of sounding an alarm. Many believe that instilling
anxiety by highlighting the cost of failure is an effective way
to focus a team’s attention and effort. One newly promoted
senior executive working in data security shared with us that
he has found no better way to motivate his team than to
openly share his concerns about the consequences of failing
to meet current key performance indicators (KPIs). He
reasoned that this kills employees’ complacency and pushes
them to work harder.
The stark differences between these two approaches hide
an important similarity: Both create emotional alignment.
Both steer teams toward a shared emotional experience —
rather than individualized and diversified ones. Whether a
manager relies on positivity or negativity, the result is a
reduction in the breadth of feelings.
Leaders use these plays because they can work in very
specific situations. Indeed, an abundance of research
supports the notion that increasing emotional alignment
contributes to team performance, specifically when a team
is executing a clear strategy. When a team shares a common
mood, members are better able to converge on a single point
of view and take the actions required to execute a given
strategy.
However, the full story behind the consequences of
emotional alignment is more complex. Because emotional
alignment minimizes important individual differences in
reactions to current events, it can prevent teams from
building an inclusive culture, however counterintuitive that
may seem. More crucially, because convergence in a team’s
mood directly reduces the diversity of perspectives
represented, it shapes how teams operate: When there is
uncertainty about the best path forward, striving for the
same emotional mood actually suppresses views critical for
the creative process, decision-making, and overall
innovation efforts.
Studies coming out of the behavioral sciences have revealed
that more complex and diverse emotional experiences
actually evoke a broader array of ways to think about a
problem.
Heterogeneous emotions beget diverse thoughts because of
the way emotions interact with how knowledge is organized
and retrieved. For example, the mood-congruent memory
effect describes the phenomenon of how we are more likely
to bring to mind knowledge associated with positive
experiences when in a positive mood and with negative
experiences when in a negative mood. The anger acquired
during a grueling commute on the freeway more readily
brings to mind all the pain and suffering in our lives than the
joys and bright spots experienced a mere 24 hours earlier.
Therefore, a collective that is in a similar mood will share
a similarly biased perspective. A group with a more
emotionally diverse landscape will have less bias and greater
breadth in the points of view they bring to the problem at
hand.
Considering Context for
Managing Emotions
Rather than homogenizing the emotional experience at
work, managers would be wise to deploy a much more
tailored approach to emotion management that takes into
account the nature of the task at hand and the ideal
emotional landscape for that task.
From our observations of managers over the years and what
has been discovered about emotional landscapes, we
recommend that leaders start with two initial questions
when aiming to architect the ideal emotional landscape in
their teams:
What iiss tth
he n
naatur
uree ooff tth
he p
prrim
imaary jjoob ttoo bbee do
don
ne aatt tth
he
momen
ent?
t? Is the team’s current primary objective to execute
upon a clear strategy that has already been mapped out in
advance? Or, instead, do you need the team to innovate,
to brainstorm, and to develop new solutions to a pressing
problem?
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What iiss tth
he ccur
urrren
entt em
emootio
ion
nal llaandscape ooff yyoour tteeam?
Focus on what we call the “aperture of your emotional lens”
to take a holistic view of your team — shift attention from
individuals to patterns in the collective. Are the emotions
among members relatively aligned, or are they diverse?
Consider whether an external event (such as a major
international crisis or a recent organizational
announcement) has created a situation where team members
are having similar feelings. Or, instead, has the variety of
experiences in their individual lives (including such
disparate events as the birth of a child, progress on a KPI,
or that same theoretical organizational announcement)
brought about a variety of moods? Focus on the emotional
temperament of the entire group and not just one or two
people.
Your answers to these two questions (execution versus
innovation, and aligned versus diversified) are essential for
determining which of the four emotion management
strategies will be most effective. Choosing the wrong play
could detract from the effectiveness of your team.
Expanding the Emotion
Management Playbook
Once you’ve identified the nature of the task at hand and
the current emotional mood of your team, you’ll be able to
identify a strategy that best fits your current circumstances.
(See “Four Strategies for Your Emotion Management
Playbook.”) Below, we detail why each strategy fits with each
combination of circumstances.
Nur
urttur
uree em
emootio
ion
ns (w
(wh
hen tth
he ttaask iiss ex
exeecutio
ion
n aan
nd tth
he
cur
urrren
entt em
emootio
ion
nal llaandscape iiss aalig
lign
ned). As noted earlier,
research shows that a team is better able to coordinate on
clear tasks when its members share a common mood. To
benefit from this emotional alignment, leaders need to be
active in encouraging and recognizing those feelings to
lower the likelihood that new emotions will intrude, which
would be counterproductive. Sustaining this cohesive
emotional model can require some planning. If the team
is upbeat, share information that will continue to rally
everyone. If it’s more somber, acknowledge the mood with
empathy.
One leader recently shared with us how she has been
handling the rise in negative emotions of her team due to
the COVID-19 crisis. She told us that at the start of one
meeting, many team members shared their fears about how
the pandemic would affect the company. This leader avoided
the temptation to lighten the mood and instead
acknowledged that times were indeed tough. By validating
the team’s negative feelings and avoiding the urge to
sugarcoat the current emotional state, she avoided
disturbing the camaraderie of shared concern. Her team
maintained a common motivation to continue executing a
plan for pulling through the hard times together.
Alig
lign
n em
emootio
ion
ns (w
(wh
hen tth
he ttaask iiss ex
exeecutio
ion
n aan
nd tth
he ccur
urrren
entt
em
emootio
ion
nal llaandscape iiss di
divver
ersse). When your team needs to
coordinate toward a common goal and you sense that it’s
experiencing a wide range of emotions, the most effective
way forward is to deploy a strategy that increases emotional
alignment. Here, the “pep talk” or “sounding of the alarm”
approaches described earlier are effective in preparing your
team to execute its task.
In this circumstance, managers need to take immediate and
potent actions to help team members get into a similar
emotional state. Earlier this year we saw one leader of a
large nonprofit enact this strategy shortly after closing all
in-person operations and shifting to remote work. Some
stakeholders were delighted not to go into the office, some
struggled to work while at home with their families, and
others were anxious about the changes. This leader began
to incorporate punctuated moments during virtual meetings
to highlight specific examples of how the organization was
continuing to deliver on aspects of its mission that were
sacred to the employees. This worked to coalesce the
collective mood toward a sense of hope and optimism.
Acknowle
ledg
dgee em
emootio
ion
ns (w
(wh
hen tth
he ttaask iiss inn
innoova
vattio
ion
n aan
nd
the ccur
urrren
entt em
emootio
ion
nal llaandscape iiss di
divver
ersse). When the goal
for your team involves finding novel solutions to a pressing
problem and you recognize that your team is experiencing
a diverse set of emotions, the best way to move forward
is to let those different emotions be heard and validated.
Avoid opening meetings in a way that could substantially
raise or lower — and thus align — the entire group’s mood.
Creating room for emotional validation allows people to
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process their affective experiences, which is more productive
than attempting to suppress them or pretending that people
are unemotional robots. The diversity of emotions in the
room will facilitate diversity of thought.
One astute leader uses this approach to begin her Monday
morning design hackathons. Recognizing the value of a
room containing a mix of irritation from treacherous
commutes, elation from weekend adventures, and
everything in between, she begins with an online poll asking
everyone to indicate two different emotions they are feeling.
With this small step, she affirms the diverse emotional
landscape in the room and how it’s a perfect mix to fuel their
innovation task at hand.
Di
Divver
ersif
sifyy em
emootio
ion
ns (w
(wh
hen tth
he ttaask iiss inn
innoova
vattio
ion
n aan
nd tth
he
cur
urrren
entt em
emootio
ion
nal llaandscape iiss aalig
lign
ned). As we’ve outlined,
the level of innovative thinking you will get from your team
will be suboptimal when there’s too much emotional
conformity. It matters little whether you created this
common mood or if it was the result of an external event.
What a leader needs to do when a team is tasked with a
creative project is to increase the complexity of the
emotional landscape.
One way to do this is powerfully simple: Set the stage for an
ideation session by having team members reflect on specific
meaningful moments from their careers and personal lives,
including when they were excited and when they were angry.
Have them jot down some words that capture how they felt
in those moments. The underlying magic of this process is
that the range of emotions attached to this broad collection
of experiences will help unleash a greater variety of thoughts
and perspectives to use in the innovation challenge.
When we run this exercise in leadership development
workshops, we typically ask just a subset of attendees to
revisit these emotionally diverse memories. Later, we ask for
a show of hands to see whether the number and variety of
solutions are higher in that group, and we find that they
nearly always are. This seemingly trivial intervention really
does squeeze more creative thought from employees.
A note on diversifying emotions: When there is big news
that creates a similar emotional response — for example,
your company’s major quarterly announcement — that’s not
a good day for ideation, regardless of whether the news is
a pleasant surprise or a major disappointment. It will be
difficult to diffuse the team’s distraction and common
emotions. Consider scheduling core ideation work for
another time, when the source of emotional alignment has
subsided.
Although all four strategies for managing employee
emotions have their places in different situations, from our
experience, managers miss important opportunities by not
using the acknowledge and diversify strategies. This is
understandable, given that they depart from the
conventional wisdom that aligning a team’s emotions is
always helpful. Again, although a common mood accelerates
execution tasks, it is counterproductive for the generation of
innovative ideas.
For creativity, emotional diversity is key. Managers who
understand this can mindfully cultivate the different
emotional landscapes required for execution versus
innovation. It’s not that this leadership work was not
required all along. Rather, the extremely emotional and
dynamic events of 2020 are finally forcing leaders to do this
difficult work.
About The Authors
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks is the William Russell Kelly Professor
of Business Administration at the University of Michigan’s
Ross School of Business. Christina Bradley is a doctoral
student in the Management & Organizations department at
the Ross School of Business. Lindred Greer (@lindredg) is an
associate professor of management and organizations at the
Ross School of Business.
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Four Strategies for Your Emotion Management Playbook
Paying attention to the emotional landscape of a workplace allows leaders to respond to situations with nuance. Depending on
what kind of job needs to be done and how aligned or diverse emotions are, different strategies can help teams most effectively
pursue strategic objectives.
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : T E A M D Y N A M I C S
It’s Time to Tackle Your
Team’s Undiscussables
Subjects that are consciously or unwittingly deemed out of bounds come in
four varieties and make it almost impossible for teams to function.
BY GINKA TOEGEL AND JEAN-LOUIS BARSOUX
I
n 2008, Theranos engineer Aaron Moore created a mock ad for a prototype of the company’s
blood testing device. Intended as a prank to amuse his colleagues, his ad described the device as
“mostly functional” and included “leeches” among its “blood collection accessories.”1
Now, with hindsight, we can interpret his spoof not just as a joke but as a desperate bid to
raise a taboo subject: The company’s device didn’t work and the leadership team was hiding
that fact. Moore’s actions spoke volumes about the undiscussables at Theranos.
Undiscussables exist because they help people avoid short-term conflicts, threats, and embarrassment. But they also short-circuit the inquiries and challenges essential to both
improving performance and promoting team learning. Our consulting work with dozens of
senior management teams has taught us that a team’s ability to discuss what is holding it back is
BENEDETTO CRISTOFANI/THEISPOT.COM
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : T E A M D Y N A M I C S
THE
ANALYSIS
The authors reviewed
various streams of
research on team effectiveness and dysfunction,
connecting the dominant
management and social
psychology perspectives
on teams with the oftenneglected psychodynamic
literature on groups.
Along with their
consulting work with
senior management
teams, the authors have
studied group dynamics
in elite sports teams,
orchestras, medical
teams, and a hostage
negotiation team.
Their insights have been
validated and refined by
participants in executive
education programs at IMD
over the past 10 years.
what drives its effectiveness. We have observed this
dynamic in a wide variety of settings and have drawn
on this experience to propose a framework, a set of
diagnostic questions, and some targeted solutions to
help teams address their own undiscussables. This
approach enables team leaders to identify the dominant undiscussables in their businesses and kick-start
the necessary conversations to bring them to light.
At Theranos, CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her
top team were unwilling even to acknowledge concerns that were obvious to many of their engineers.
It was significant that Moore didn’t share his misgivings directly with his bosses but expressed them
sarcastically and anonymously.
When Holmes was told about the prank ad, she
launched an investigation to identify the culprit.
Instead of triggering debate, her actions reinforced
the message that problems with the company’s
product were not to be discussed. Within months
of being reprimanded, Moore resigned, frustrated
and disillusioned.
The Theranos case illustrates what can happen
when questioning voices are silenced and topics
placed off-limits. At Theranos, that created a culture of fear and denial that ultimately led to false
claims made to investors and customers, as well as
decisions that jeopardized patient health. The
once-inspiring Theranos story ended with criminal
fraud charges filed against Holmes and the collapse
of a startup previously valued at $9 billion.
While Theranos represents an extreme case of a
dysfunctional organization, the underlying issue —
team undiscussables — is all too common. And it’s
getting worse as increasingly virtual and globally
distributed teams find it harder to pick up signals
of discomfort and anticipate misunderstandings.
With fewer opportunities to raise undiscussables
face-to-face (casually, over lunch or coffee), it becomes even more important to identify and air
concerns before they escalate and team and organizational performance begin to suffer.
A Misunderstood Problem
When the leadership teams we work with struggle
with undiscussables, the symptoms they present
to us range from unresolved conflicts among
team members and uneven participation in meetings to destructive groupthink and employee
disengagement. We have studied group dynamics in
numerous nonbusiness settings, too — including
elite sports teams, orchestras, medical teams, and a
hostage negotiation team — and the pattern holds
across contexts and levels: The more undiscussables there are, the more difficult it is for the team
to function. If they aren’t discussed collectively,
they can’t be managed intelligently.
Yet team leaders tend to overestimate the risks of
raising undiscussables. They assume incorrectly
that talking about negative subjects will sap team
energy, reveal issues they cannot resolve, and
expose them to blame for the part they played in
creating the problems the group faces.
In reality, we’ve found that discussing undiscussables brings relief, boosts energy, and bolsters
team goodwill.
Team leaders also underestimate the consequences of doing nothing to address undiscussables.
Ignoring them invariably results in strained working relationships that produce ineffective meetings
marked by a lack of debate. This leads to bad decisions that are made worse, because without open,
honest discussion, a team cannot learn from its
mistakes or correct course. Left unmanaged, undiscussables contaminate the team, choking its
problem-solving abilities and capacity to learn and
adapt to change.
Four Layers of Undiscussability
Executives often talk about undiscussables as though
they were all the same: views people hold and choose
not to air in public. They are typically described as
the elephant in the room, the 800-pound gorilla, or the
dead moose. Thinking this way both overlooks their
complexity and makes them more fearsome. We
propose a multifaceted view of undiscussables. The
thinking-saying gap (Theranos engineers knew
their device didn’t work but couldn’t say so) is just
one category. There is also the saying-meaning gap,
the feeling-naming gap, and the doing-knowing
gap. (See “Mind the Gaps.”)
Each type of undiscussable has its own drivers.
Some emerge from cognitive barriers, others from
emotional ones. Some are known to everyone on the
team, while others are sensed only by a few or are utterly unknown, existing outside the team’s collective
consciousness. Different types of undiscussables
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need to be surfaced in different ways. Some can be
drawn out through direct questions; others must be
inferred from patterns of behavior and then validated with the team. (See “Diagnosing the Problem:
A Checklist,” p. 40, for questions leaders can ask to
identify their teams’ undiscussables.)
Although the following categories overlap somewhat, differentiating between types of undiscussables
can help you tackle them more effectively.
1.You THINK but dare not say. Undiscussables are
most commonly associated with risky questions,
suggestions, and criticisms that are self-censored.
You may joke about them (as Moore did at Theranos)
or discuss them confidentially but never openly.
For example, the incoming CEO in the Australian
subsidiary of a global information company
quickly noted her new team’s wary exchanges in
meetings and team members’ disconcerting
tendency to nod approvingly in public only to
criticize in private. They were unaccustomed to
speaking their minds. Coming in with a tough
change mandate, the CEO needed her team’s honest input and wholehearted buy-in. She had to
address its cautious behavior.
Views are left unspoken mostly when people fear
the consequences of speaking, whether the risk is
real or imagined. The main driver of this fear is often
team leaders with an emotional, erratic management style and a reputation for responding harshly
when people disagree with them. That makes team
members feel unsafe.
As research by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson
has shown, a critical barrier to psychological safety is
the weight of hierarchy.2 Power and status differences
tend to discourage team members from bringing up
issues or concerns they think the leader may view as
disruptive or even none of their business.
Beginning the fix: How can leaders minimize
those power differences and make it safe to speak
up? By explicitly acknowledging they may unwittingly have created a climate of fear or uncertainty,
inviting discussion about sensitive issues, drawing
out concerns, promising immunity to those who
share dissenting views, and lightening the weight of
their authority in the room.
In the Australian subsidiary, the CEO took several concrete actions. To model her commitment to
MIND THE GAPS
Teams struggle with undiscussables when they…
… THINK but dare not say
… SAY but don’t mean
… FEEL but can’t name
… DO but don’t realize
openness and reduce mistrust, she asked the team to
submit anonymous questions in writing about her
style and her intentions. She then asked the HR head
to run an honest dialogue session with the team
(while she was absent) to encourage productive disagreement. The session focused on the difference
between straight talk and fight talk.3 While both
styles of communication are based on candor,
straight talk distinguishes clearly between the individual and the issue; fight talk conflates them.
In subsequent meetings, with the CEO present,
whenever the team seemed reluctant to push back
on a proposal, she would say, “I feel there might be
something else. ... Let’s see if it would help for me to
leave the room. And when I come back, I want you as
a team to share your concerns.” This helped free people from their inhibitions. Eventually, as the team
realized the CEO really did want constructive pushback, leaving the room became unnecessary. She also
replaced the rectangular meeting table with a round
one to signal a more egalitarian environment and
foster more intimate interactions.
To encourage genuine give-and-take, team
leaders must play a supportive role and be very
conscious of how volubly they express themselves
during discussions. They should avoid stating their
preferences or opinions at the beginning of team
discussions and refrain from immediately judging
the contributions of others. They also can show
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : T E A M D Y N A M I C S
DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEM: A CHECKLIST
Here are some signs that your team may be struggling with one or more of the four types of undiscussables.
1. DO TEAM MEMBERS THINK THINGS THEY DARE NOT SAY?
Do they agree publicly during meetings but disagree (and vent) privately?
Do they often use sarcasm, silence, or nonverbal gestures to signal disagreement?
Do they focus on managing up in meetings?
2. DO THEY SAY THEY SHARE CERTAIN VALUES BUT FAIL TO PRACTICE THEM?
Are team meetings too undemanding and unrealistically upbeat?
Do people cling to an image of cohesiveness, frowning on any criticism of the team as a sign of disloyalty?
Do they always seem to adopt similar perspectives on problems?
3. DO THEY HAVE NEGATIVE FEELINGS THEY CAN’T NAME?
Do meetings feel antagonistic (tempers fray; disagreements become personal)?
Are people reluctant to comment on issues outside their direct responsibilities?
Do team members organize themselves into rigid factions?
4. ARE THEY UNWITTINGLY ENGAGING IN UNPRODUCTIVE BEHAVIORS?
Does the team have trouble identifying root causes for its ineffectiveness?
Does it spin its wheels on minor issues?
Do important items often get postponed or fall between the cracks?
that they are part of the group by sharing their
mistakes and engaging in maintenance behaviors,
including saying “we” rather than “I,” encouraging
team members to voice their concerns, and
acknowledging their contributions.
In short order, the Australian information company’s team meetings grew more productive as
these new expectations and processes were internalized and became routine. The CEO was able to
execute her change mandate successfully, and team
development, both individual and collective, accelerated. Team members took the functioning of
their team more seriously and carried the same
principles into meetings with other teams.
2. You SAY but don’t mean. Alongside unspoken
truths, there are spoken untruths. These undiscussables reflect discrepancies between what the team
says it believes or finds important and how it behaves
(what academics have described as gaps between espoused theory and theory-in-use).4
Teams often proclaim but fail to follow certain
values, objectives, or practices that are supposed to
guide and inspire them and create a sense of togetherness. The disconnect between what’s said
and what’s done is visible to all, but no one points it
out for fear of endangering the team’s cohesion,
even if that cohesion is based on a shared illusion.
Here’s an example: The top team of a Scandinavian
paper giant struggled with plunging demand for
paper caused by digitalization. In response, the tightknit leadership team declared its commitment to
“reinvent the company.” In reality, all the team talked
about in meetings and retreats was efficiencies and
cost cutting.
The chief concern in such teams is protecting the
group, as opposed to protecting the individual in the
think-but-dare-not-say category of undiscussables.
Silence is not based on fear as much as on an unquestioned and distorted sense of loyalty to the team, its
leader, or the organization. Drawing attention to the
disconnect between intentions and actions would feel
like letting down colleagues and killing team spirit. This
false positivity, which people express by simply mouthing accepted values, practices, and objectives — the
espoused theory — hides any concerns that the team
might be incapable of making the necessary changes to
the organization and that people might lose their jobs
as a result. This protective impulse may appear innocent, but in the long run, it undermines learning and
leads to disillusionment as people stop trusting the
value of one another’s words and commitments.
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : T E A M D Y N A M I C S
Beginning the fix: Team leaders must first expose the hypocrisy of saying but not meaning and
acknowledge their part in the charade, collecting
anonymous examples of empty proclamations and
challenging the overprotective mindset that inhibits the airing of criticism. They can initiate the
process by asking the team to complete this sentence: “We say we want to …, but in fact, we….”
As the paper company prepared for yet another
round of downsizing, it was becoming increasingly
difficult to pretend that the team was reinventing
the business. The cognitive dissonance between the
mantra and the reality became too great for the
CEO to accept. “In one of these endless group executive meetings,” he told us, “I listened to myself and
all my good, hard-working colleagues, and then I
lost my temper and I said, ‘What are we doing here?
We’re telling the same story time and again: How
tough life is. How the government doesn’t understand us. The customers are tough; the competition
is unfair. We’re talking, talking, talking about what
the world is doing to us.’ ”
The CEO acknowledged that the team was not,
in fact, doing what it said it was doing nor what the
company needed: reinventing its business model
and processes. In this way, he demonstrated the
level of candor and self-criticism needed to break
the team out of its slump, closing the gap between
meaning and saying.
His frankness also freed the team to reflect on
other delusions that were keeping it idling. It soon
concluded that its capacity for reinvention was
constrained by the group’s homogeneity.
So the team decided to assign the reinvention
challenge to a more diverse group of 12 people who
included more women, people with experience
outside the paper industry, and non-Nordics. This
team would function as internal consultants.
Handpicked from 160 internal applicants, the
group was eclectic and far better equipped to imagine out-of-the-box solutions. Eight years on, the
organization has transformed itself into a company
specializing in renewable materials. According to
the former CEO, the dynamics within the team also
changed dramatically. “I think we have a very open
dialogue now. We don’t argue anymore about ‘Is
the world changing or not?’ It’s already changed.
Now, it’s all about, ‘Can we get ahead of the curve?
Can we change the world for the better?’ ”
Team leaders play a key role in initiating the
soul-searching, ensuring that the organization’s
stated goal is the real goal, stressing a collective responsibility to keep one another honest, listening
to alternative viewpoints, and breaking down the
unproductive and misconceived connection between criticism and disloyalty.
3. You FEEL but can’t name. Some undiscussables
are rooted in negative feelings — such as annoyance,
mistrust, and frustration — that are difficult for
team members to label or express constructively. But
manifesting one’s anger or resentment is not the
same thing as discussing it.
For example, the top team of a German-based
high-tech company was thrown into turmoil by
unspoken tensions between two colleagues: one a
fast-rising CTO, the other a recently hired COO.
Following a series of clashes, they had stopped talking. Each felt the other was behaving unreasonably.
The behavior or comments of colleagues with
divergent perspectives can trigger allergic reactions, often based on misunderstandings. Research
shows that healthy disagreements over what to do
or how to do it can morph quickly into interpersonal conflicts.5 Too easily blamed on a vague “lack
of chemistry,” these feelings can infect the whole
team, especially when the pressure is on. Just one
touchy relationship is enough to generate a malaise
Team leaders must first expose the hypocrisy of saying
but not meaning and acknowledge their part in the
charade, challenging the overprotective mindset that
inhibits the airing of criticism.
SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
10
Healthy disagreements can morph quickly into interpersonal conflicts. Just one touchy relationship is enough
to generate a malaise that hinders team deliberations
through emotional and social contagion.
that hinders team deliberations through emotional
and social contagion.6
Faulty perceptions mostly go uncorrected because the antagonists don’t test their inferences.
Based on their own worldviews and self-protective
instincts, they presume they know why the other
party is acting in a particular way and let that drive
their behavior. This leads to escalating tensions.
Beginning the fix: The feuding parties need
help to investigate the differences — in personality,
experience, and identity — that sustain and fuel
their apparent incompatibilities, their so-called
lack of chemistry. The team leader’s role is to
ensure that individuals feel equally welcome and
accepted within the team and promote diversity
as a source of insight, not friction. One strategy is
to ask team members to complete the sentence
“I feel …” to literally put a name to the feeling to
surface whatever is bothering them.
A neutral coach can help team members open up
by asking essential follow-on questions and probing
for clarification when needed. This process can be
augmented with a formal assessment tool that captures individual team members’ personality profiles
and a common framework that helps people understand the roots of their colleagues’ behaviors.
In the case of the German high-tech company’s
CTO and COO, a striking contrast in their profiles
offered insight into some of the difficulties they
were having. On one dimension of the personality
assessment, the COO favored big picture thinking
and gravitated toward new ideas, while the CTO
was extremely detail-oriented and practical, leaning toward the tried-and-true. This insight helped
explain why the CTO constantly raised objections
to the COO’s sweeping solutions to problems.
In the process of discussing how their personality scores tallied with their self-images, another
factor emerged: The COO saw himself as a problem
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
solver, while the CTO defined himself as a selfstarter, relying on his own independent judgment.
These differences in self-image helped explain
why the valuable experience of the COO was resisted by the CTO, who resented interference and
dreaded becoming “dependent.” At the same time,
the COO felt frustrated that he was being prevented
from solving the problem. The CTO appeared to
the COO as a know-it-all; the COO saw the CTO as
someone who could not and would not take advice.
Unwittingly, each behaved in a way that refuted the
other’s core work identity. Inevitably, they drove
each other crazy.
To diminish such tensions, you must try to disentangle intent from impact. Even if feedback and advice
are well intentioned, they may challenge another person’s self-image as competent, honest, or likable,
triggering a strong, negative emotional response.
Once you understand where colleagues are
coming from, it becomes easier to value and leverage their input without taking their comments or
behavioral quirks as attempts to show off, frustrate,
or take advantage. But self-knowledge is equally
valuable: When you can see and describe your own
tendencies accurately, your colleagues are less likely
to take your quirks personally.
The breakthrough, in the case of the high-tech
company’s CTO and COO, was a role-play exercise,
asking each to put himself in the other’s shoes. They
proved so adept at describing how the other felt that
they ended up laughing. There was no lack of empathy — just very different approaches and priorities.
Realizing that their respective behaviors were not
malevolent or personal, they were able to start working together more effectively, recognizing the
contributions each could make to the other and their
organization. They also were able to get feedback
from other team members to help them maintain
the behavioral changes to which they had agreed.
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : T E A M D Y N A M I C S
The good news is that destructive and unconscious
dynamics lose their power when they become visible
and a topic for discussion.
4. You DO but don’t realize. The deepest undis-
cussables are collectively held unconscious behaviors.
These undiscussables are the most difficult to uncover. Members of the team may be aware of isolated
problems in their dynamic, but they cannot connect
the dots and infer root causes, so they jump to the
wrong conclusions about what is behind team inefficiencies and poor performance.
Consider this example: The CEO of a French
travel company complained about the dearth of debate and lack of engagement within his team. We sat
in on one meeting, and he was right. The trouble
was, he was the problem. He was disengaged and easily distracted, and team members unconsciously got
the message that they were not important to him.
This is what psychologists call projection,
wherein we ascribe our own thoughts and feelings
to someone else. The CEO was disengaged, so he
thought the team was. Of course, the team quickly
replicated his behavior, becoming disengaged itself,
and the CEO had no idea he inspired it.
Teams instinctively develop defensive routines to
cope with anxiety, such as that generated by feeling
ignored or undervalued. This allows them to avoid
thinking about or even naming the underlying issues. But it also blocks learning, preventing the team
from responding and adapting effectively to emerging challenges. Team members at the travel company
were unwittingly mimicking their leader; that was
their coping mechanism. If they were checked out,
they wouldn’t be bothered by the fact that he was.
As described by British psychotherapist Wilfred
Bion, unconscious and unacknowledged undiscussables manifest in seemingly unrelated team
dynamics — hence the difficulty connecting the
dots. At the travel company, there were hub-andspoke exchanges with the team leader that prevented
team members from interacting, conversations
dominated by the same two people, and a distracting preoccupation with a fake foe. All these
interactions impeded critical self-review.7 And they
disguised the true source of dysfunction.
Behavior patterns that emerge from anxiety
begin on an unconscious level and then become
part of “the way we do things.” Team members fall
into rigid roles, sit in the same chairs, and follow
rituals that impair their ability to question assumptions and get their jobs done.
Beginning the fix: Though unnoticed by the
team, warped interaction patterns may be readily
discernible to outsiders. The team leader can invite
a trusted adviser from another part of the organization or an external facilitator to observe the team
and give feedback on communication habits, including body language, who talks and how often,
whom people look at when they talk, who interrupts whom, who or what is blamed when things
go wrong, what is not spoken about, who stays silent, and whose comments are ignored.
A trained observer can then engage in what MIT
Sloan School of Management’s pioneering organizational psychologist Edgar Schein calls humble inquiry,
in which the aim is to elicit information and feelings
important to the team’s mission. The questioner’s
outsider status allows for naive, unthreatening questioning of the unconscious processes at play.8 The
Five Whys technique (asking “Why?” at least five
times), made famous in Six Sigma methodology,
can help the outsider drill down to deeper levels and
surface what the team is avoiding.
Prior to beginning our work at the travel company,
we asked to film one of the top team’s meetings (this is
part of our usual process). We saw that there were lots
of side conversations. People slouched and fiddled
with their phones during presentations. The impression was of a group going through the motions.
Then, we showed the team a series of clips focusing on all the occasions the CEO was distracted
by his phone. Initial amusement turned to embarrassment as the sequence ran on and on, but we
SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
12
interrupted it after three minutes and told the team,
“Tell us what you see.”
The CEO was shocked. “Had you told me I was
doing it, I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said. The
team members were also surprised, but once the
evidence was visible to them, they had little difficulty decoding the message the CEO was sending: a
lack of respect and appreciation for other people
and their work. Of course, that discouraged open
debate. The CEO’s behavior also authorized the
team to act in similar fashion, producing the very
outcomes — disengagement and unproductive
meetings — that he complained about.
The good news is that these destructive and unconscious dynamics lose their power when they
become visible and a topic for discussion. But, to
help reset their behavior in meetings and inculcate
new habits, the team members also took two concrete measures: They agreed to a one-month ban
on devices in their meetings (with fines donated to
charity for violations), and they drew up a team
charter clarifying new behavioral expectations that
included listening to each other, asking more questions, delaying assumptions, and summarizing
conclusions and follow-up actions.
As is often the case, the content of the charter was
not particularly original, but it empowered every
team member to enforce the new ground rules in the
moment by pointing to the prominently displayed
document they had all signed. Six months later, the
CEO told us that the team’s meetings were shorter,
more focused, and generating richer debate.
Team Detox
Most teams have — and suffer from — undiscussables in all four categories. But instead of trying to
fix all of them at once, we advise team leaders to
take a sequential approach, starting with the two
more conscious categories they can have an immediate impact on: knowing but not daring to say and
saying but not meaning it.
First things first. The best point of entry is making sure “we do what we say.” This is low-hanging
fruit, as the consequences of “not doing what we
say” are visible to all and reflect a collective failing
rather than an individual one. Also, when the top
team is involved, a misalignment between words
and actions can have a profoundly corrosive impact
on the entire organization, leading to cynicism, disengagement, and conflicts at all levels.
As team leader, you are well placed to start the
conversation about how to improve team processes
and address dysfunctional communication patterns. You can engage in some preparatory reflection
by asking yourself, “Is this a problem I have helped
create?” Acknowledging your own responsibility is a
powerful way of unblocking the discussion and setting an expectation of candor.
Easy wins can help team members realize that
what they gain will outweigh the pain — generating
momentum to move from above-the-surface undiscussables to deeper undiscussables that usually
require facilitation or external intervention.
Team time. Surfacing and removing undiscussables is never a one-off exercise. To prevent the
buildup of new undiscussables, you have to make
time for inward-focused team talk, not just outwardfocused work talk.
We once studied a Swiss negotiating team specializing in kidnappings and hostage situations.
STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION
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SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
13
C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : T E A M D Y N A M I C S
With the stakes so high, the team could not afford
to let undiscussables disrupt its process. The team
was outstanding at monitoring its dynamics in real
time (with the assistance of a designated observer),
as well as reviewing what happened, taking account
of feelings as well as facts.
Similar principles hold in business. Highperforming teams pay attention not only to what
they achieve but how they achieved it by working together. This does not come naturally. You have to
work at it and introduce routines and forums to
purge your team of undiscussables before they take
root and cause problems.
The top team of a fast-expanding European
software group we worked with systematically devotes half a day during its twice-yearly retreats to a
discussion of how the team is working together.
The session is facilitated by the head of HR, who
tells them, “You’re all busy running your areas. If
you’ve stepped on one another’s toes along the way,
now’s the time to get it out on the table.” As a more
regular exercise, at the end of meetings, the CEO
sometimes asks team members to complete the
phrase “I’m concerned about …” to try to catch potential issues early on.
We have seen other teams use similarly simple
practices to prevent undiscussables from accumulating. Some adopt a check-in routine at the start of
meetings to iron out niggling concerns that might
be bothering the participants. An alternative is to
air these matters at the end of meetings by going
around the table three times, asking, “What was
helpful?” “What was not helpful?” and “What
would you do differently at the next meeting?”
A healthy team must be able to review and revise
its own functioning.
Exception to the rule. While the pressure to
avoid tough issues never lets up, surfacing undiscussables almost always pays off — provided it is
done in a constructive manner.
There is just one situation where we would not
recommend it: If you’ve inherited a dysfunctional
team and have to achieve something fast, spending
time diagnosing and unearthing undiscussables
may not be an optimal approach.
In such instances, it is often more effective to
adopt a positive psychology strategy, applying appreciative inquiry, such as discussing what the team
does well or has done right, with the same forensic
rigor you would apply to unpacking dysfunctional
behaviors and events, and building from there.9
The goal in this situation is to find ways to work
around any weaknesses and align strengths to develop
positive emotions and relationships before taking
on the hard work of discussing undiscussables.
However, the takeaway remains the same: In an
increasingly fast-paced world, teams desperately
need a space to talk about the way they go about
their business.
Ginka Toegel is a professor of organizational behavior and leadership at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Jean-Louis Barsoux is a term research professor at
IMD. Comment on this article at http://sloanreview
.mit.edu/x/61108.
REFERENCES
1. J. Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon
Valley Startup (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018): 47.
2. I.M. Nembhard and A.C. Edmondson, “Making It Safe:
The Effects of Leader Inclusiveness and Professional Status on Psychological Safety and Improvement Efforts in
Healthcare Teams,” Journal of Organizational Behavior
27, no. 7 (November 2006): 941-966.
3. S. Miller, D. Wackman, E. Nunnally, et al., Straight Talk:
A New Way to Get Closer to Others by Saying What You
Really Mean (New York: Rawson Associates, 1984).
4. C. Argyris and D. Schön, Organizational Learning:
A Theory of Action Perspective (Reading, Massachusetts:
Addison-Wesley, 1978).
5. L.L. Greer, K.A. Jehn, and E.A. Mannix, “Conflict
Transformation: A Longitudinal Investigation of the
Relationships Between Different Types of Intragroup
Conflict and the Moderating Role of Conflict Resolution,”
Small Group Research 39, no. 3 (June 2008): 278-302.
6. K. Jehn, S. Rispens, K. Jonsen, et al., “Conflict Contagion: A Temporal Perspective on the Development of
Conflict Within Teams,” International Journal of Conflict
Management 24, no. 4 (2013): 352-373.
7. W.R. Bion, Experiences in Groups (1961; repr., London:
Routledge, 1989).
8. E.H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of
Asking Instead of Telling (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, 2013).
9. D.L. Cooperrider and S. Srivastva, “Appreciative Inquiry
in Organizational Life,” in Research in Organizational
Change and Development, ed. R.W. Woodman and
W.A. Pasmore (Stamford, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1987):
129-169.
Reprint 61108.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019.
All rights reserved.
SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
14
[INTERVIEW ]
Why Teams Still Need Leaders
When people collaborate remotely, hierarchy keeps them moving in the same
direction — but leaders can flex to promote autonomy and creativity.
LINDRED (LINDY) GREER, INTERVIEWED BY FRIEDA KLOTZ
I
n recent years, agile and flat working structures have gained favor at many companies
and struck a responsive chord with employees who are put off by stifling hierarchies.
But doing away with hierarchy can cause confusion, spark complaints from employees,
and hasten departures, says Lindred (Lindy) Greer, associate professor of management
and organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and faculty
director at its Sanger Leadership Center. While agreeing that rigid forms of hierarchy
can impede innovation, she has found that it can provide many important benefits
when managed well.
Greer first became interested in team structures more
than a decade ago while investigating diversity, hoping to
understand how gender and
race play out in social interactions. She found that team
members tended to be less
focused on their colleagues’
gender and ethnicity than on
the power they wielded. She
then decided to explore how
hierarchies work in organizations and what happens when
they go wrong. She has written
a number of groundbreaking
MICHAEL AUSTIN/THEISPOT.COM
articles on hierarchy, status,
and the social dynamics of teams, including, most recently, “Why and When Hierarchy
Impacts Team Effectiveness” in the Journal of Applied Psychology.1
MIT Sloan Management Review correspondent Frieda Klotz spoke to Greer as she was
about to travel to Seattle to coteach a course on leadership development with an orchestra
conductor at a business incubator. What follows is an edited version of their conversation.
in power struggles, and battle over rank.
All of this harms performance. One of
the burning questions in management
research right now is, what are the best
alternatives to hierarchy? But it’s a complex picture — hierarchy isn’t always bad
or harmful, and its effectiveness may depend on where and how it’s implemented,
and how the person at the top manages
the hierarchy. For example, there is growing interest in remote work and virtual
teams, and in that context hierarchy works
quite well.
Why is hierarchy a good way to structure
virtual teams?
GREER: Hierarchy makes it easier to coor-
dinate how people work together. So for
teams that most need structure — those
operating under uncertain conditions or
when the task is unclear, as often happens
in virtual or remote teams — hierarchy is
highly effective. It still has downsides, but
the need for it is so great that it trumps
whatever internal politics and bureaucracy come with it. You simply need that
structure to keep people moving together.
Often when people work remotely, there is
an assumption that they have more autonomy and freedom than office workers. But is
MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW: A few
years ago, many management experts and
business leaders were saying that hierarchy
had had its day and that the future belonged
to flat organizations. What’s happening? Is
the pendulum swinging back?
GREER: Hierarchy is probably the most
common form of organizing the workplace.
There aren’t a lot of good alternatives to it,
and companies need some say in managing workers, particularly as they scale.
However, there are also a lot of downsides
to hierarchy, and over the last decade my
collaborators and I have documented the
many ways in which it can go wrong. Team
members squabble over resources, engage
it wrong to think so?
GREER: Hierarchy does not have to mean
less autonomy. For example, when I talk
to the CEOs of companies doing really
well with a remote-work model — I’m
thinking about Automattic, which owns
WordPress, or 10up, a successful web-design
company — they emphasize the need for
SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
15
FRONTIERS
Why Teams Still Need Leaders (Continued from page 15)
structure. In practice, this means that they
put much more effort into coordinating
how people work together than other
companies. They formalize role descriptions and onboarding better, and they’re
more intentional and specific in their recruiting and hiring. For example, they’ll
do interviews through Slack to test independence and communication virtually.
They say this makes them better at navigating the people side of business largely
because the remote workforce is utterly
intentional about the way interactions are
structured.
But even though the workers are accountable to someone, they can still retain
decision control in their areas of expertise
because the company has clear values that
guide how to make decisions. That’s the
thing: Hierarchy can go hand in hand
with autonomy. It doesn’t have to be one
or the other.
How does that kind of conflict affect team
performance?
GREER: In the 2018 paper in the Journal of
Applied Psychology, my coauthors and I
showed that on average, hierarchy causes
power struggles and personal conflicts and
can thereby undermine team performance.
In other research, we found that 70% of the
time peer disputes turned into personal
conflicts and power struggles.2 This was
really bad for the teams’ productivity as
well as for the employees’ happiness.
What does your recent research say about
how hierarchy works or doesn’t work in an
office environment?
GREER: Research has generally historically
focused on the benefits of hierarchy. The
core assumption, drawn from animal behavior, was that hierarchy was a natural
way to organize people, that if one person
was dominant, others would be more submissive. The research assumes that people
find hierarchy comfortable and seek it out
in times of crisis. My research challenges
the view that hierarchy is always good by
showing that it can lead to inequities and
conflicts within teams. One of the problems is that the structure it provides isn’t
always the right one, in both the form of
structure and the context in which it is
applied. For example, people aren’t always
happy about how they’re ranked, and
there can be power struggles and turmoil
around roles. In some contexts, like creative brainstorming, hierarchy just gets
in the way and fosters competition rather
than collaboration.
“The Navy SEALs have
an excellent approach:
On the ground,
there’s a clear chain
of command. … But
when they sit down
to debrief, everybody’s
equal and has a voice.”
— LINDY GREER
Given the potential problems, what can
companies do?
GREER: Managers need to be smarter about
how they use hierarchy. Good leaders know
how to flex — to use hierarchy to get things
done but also to flatten the organization
when they want workers to be creative. The
Navy SEALs have an excellent approach:
When they’re on the ground, there’s a clear
chain of command. If their commander
says, “Get out now,” there’s no playing
devil’s advocate — no one argues. You
listen and you fall into rank.
But once they go back to the base to
debrief, Navy SEALs literally take their
stripes off at the door. When they sit down,
everybody’s equal and has a voice. This is
important because one person on the team
might have noticed something really critical
that nobody else saw, which could inform
their plans for the next assignment. So they
flatten out; they share ideas. Then they go
back outside, put on their stripes and uniforms, and literally fall into rank again.
I spent the last half year or so studying
startups to see if there were companies that
had effective ways of flexing as well. These
were early-stage tech companies, representing both B2B and B2C business models.
Many of them just accepted hierarchy,
while others were resigned to being flat and
chaotic. But some of the best-managed
companies were able to flex the hierarchy
fluidly. Day to day and meeting to meeting,
I saw managers who could make the team
hierarchical but also flatten it when they
needed to. I think realizing how to manage
that duality — and allow for autonomy —
is at the heart of this. At the end of the day
there needs to be a leader, but it doesn’t
mean every interaction is hierarchical.
Are there special skills managers need to
learn?
GREER: Companies are realizing that to do
hierarchy well, they really need to invest in
leadership development. Even startups realize that leadership is a set of behavioral
tools that can be learned.
A lot of the companies are also experimenting with different types of structures,
where project teams are flatter but report regularly to a panel of internal company advisers
(as opposed to leaders). The trouble is that a
lot of these experiments are not data driven.
They don’t collect large-scale data to see
whether the infrastructure actually works.
One experiment that has received a fair
amount of exposure is known as holacracy.
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16
It was introduced by management at
Zappos, the online shoe retailer, in 2013,
where it was used to scale back hierarchy in
favor of flat, cross-functional groups. In the
course of the experiment, Zappos discovered that it needed an elaborate rule book
to guide people on how to use the holacratic method. In fact, it was much more
complicated than the hierarchy they’d
started off with. When the CEO, Tony
Hsieh, gave employees the option of
accepting the new system or leaving the
company, one-third of them walked out.3
Since then, Zappos has made a bunch of
changes but has maintained some aspects
of the system. Although I think ideas like
holacracy have value, in my view imposing
rigid schemes is the wrong way to go.
As for other approaches, there are
aspects of agile that have shown promise.
But companies still need to figure out
how to allow for moments of hierarchy.
Members of agile teams still need to coordinate and find ways to resolve conflicts.
Even if you’re not using hierarchy, you
always need a decision-making role. The
question is, how can you encourage working together and coordination in a simple
and elegant manner?
hierarchical, while training both leaders
and teams how to adapt the hierarchical
structure to handle the demands.
So where does this leave managers? Do they
1. L.L. Greer, B.A. de Jong, M.E. Schouten,
et al., “Why and When Hierarchy Impacts Team
Effectiveness: A Meta-Analytic Integration,”
Journal of Applied Psychology 103, no. 6
(June 2018): 591-613.
keep looking for good alternatives to hierarchy or focus on the flexible flattening you’ve
described?
GREER: Until we have an alternative model
that is established and has been shown to
work, the simplest and safest approach for
companies is to use hierarchy but also to
train leaders to use it well: to be able to flex
and adapt how they use it. This means
selecting leaders who have the skill sets to
foster teams that are empowered and
Frieda Klotz (@friedaklotz) is a freelance
journalist and correspondent for MIT Sloan
Management Review. Comment on this
article at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/61110.
REFERENCES
2. F.R.C. de Wit, L.L. Greer, and K.A. Jehn,
“The Paradox of Intragroup Conflict: A MetaAnalysis,” Journal of Applied Psychology 97,
no. 2 (March 2012): 360-390.
3. A. Groth, “Is Holacracy the Future of Work or a
Management Cult?” Oct. 9, 2018, www.qz.com.
Reprint 61110.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
2019. All rights reserved.
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R E D E S I G N I N G W O R K : O P E R AT I O N S
A New Approach to
Designing Work
For years, management thinkers assumed that there were
inevitable trade-offs between efficiency and flexibility —
and that the right organizational design for each was different.
But it’s possible to design an organization’s work in ways that
simultaneously offer agility and efficiency — if you know how.
BY NELSON P. REPENNING, DON KIEFFER, AND JAMES REPENNING
YOU CAN HARDLY pick up a business publication without reading about the ever-increasing
pace of change in technologies and markets and the consequent need for more adaptable organizations. Given the imperative of adaptability, it is not surprising that few words have received more
attention in recent conversations about management and leadership than “agile.”1 Organizations
ranging from large corporations like General Electric Co. to tiny startups are trying to be both flexible and fast in the ways that they react to new technology and changing market conditions.2
The word “agile” appears to have been first applied to thinking about software by 17 developers in
2001.3 Having experimented with more iterative, less process-laden approaches to developing new applications for several decades, the group
codified its experience in an agile manifesto. “We are uncovering better ways
of developing software by doing it and
helping others do it,” they wrote. In software development, agile now has a variety
of manifestations, including scrum, extreme programming, and feature-driven
development.4 The results have been significant. A variety of studies show that
agile software development methods can
generate a significant improvement over
their more traditional predecessors.5
But what does this mean outside of software? Can agile methods be successfully
applied to other types of work? Many proponents (a number of whom started in the
software industry) argue that the answer is
yes, and a growing collection of books, papers, and blog posts suggests how it might
be done.6 The evidence, however, remains
limited to date, and a recent article by two
THE LEADING
QUESTION
How can
companies
achieve both
agility and
efficiency in
their work?
FINDINGS
Make a distinction
between welldefined and
ambiguous tasks.
Break processes into
smaller units of
work that are more
frequently checked.
Identify points at
which collaboration
is needed.
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R E D E S I G N I N G W O R K : O P E R AT I O N S
ABOUT THE
RESEARCH
Our dynamic work design
framework originated more
than 20 years ago when
two of the authors worked
together to improve both
manufacturing and product
development at HarleyDavidson Inc. (At the time,
one of the authors [Don
Kieffer] was leading HarleyDavidson’s largest engine
development project, and
another [Nelson Repenning]
was doing research on
failures in new product
development.) Following
the principles of action
research, in the ensuing
decades we have regularly
iterated between trying to
help organizations improve
their work design and building a theory grounded in the
underlying social science
for why these interventions
did or did not work. Over
the years, we have done
dozens of projects in a variety of industries, including
oil and gas, software, and
genetic sequencing. We
have also supervised more
than 1,000 work design
projects done by executives
in our courses at MIT.
of agile’s founders cautions against applying agile
indiscriminately.7 The blogosphere is also replete
with discussions of an ongoing agile backlash.
To provide some practical advice to business leaders trying to understand what agile might mean for
their organizations, we take a different approach. Our
research suggests that in applying agile methods from
the software industry to other domains, managers
often confuse practices and principles. When agile
methods work, they do so because the associated practices manifest key behavioral principles in the context
of software development. But, successful as those practices can be when developing software, there is no
guarantee that they will work in other contexts. The
key to transferring a set of practices from one domain
to another is to first understand why they work and
then to modify them in ways that both match the
new context and preserve the underlying principles.
The goal of this article is to help you understand
several key work design principles that undergird not
only agile practices in software but also Toyota Motor
Corp.’s well-known production system in manufacturing. Once you understand these underlying work
design principles — through a framework we call dynamic work design — you can create work processes
in your own organization that are both more flexible
and more efficient. (See “About the Research.”)
Stability Vs. Uncertainty
Academics and managers alike long believed that organizations had to make trade-offs between flexibility
and efficiency. A central notion in the academic theory on organizational design is contingency, the idea
that organizations and their associated processes
need to be designed to match the nature of the work
they do. One of the most common variables in contingency theory is the degree of uncertainty in the
surrounding environment (often also conceptualized
as the need for innovation). When both the competitive environment and the associated work are stable
and well understood, contingency theory suggests
that organizations will do best with highly structured,
mechanistic designs. In contrast, when facing highly
uncertain situations that require ongoing adaptation,
the theory suggests that organizations will do better
with more flexible, organic designs.8
An early advocate of the mechanistic approach
to work design was Frederick Winslow Taylor,
author of the 1911 book The Principles of Scientific
Management.9 Taylor’s essential insight was simply
that if work is regularly repeated, it can also be
studied and improved. In stable, well-understood
environments, it is thus often best to organize work
in ways that leverage the efficiency that comes with
repetition. For example, in a modern factory, welldefined tasks are specified, and the work proceeds
serially, moving from one carefully constructed and
defined set of activities to the next. There is little
need for collaboration in these settings, and the organizational structure that surrounds stable and
repeatable work tends to be hierarchical to ensure
that everybody follows the prescribed work design.
The cost of such efficiency is adaptability. Due to
the high degree of routinization and formalization,
mechanistic process designs are difficult to change
in response to new requirements. Though efficient,
a mechanistic design is not agile.
When, however, the environment is unstable and
uncertain, discrete tasks are harder to define, and
therefore organizations cannot rely on a sequence of
clearly defined steps. For example, product development teams often face challenges for which there is
little precedent. Contingency theory holds that in
unpredictable environments like new product development, organizations rely more on things like
training and collaboration and less on routinization
and careful specification. Developing a breakthrough
product or service usually can’t be organized like a
factory assembly line. Marketing experts may develop
a set of initial requirements, which are then passed on
to designers and engineers, but the requirements
often evolve through multiple iterations as designers
and engineers determine what is technically feasible.
Consequently, effective development processes often
require ongoing real-time collaboration, rather than
rote adherence to a set of sequentially organized steps.
Though the contingency theory was first developed more than 50 years ago, its basic insights
reappear frequently in contemporary management
thinking. Many flavors of process-focused improvement, such as total quality management, Six Sigma,
and business process reengineering, are extensions
to Taylor’s fundamental insight that work that
is repeated can also be improved. Recently, the
increasingly popular design thinking approach can
be thought of as a charge to tackle ambiguous,
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uncertain tasks with a more collaborative, less hierarchical work design. 10 In general, contingency
theory gives managers a straightforward approach
to designing work: Assess the stability of the competitive environment and the resulting work, and
then pick the best mix of defined tasks and collaboration to fit the challenge at hand. (See “A Traditional
Approach to Work Design.”) If the work being designed consists of well-defined tasks (for example,
assembling components), then it is best to organize
it serially, or, as we label the cell on the bottom left,
using the “factory” mode. Conversely, if the work is
highly ambiguous and requires ongoing interaction
(for example, designing new products), then the
work is best organized collaboratively, or, as we label
the cell on the top right, in “studio” mode.
Though powerful, this approach to work design is
not entirely satisfying for two reasons. First, it describes an unpalatable trade-off: Work done using the
serial factory design isn’t very flexible, making it hard
to adapt to changes in external conditions, and work
done using the collaborative studio approach often
isn’t very efficient. Second, few types of work perfectly
fit the archetype of well-defined or ambiguous work.
Even the most routine work has the occasional
moment of surprise, and conversely, even the most
novel work, such as designing a new product or service, often requires executing routine analysis and
testing activities that support each creative iteration.
Academic theory notwithstanding, real work is a
constantly evolving mix of routine and uncertainty.
At first glance, agile methods appear to fall more
toward the collaborative side of the work spectrum.
However, our research suggests a different interpretation. The conventional approach to process and
organizational design is almost entirely static, implicitly presuming that once a piece of work has been
designed, everything will go as planned. In contrast,
a dynamic approach to work design suggests viewing
A TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO WORK DESIGN
In a traditional approach to work design, if the work being designed consists
of well-defined tasks (for example, assembling components), then it should be
organized serially, in what we call the “factory” mode. Conversely, if the work
is highly ambiguous and requires ongoing interaction (for example, designing
new products), then the work should be organized collaboratively, in what we
call the “studio” mode.
Organize
collaboratively
“Studio”
Organize
serially
“Factory”
Well-defined
work
Ambiguous
work
work as an ever-evolving response to the hiccups and
shortfalls that are inevitable in real organizations. As
we will describe later in this article, agile methods actually transcend the traditional serial vs. collaborative
work framework by creating better mechanisms for
moving between the two basic ways of organizing
work. By identifying mechanisms to cycle back and
forth between well-defined factory-style tasks and
collaborative studio modes when appropriate, an
agile approach can considerably reduce the trade-off
between efficiency and adaptability.
Dynamic Work Design at Toyota
What does this look like in practice? Consider a
well-known example of work and organizational
design, Toyota’s Andon cord. Work on Toyota assembly lines is the epitome of the serial, mechanistic
design. Tasks are precisely specified, often detailing
specific arm and hand movements and the time
A dynamic approach to work design suggests viewing work
as an ever-evolving response to the hiccups and shortfalls that
are inevitable in real organizations.
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R E D E S I G N I N G W O R K : O P E R AT I O N S
that each action should take. In a plant we visited
recently, training for a specific role began with the
trainee learning to pick up four bolts at a time —
not three and not five. Only when the trainee could
pick up four bolts regularly was she allowed to learn
the next motion. But, despite an attention to detail
that would have made Taylor proud, sometimes
things go awry. In the Toyota scheme, a worker noticing such an issue is supposed to pull what’s known
as the Andon cord (or push a button) to stop the
production line and fix the problem.
While the management literature has correctly
highlighted the importance of allowing employees
to stop the line,11 what happens after the cord is
pulled might be more important. During a recent
visit we took to a Toyota supplier in Toyota City,
Japan, we observed that one operator on the factory
floor was struggling to complete her task in the allotted time, and so she hit a yellow button, causing
an alarm to sound and a light to flash. (This factory
has replaced the Andon cord with a yellow button
at each operator’s station.) Within seconds, the
line’s supervisor arrived and assisted the operator
in resolving the issue that was preventing her from
following the prescribed process. In less than a
minute, the operator, now able to hit her target,
DYNAMIC WORK DESIGN AT A TOYOTA SUPPLIER
At a Toyota supplier, a worker on an assembly line can press a button if he or she
faces a problem. A manager then helps solve the problem through collaboration;
once the problem is solved, the worker returns to his or her task. Pushing the button
thus initiates a temporary shift in the work design — from serial to collaborative work
and then back again — that increases agility.
Agile as Dynamic Work Design
“Studio”
Problemsolving
Organize
collaboratively
“Factory”
Organize
serially
Push
button
Change
work
mode
Problem
solved
Problem
Well-defined
work
returned to her normal routine, and the supervisor
went back to other activities.
What, from a work design perspective, happened
in this short episode? Initially, the operator was working in the “factory” mode, executing well-defined
work to a clearly specified time target. (See the box
on the lower left in the exhibit “Dynamic Work
Design at a Toyota Supplier.”) But when something
in that careful design broke down, the operator
couldn’t complete her task in the allotted time.
Once the problem occurred, the operator had two
options for responding. She could have found an ad
hoc adjustment, a workaround or shortcut that
would allow her to keep working. But this choice
often leads to highly dysfunctional outcomes.12
Alternatively, as we observed, she could push the
button, stop the work, and ask for help. By summoning the supervisor to help, pushing the button
temporarily changed the work design. The system
briefly left the mechanistic, serial mode in favor of
a more organic, collaborative approach focused
on problem resolution. Once the problem was resolved, the operator returned to her normal task
and to the serial work design.
The Toyota production system might at first appear to be the ultimate in mechanistic design, but a
closer look suggests something far more dynamic.
When a worker pulls the Andon cord, the system actually moves between two modes based on the state
of the work. Though the nature of the work couldn’t
be more different, such movement between the two
modes is also the key to understanding the success of
agile software development.
Ambiguous
work
As we discussed earlier, the last two decades have witnessed a significant change in the conduct of software
development. Whereas software was once largely
developed using what is known as the waterfall
approach, agile methods have become increasingly
popular. From a dynamic work design perspective,
the waterfall and agile approaches differ significantly.
In the waterfall approach, the software development cycle is typically divided into a few major
phases. A project might include a requirements
phase, an architecture development phase, a detailed
coding phase, and a testing and installation phase. A
waterfall project typically cycles between three basic
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21
Checking in with more senior leadership only in the form
of periodic phase-gate reviews means that the entire team
could work for months before realizing they are not meeting
management’s expectations.
modes of work. First, the bulk of the time is spent by
software architects and engineers working individually or in small groups, completing whatever the
specific phase requires. Second, typically on a weekly
basis, those people leave their individual work to
come together for a project meeting, where they report on their progress, check to ensure mutual
compatibility, and adapt to any changes in direction
provided by leadership. Third, at the end of each
phase, there is a more significant review, often
known as a “phase-gate review,” in which senior
leaders do a detailed check to determine whether the
project is ready to exit that phase and move to the
next. Development cycles for other types of nonsoftware projects often work similarly.13
Agile development processes organize the work
differently. For example, in the scrum approach14
(one version of agile), the work is not divided into
a few major phases but rather into multiple short
“sprints” (often one to two weeks in length) focused on completing all of the work necessary to
deliver a small but working piece of software. At the
end of each sprint, the end user tests the new functionality to determine whether or not it meets the
specified need.
Like the waterfall method, the agile approach to
software development also has three basic work
modes — individual work, team meetings, and customer reviews — but it cycles among them very
differently. First, proponents of agile suggest meeting daily — thus moving from individual work to
teamwork and back every day — in the form of a
stand-up or scrum meeting, where team members
report on the day’s progress, their plans for the
next day, and perceived impediments to progress.
Second, agile recommends that at the end of each
sprint, the team lets the customer test the newly
added functionality. Finally, in something akin to
the Andon cord, some versions of agile also include
an immediate escalation to the entire team when a
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
piece of code does not pass the appropriate automated testing, effectively again moving the system
from individual work to the team collaboration mode.
Viewed from a dynamic work design perspective,
agile offers two potential benefits over waterfall. First,
in waterfall development, the frequency of collaborative episodes is usually too low, both among the team
members and between the team and its customers. A
developer working for a week or two without a checkin could waste considerable effort before it’s clear that
he or she has made a mistake or gone off course. In
practice, developers often do not wait this long and informally check in with supervisors or teammates.
While seemingly functional, these check-ins can lead
to a situation in which the entire team is not working
from a common base of information about the state
of the project. In such cases, the operating mode starts
to migrate from the box on the lower left, the “factory”
mode, to the one on the lower right, where ambiguous
work is organized serially. This results in costly and
slow iteration, which we call ineffective iteration. (See
“Dysfunctional Dynamics,” p. 35.) Research suggests
that in R&D processes, this mode can be highly inefficient.15 Similarly, checking in with more senior
leadership only in the form of periodic phase-gate
reviews means that the entire team could work
for months before realizing that it is not meeting
management’s expectations, thus also potentially
causing rework.
The agile approach to software development also
improves the quality of the time that developers spend
working alone. The focus on developing pieces of
functionality means that both the team and the customer are never more than a few weeks away from a
piece of software that can be used, making it far easier
to assess whether it meets the customer’s need. In contrast, in waterfall, the early phases are characterized by
long lists of requirements and features, but there is
nothing to try or test. It’s not surprising that waterfall
methods often lead to projects in which major defects
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R E D E S I G N I N G W O R K : O P E R AT I O N S
and other shortfalls are discovered very late in the development cycle and require costly rework.16
Applying Dynamic Work Design
Both the Toyota production system and agile-based
software methods are thus examples of what we call
good dynamic work design. In contrast to traditional
static approaches, dynamic work design recognizes
the inevitability of change and builds in mechanisms
to respond to that. Once managers recognize the
necessity of moving between more individual and
more collaborative modes of work, they can build on
four principles to create shifting mechanisms that are
well matched to the work of their organization.
1. Separate well-defined and ambiguous work.
Begin by clearly separating well-defined and ambiguous tasks. Trying to handle both types of work
in the same process often leads to trouble. (See
“Dysfunctional Dynamics.”) Often, the two types
can be separated by inspection, but if not, then look
for the signature element of ambiguous work, iteration. When work is well defined, it can be moved to
the next stage like the baton a relay runner hands off.
When done correctly, it doesn’t need to come back.
In contrast, when work is ambiguous, even the best
effort often needs to be revisited. If you find that a
particular task often requires multiple iterations
through the same set of steps, that’s a good sign that
you are confronting ambiguity inefficiently.
2. Break processes into smaller units of work that
are more frequently checked. If you strip away all the
hype, the agility of any work process — meaning its
ability to both adjust the work due to changing external conditions and resolve defects — boils down to
the frequency and effectiveness with which the output
is assessed. In both traditional, pre-Toyota manufacturing and waterfall software development, the
assessments are infrequent and not particularly effective. Consequently, both approaches tend to be slow to
adjust to changes in the external environment, and
quality will be achieved only through slow and costly
rework cycles. In contrast, when assessments are
frequent and effective, the process will be highly
adaptable and quality will improve rapidly. The fundamental recipe for improved process agility is this:
smaller units of work, more frequently checked.
3. Identify the chain of individuals who support
those doing the work. It is also important to identify
the help chain — the sequence of people who support
those doing the work. In manufacturing, the help
chain starts with a machine operator and extends
from foremen to supervisors all the way up to the
plant manager. In software, the help chain often begins with an engineer and moves through the team
leader to more senior managers, ultimately ending
with the customer. It is critical, in our experience, that
you identify the chains of individuals who do and
support the work, not their roles, departments, or
functions. Increasing agility requires knowing whom
to call when there is a problem or feedback is needed.
4. Introduce triggers and checks that move work
into a collaborative mode. Once you understand the
help chain, you have two basic mechanisms for activating it: triggers and checks. A trigger is a test that
reveals defects or misalignment and then moves the
work from a factory mode to a more collaborative
mode. In our opening example, the Toyota operator’s
inability to complete the assembly task on time triggered her pushing a button and then receiving help
from a supervisor. A check involves a prescheduled
point when the work is moved to a more collaborative
environment for assessment. In agile software development, this shift happens daily in stand-up meetings
where the team quickly assesses the current state of
the project. Completing a sprint creates a second opportunity, this time to check in with the customer.
Improving Procurement
Performance
Using this dynamic work design framework within
a company can lead to significant improvements in
both efficiency and adaptability. Consider the case
of a company we’ll call “RefineCo,” which owns
several oil refineries and distribution terminals in
the United States. The company had a procurement
organization that was uncompetitive by almost any
benchmark. RefineCo paid more for similar parts
and services than its competitors, and the procurement group’s overhead costs were higher than the
industry average. Even more troubling, when critical parts were not delivered to a refinery, it often
turned out that the location was on “credit hold”
due to an inability to pay the supplier in a timely
fashion. Every participant in the system, from senior management down to the shipping and
receiving clerks, was frustrated.
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DYSFUNCTIONAL DYNAMICS
What happens when organizations don’t do a good job of cycling between factory and studio modes of work? We have observed two
related failure modes, ineffective iteration and wasted attention. When they are combined, they create a truly unproductive work design —
one we have dubbed the axis of frustration. (See “The Axis of Frustration.”)
Ineffective Iteration Consider first what happens when elements
of the work in question are highly ambiguous but are nonetheless
organized serially (captured in the box in the lower right-hand corner). Relative to a more collaborative design, this approach tends to
create slow and costly iteration. The lack of speed comes
because the ambiguity must travel among participants to be resolved, thus requiring multiple rounds, each of which takes time.
Worse, when knowledge work is designed serially, many of these
interactions take place through email or text messaging. Research suggests both that such communication modes are
less effective for reducing ambiguity than face-to-face communication and that those sending such messages are
unaware of those limits.i Trying to resolve ambiguity via email
or text messaging tends to create more misunderstandings
and often necessitates multiple iterations.
Wasted Attention On the flip side, organizing well-defined
work in a collaborative fashion also creates inefficiency. If the
work is clearly defined, then it doesn’t benefit from a collaborative approach, and collaboration just multiplies the cost.
Worse, too much collaboration may prevent the efficiencies
that come with the learning curve that emerges when people
repeat the same task.ii
meetings. (As a manager we once interviewed said, “I knew
my project was in trouble when I was required to give hourly
updates.”) But the form of those reviews makes all the difference.
If they are well designed and focus on resolving the key problems
that are causing the iteration, then they can move the system
back to a more productive cycling between factory and studio
modes. Such interventions, however, are the exception rather
than the rule.
THE AXIS OF FRUSTRATION
Organize
collaboratively
The Axis of Frustration Whereas functional work processes
move between the factory and studio modes, our research
suggests that absent careful design attention, processes can
devolve to the point where they move between the failure
modes described above, oscillating between wasted attention
and ineffective iteration — the dynamic we call the axis of
frustration.
Getting stuck on the axis of frustration typically starts
with time pressure — a project is behind schedule or a more
repetitive process is not delivering on its targets. When people feel they are behind, they don’t want to take the time to
shift into collaborative studio mode for problem-solving, preferring to stay in the factory box on the lower left and “just get
the work done.” The consequence of this decision is to leave
one or more problems unresolved, whether it is an element of
a product design that doesn’t work or a defect in a manufactured
product. Eventually, these problems will be discovered, usually
by an activity downstream from the one that generated it. And, if
this problem is not then solved in collaborative studio mode (again
due to time pressure) but instead sent back for rework, then the
system has effectively moved from the box on the lower left to the
box on the lower right and is now in “ineffective iteration” mode.
The consequence of ineffective iteration is that the process
becomes increasingly inefficient and incapable of meeting its
targets. Senior leaders are, of course, unlikely to stand idly by
and will eventually intervene. Unfortunately, the typical intervention is often to scrutinize the offending process in more detail,
usually in the form of more frequent and more detailed review
Wasted attention
“Studio”
The axis of
frustration
Organize
serially
“Factory”
Ineffective iteration
Well-defined
work
Ambiguous
work
When organizations make the mistake of both structuring
well-defined work collaboratively and ambiguous work
serially, the result is a highly inefficient process we call
the axis of frustration. This process oscillates between
wasted attention and ineffective iteration.
Most work processes have not been designed with escalation
mechanisms in mind. So, when senior managers want to intervene
and scrutinize a project, they don’t know where to look and want to
review everything. The result of such scrutiny is long review meetings, the majority of which focus on elements of the process that are
just fine, thereby trapping the process in the upper left-hand box,
“wasted attention.” Worse, long review meetings and the preparation that they require steal time and resources from actual work, thus
intensifying the time pressure that prevented a proper shift between
work modes in the first place. Without careful attention to the mechanisms that move a process between the individual and collaborative
modes, processes can increasingly cycle between ineffective iteration and wasted attention, basically moving between frantically trying
to solve (or at least hide) the latest problem before the next review,
and endless, soul-destroying review meetings that never get to
solving the problems that would really make a difference.
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Long turnaround times created unhappy customers and
suppliers who constantly called to complain and ask about
their particular order or payment.
The procurement system at each of RefineCo’s
sites worked roughly as follows. To purchase an item
or service from an outside vendor, an employee
would enter the requirements into the electronic
procurement system, which would then appear as a
request to the central procurement function. The
staff in the procurement office would then review the
request and issue a purchase order. That order would
go to the supplier. When the product arrived at the
refinery or the service was completed, a packing slip
or service order verification slip would be generated,
which would also be entered into the procurement
system. Later, the supplier would generate an invoice
that was also entered into the system. The electronic
system would then perform a three-way match to
verify that everything was done correctly: The purchase order should match the verification receipt,
which, in turn, should match the invoice. If there was
not a three-way match, the invoice would be “kicked
out” of the system and the supplier would not get
paid until the discrepancy was resolved.
The job of resolving those discrepancies fell
to the staff in the refinery’s purchasing office.
Unfortunately, the products and services procured
frequently failed the three-way match, leading to
both an overburdened purchasing department and
frustrated suppliers. Though the refinery was part of
a large and successful company, it was frequently on
credit hold with its suppliers for failure to pay invoices on time, making it difficult for the staff to do
their jobs and run the plant safely. The dedicated
procurement staff worked 10-plus hours per day and
had hired temporary workers to help manage the
backlog, but they were still falling behind.
Most of the members of the procurement team
complained bitterly about being “overworked” and
how “screwed up the system was.” Nobody saw any
opportunity for improvement beyond adding what
appeared to be much-needed staff. For us, the critical
moment in our work with the procurement staff
came when one of the longtime team members
explained that a good purchase request contained “all
the information I need” and could be turned into an
official purchase order in “five to 10 minutes.” A difficult one, however, lacked key pieces of information
and might require one to two hours to process as the
purchasing staff traded emails with both the requesting unit and the supplier. Despite this effort, difficult
purchase orders were usually the ones that failed the
three-way matching process and got kicked out of the
system. Further investigation revealed that the purchase order system was completely gridlocked with
the kicked-out orders, and the team spent much of
its time trying to clear the backlog. The system had
descended into the classic “expediting” or “firefighting” trap: There were so many purchase orders in
process that the turnaround time for any given one
was very long. But long turnaround times created unhappy customers and suppliers who constantly called
to complain and ask about their particular order or
payment. Consequently, the procurement team was
constantly reprioritizing its work and reacting to
whichever customer or supplier was most unhappy.
Our first insight came in recognizing that the
procurement team was engaged in two different
types of work that corresponded to what we call serial “factory” work and collaborative “studio” work.
When the requested item was standard and all the
needed information was provided, a single person
could easily process the request without collaboration; then, once the purchase order was entered, it
would easily flow through the system, just like an
item on an assembly line. However, standard requests flowed easily through the system only if the
request came with the correct information. If it did
not, then it could require several rounds of iteration,
usually via email, to issue the purchase order. So the
purchasing function created a simple checklist that
described a good purchase request. The idea was
to ensure that standard orders would always arrive
with the correct information. To give the various departments an incentive to use the checklist, the
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purchasing function promised that any request received by 7 a.m. with the proper information would
result in a purchase order being issued by 2 p.m. that
day. At that time, a one-day turnaround was unheard
of because every order simply went into the “to do”
pile. The purchasing department also created a simple trigger to improve productivity: Purchase orders
that were missing items on the checklist would be
immediately returned to the requesting unit.
The second part of the intervention came in recognizing that not every request could be supported
in factory mode. In the existing system, neither the
requesters nor the purchasing staff distinguished between a standard request and a novel one. Thus,
when a request for a new product or service showed
up, the agent would do his or her best to process it,
typically requiring multiple emails with the requester, often over several days, to nail down all the
relevant information. In many cases, when the
agents couldn’t get the information they needed,
they would make their best guess and then submit an
incomplete or incorrect purchase order. This, too,
created additional iteration, as the supplier, unsure
of what was being requested, would call or email the
agent. The purchasing process was thus living in the
lower right-hand box of our matrix, attempting to
accomplish ambiguous work in a serial fashion and
thereby creating slow and expensive iteration.
Creating an effective collaborative studio mode
to handle the complex purchase orders required two
changes in work design. First, the team created a
clear trigger: If a request was nonstandard, then it
was moved into a separate pile and not dealt with
immediately. Second, each day at 2 p.m., the team
would work together to process the more complex
cases. By working collaboratively (in studio mode),
they were able to resolve many of the more complex
cases without additional intervention — somebody
on the team might have seen a similar order before.
Also, having a face-to-face meeting was far more
efficient than the endless chain of email that it replaced. And, if additional information was needed,
the team could schedule a phone call in the time
window after 2 p.m., rather than send an email,
again reducing the number of expensive iterations.
The results of these two changes were significant.
Creating a factory mode for the standard orders
allowed the team to make good on its “in by 7, out by
2” promise almost immediately, generating an immense amount of goodwill with the requesters.
Spending the afternoon in studio mode also sped the
processing of the complex orders. The two changes
created enough space that the team was able to use studio time to not only process the more complex requests
but also work through the backlog of unresolved older
orders. In the end, due to the efficiency improvements,
the procurement team reduced its staff by the equivalent of two full-time staff members, while providing
far faster and more reliable service. These process
improvement insights were then applied to the
company’s other U.S. sites and, as of this writing,
RefineCo pays more than 90% of its invoices on time,
resulting in a far happier collection of suppliers.
Look for Best Principles
Managers and consultants are often obsessed with
the search for best practices — those activities that
appear to separate leading organizations from the
rest of the pack. The idea behind this search is that
once identified, best practices can be adopted by
other organizations, which will then experience similar gains in performance. While there is certainly
some truth to this idea, the supporting evidence is
decidedly mixed. Organizations frequently struggle
to implement new tools and practices and rarely
experience similar gains in performance. In many
industries, the performance gap between the top and
middle performers remains stubbornly difficult to
close. A key reason for these failures is simply that
organizations are complex configurations of people
Organizations are complex configurations of people and technology, and a set of tools or practices that works well in one
context might not be equally effective in a major competitor —
even if that competitor is located just down the street.
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R E D E S I G N I N G W O R K : O P E R AT I O N S
and technology, and a set of tools or practices that
works well in one context might not be equally effective for a major competitor — even if that competitor
is located just down the street.
Best practices are “best” when they manifest an underlying behavior principle in a way that is well
matched to the organization that uses them. Toyota’s
famed Andon cord and the localized problem-solving
it catalyzes work by capitalizing on the efficiency
that comes from individual repetition and the
innovation that comes with collaborative problemsolving. Conversely, agile development methods
work by channeling the creativity of software engineers through frequent team meetings and customer
interactions. More generally, organizations become
more adaptable when they find defects and
misalignments sooner. A dynamic approach to contingency, supported by triggers and checks, can open
the path to creating practices that support increased
agility in the work of your organization.
Nelson P. Repenning is the School of Management
Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and
Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of
Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he
currently serves as the associate dean for leadership
and special projects and the faculty director of MIT’s
Leadership Center. Don Kieffer is a senior lecturer in
operations management at the MIT Sloan School and
a founder of ShiftGear Work Design, a consulting firm
based in Cambridge. James Repenning is the managing partner at ShiftGear Work Design. Comment on
this article at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/59234.
REFERENCES
1. A quick trip to the web reveals multiple manifestations,
including “agile principles,” “enterprise agile,” “agile organizations,” and a variety of suggestions, including the
charge to “apply agile development to every aspect of
business.” See, for example, S.D. Goldstein, “Apply Agile
Development to Every Aspect of Business,” Mint, Dec. 4,
2016, http://www.livemint.com.
2. D. Leonard and R. Clough, “How GE Exorcised the
Ghost of Jack Welch to Become a 124-Year-Old Startup,”
Bloomberg, March 17, 2016, www.bloomberg.com.
3. See their manifesto here: http://agilemanifesto.org.
4. For a summary, see F.S. Glaiel, A. Moulton, and S.E.
Madnick, “Agile Project Dynamics: A System Dynamics
Investigation of Agile Software Development Methods,”
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering
Systems Division working paper, Oct. 2014, available at
http://dspace.mit.edu.
5. See C.J. Stettina and J. Hörz, “Agile Portfolio Management: An Empirical Perspective on the Practice in Use,”
International Journal of Project Management 33, no. 1
(January 2015): 140-152; J. Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland,
“Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time”
(New York: Crown Business, 2014); and D. West and
T. Grant, “Agile Development: Mainstream Adoption
Has Changed Agility,” Forrester, Jan. 20, 2010,
www.forrester.com.
6. See, for example, M.E. Moreira, “Being Agile: Your
Roadmap to Successful Adoption of Agile” (New York:
Apress, 2013).
7. D.K. Rigby, J. Sutherland, and H. Takeuchi, “Embracing
Agile,” Harvard Business Review 94, no. 5 (May 2016):
40-50.
8. The classic descriptions of contingency theory can be
found in T. Burns and G.M. Stalker, “The Management of
Innovation,” rev. ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University
Press, 1994) and in P.R. Lawrence and J.W. Lorsch,
“Organization and Environment: Managing Differentiation
and Integration,” rev. ed. (Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 1986). An updated summary can be found
in several textbooks, including R.M. Burton, B. Eriksen,
D.D. Håkonsson, and C.C. Snow “Organization Design:
The Evolving State-of-the-Art” (New York: Springer
Science+Business Media, 2006).
9. F.W. Taylor, “The Principles of Scientific Management”
(New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1911).
10. T. Brown, “Change by Design: How Design Thinking
Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation” (New
York: HarperBusiness, 2009).
11. J. Liker, M. Hoseus, and the Center for Quality People
and Organizations, “Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of
the Toyota Way” (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2008).
12. See, for example, N.R. Repenning and J.D. Sterman,
“Capability Traps and Self-Confirming Attribution Errors in
the Dynamics of Process Improvement,” Administrative
Science Quarterly 47, no. 2 (June 2002): 265-295; and
N. Leveson, “A Systems Approach to Risk Management
Through Leading Safety Indicators,” Reliability Engineering and System Safety 136 (April 2015): 17-34.
13. K.T. Ulrich and S.D. Eppinger, “Product Design
and Development,” 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill
Education, 2016).
14. Sutherland and Sutherland, “Scrum”; and Scrum
Guides, www.scrumguides.org.
15. L.A. Perlow, “The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology
of Work Time,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44,
no. 1 (March 1999): 57-81.
16. See Sutherland and Sutherland, “Scrum”;
and J. Kamensky, “Digging Out of the Digital Stone
Age, ” Government Executive, March 9, 2017,
www.govexec.com.
i. N. Epley and J. Kruger, “When What You Type Isn’t
What They Read: The Perseverance of Stereotypes and
Expectancies Over E-Mail,” Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology 41, no. 4 (July 2005): 414-422.
ii. L. Argote and D. Epple, “Learning Curves in Manufacturing,” Science 247, no. 4945 (Feb. 23, 1990): 920-924.
Reprint 59234.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018.
All rights reserved.
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : L E A D E R S H I P
MICHAEL GLENWOOD GIBBS/THEISPOT.COM
Improving the Rhythm
of Your Collaboration
Alternating between always-on connectivity and heads-down focus is
essential for problem-solving.
BY ETHAN BERNSTEIN, JESSE SHORE, AND DAVID LAZER
C
ount-offs at the beginning of musical performances, whether verbal (“One,
two…”) or symbolic (with a baton or a snap), are a fixture of live collaboration
for musicians. Conductors use them to establish tempo and feel, and to provide
guidance on how to interpret the written rhythms — the patterns of sound and
silence — that the ensemble is about to play.
Similarly, in the workplace, leaders help set the beat for their organizations’
and teams’ collaborative efforts. For at least a century, they have done this largely
by planning working-group meetings, huddles, one-on-ones, milestone reports,
steering committee readouts, end-of-shift handoffs, and so on. Through 30-, 60-,
and 90-minute calendar meetings scheduled weeks in advance to prevent
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : L E A D E R S H I P
THE
RESEARCH
In one experiment, the
authors randomly assigned
51 groups of 16 people into
four different network
structures and asked
them to solve a complex
whodunit task, all using
collaborative technology
but with varying levels
of connectivity.
In a second experiment,
they randomly assigned
514 sets of three subjects
to one of three levels of
collaborative interaction
(none, intermittent, or
constant) and asked the
group to solve the classic
traveling salesperson
problem, which is a
complex optimization task.
They also reviewed the
literature on information
sharing in social networks,
collective intelligence,
brainstorming, and group
and team problem-solving.
conflicts and at odd times to accommodate global
team members, they have established the patterns
of active interaction (“sound”) and individual
work (“silence”) that form the rhythms of their
employees’ collaboration.
But such rhythms have gotten much more complex and less controlled in recent years. Organizations
now have a treasure chest of digital tools for collaboration — Slack, Teams/Skype, Chatter, Yammer, Jive,
Zoom, Webex, Klaxoon — that they didn’t have
before. (The global collaboration software market
was $8 billion in 2018 and is projected to double to
$16 billion by 2025.1) Add to that email, texting, and
messaging, along with the meetings that haven’t gone
away, and the math is telling: Research shows that
executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours per
week in meetings (up from less than 10 hours
50 years ago),2 while McKinsey estimates the average
knowledge worker spends 65% of the workday
collaborating and communicating with others (including 28% of the day on email).3 So collaboration
has gone omnichannel. You can see why orchestrating all of this has become such a challenge.
Indeed, given how hyperconnected most people
are now at work, one might question whether they
even have a rhythm of collaboration, not because
they lack sufficient interaction (sound) but because
they lack any absence of it (silence). That observation prompted us, as researchers, to ask: Should
organizations have a rhythm of collaboration that
alternates on and off, or is more simply better, as
people tend to assume?
Our findings suggest that alternation is essential
for work that involves problem-solving. As collaborative tools make interaction cheaper and more
abundant, opportunities to think without interaction are becoming more expensive and scarce, yet
they remain critical. In fact, our research shows that
when people trade a rhythm of on-and-off collaboration for always-on connectivity, they coordinate
and gather information more effectively, but they
produce less innovative, less productive solutions.
That’s troubling, given current trends in the
workplace. By achieving more and more connectivity, humans are becoming a bit like passive nodes in a
machine network: They are getting better at processing information but worse at making decisions from
it. In other words, we’ve designed organizational
communication to make it harder, not easier, for
human beings to do what we’re being told we need to
do in the next decade or two — that is, differentiate
our capabilities from the growing capacities of big
data, automation, and AI.
It takes more leadership — not less, as the trend
toward flatter organizations and teams might lead
us to believe — to create an effective rhythm that
alternates between rich interaction and quiet focus.
Here, we explore what that means in practice for
managers and draw on examples from organizations we’ve studied to illustrate how you can avoid
common problems and establish an optimal collaborative rhythm for your team.
Connectivity: What We Gain,
What We Lose
When we solve problems collaboratively — whether
we’re making strategic decisions, fixing operational
glitches, or generating ideas — we engage in two categories of actions: (1) gathering the facts we need to
generate and develop various potential solutions,
and (2) figuring out the best solutions.
Academics are not strangers to the study of problem-solving. There is a large body of research about
it, with contexts including recreational venues like
adventure racing4 and escape rooms,5 simulated
laboratory experiments, and real-world field research
in the workplace. But most of the research has focused on individual rather than collective problemsolving.6 Even among studies of collaboration, few
have looked into how much we want to have.7
So we headed to the laboratory to explore that
question. In our first study,8 we randomly assigned
individuals to 51 16-person organizations — some
more connected by technology than others — and
asked each organization to solve a complex problem:
Divine the who, what, where, and when of an impending terrorist attack (akin to the famous Clue whodunit
game but with higher hypothetical stakes). Each organization used a platform not unlike the collaborative
tools used in workplaces today: Through their computers, individuals could search for information, share
it with one another, and contribute theories about
solutions while the platform tracked all behavior.
We found that connectivity had different
effects on the fact-finding and figuring stages of problem-solving. For finding facts, more connectivity
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was better, without limitation. But figuring out
what to do with those facts — actually creating the
solutions — was undermined by too much connectedness. The same connections that helped
individuals collaborate in their search for information also encouraged them to reach consensus on
less-than-perfect solutions, making connectivity a
true double-edged sword.
Fact-finding and figuring are, we believe, representative of broader classes of activities. If we were to
describe this trade-off more generically, it is the
question of whether the task primarily requires
coordination or imagination. If there are acute coordination needs (for instance, avoiding redundant
effort by ensuring we don’t all look under the same
pillow for the keys), then always-on connectivity is
helpful. If imagination is more critical, then always-on
connectivity can make it nearly impossible to manage
the creativity of multiple minds, which requires a balance between allowing those minds to learn from one
another and enhancing the capacity of each one to
generate fresh ideas. Too little communication, and
there’s no learning and no synergy. Too much communication, and all the minds end up in the same
place, focusing on the same types of solutions.
Breaking the Trade-Off
Does that have to be the case? Do organizations and
teams need to choose between being great at factfinding and being great at figuring?
To further investigate, we returned to the laboratory, this time with the goal of directly asking
whether deliberately choosing a rhythm of collaboration (that isn’t always on) could help.9 We asked a
number of three-person groups to solve what’s
called the traveling salesperson problem. Each
person was given a map with the locations of
25 fictional cities that they needed to visit. Their
task was to find the shortest trip to visit each city
once and then return home to their starting point.
For decades, academics have been using the
traveling salesperson problem to study complex
problem-solving, in part because the set of all possible
solutions forms what is called a rugged solution landscape: If you were to visualize all options as paths up a
mountain (where the altitude reached is the measure
of success), getting from a good solution to a better one
might require you to hike back down the mountain
and climb a very different path. So myopic decision
makers (as we all inevitably are) risk getting stuck at a
low peak because they didn’t see the higher peak before
they started climbing. This happens in the traveling
salesperson problem because the choice of which city
to visit next is constrained by the other choices made in
one’s route. To find a better solution, one must often go
back and reconfigure those decisions.
In our version of the traveling salesperson
problem, people attempted to solve it under one of
three conditions. The members of one set of groups
never interacted with one another, solving the
problem in complete isolation; members of
another set constantly interacted, as we do when
equipped with always-on technologies; and members of the third set interacted intermittently.
Consistent with our previous study and other
research,10 we anticipated — and found — that the
groups with no interaction were the most creative,
coming up with the largest number of unique solutions, including some of the best and some of the
worst in terms of total distance traveled to visit
each city and return back home again. In short,
when isolated, they produced a few fantastic solutions but, overall, a low average quality of solution
due to so much variation.
We also anticipated — and found — that the
groups with constant interaction were the most consistent, producing a higher average quality of
solution but finding the very best ones much less
frequently. In other words, when always on, they
produced less variable but more mediocre solutions.
Too little communication, and there’s no learning
and no synergy. Too much communication, and all
the minds end up in the same place, focusing on the
same types of solutions.
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Groups that interacted intermittently — with a
true rhythm of collaboration — broke the tradeoff, capturing the best of both worlds rather than
succumbing to the worst of either one. They preserved enough isolation to find the best solutions at
least as frequently as the groups with no interaction, but also enough collaboration to maintain an
equivalently high average quality of solution compared with the groups with constant interaction.
Learning was a key factor: During periods of separation, people naturally struck out on their own and
tried new and diverse approaches to the problem —
but when they came together again, they could learn
from these different solutions. Even if the new solutions people found on their own weren’t effective
overall, they often included a useful idea or two that
could be learned from and recombined with other
solutions. In this sense, intermittent interaction created the conditions for collective intelligence, rather
than relying on a few leading individuals to come up
with the strongest ideas.
Even people with the best solution at any given
point in the experiment did better in an intermittent environment. They were exposed to new ideas
from their peers that they could use to improve
their already good solutions. And of course, people
with worse solutions could adopt the best solution
in the group as a new jumping-off point for their
next period of solo solving.
By contrast, people who interacted constantly
had many opportunities to learn but fewer ideas to
learn from, given how closely they hewed to group
consensus. Those who never interacted generated
more (and more diverse) ideas, but their isolation
prevented learning from occurring.
There are two key lessons for managers in those
results. First, when it comes to solving complex problems, collaboration yields diminishing returns —
beyond a certain point, the average quality of solutions
does not improve from more interaction. Second,
too much collaboration has its costs — you drive out
the diversity of thought that is helpful for creating
the best solutions.11
Finding the Right Rhythm at Work
Clearly there’s value in having a rhythm of collaboration rather than always-on interaction. But how do
you choose one and then put it into practice? What’s
the equivalent of a musician’s count-off by the leader
of an organization or team? Here are a few approaches
that seem promising in light of our research.
The light switch approach: Turn it off — in
cycles. As with so many things, collaboration technology has simultaneously solved one problem (too
little interaction) and created another (too much).
Our research and that of others12 suggests that it’s
important to find opportunities to unplug not just
off-hours but also during work. Many of us eagerly
anticipate the time we get to spend in the quiet car of
the train, on an airplane with no Wi-Fi, or in a cabin
that is just a bit too remote to be on the grid. Leaders
can provide that kind of time in the workplace, too.
While people are getting used to putting smartphones in a box on their way into a meeting (to focus
on one form of collaboration versus another), more
and more organizations are also creating coordinated
unplugged times for heads-down work.
Flicking the collaboration light switch is something that leaders are uniquely positioned to do,
because several obstacles stand in the way of people
voluntarily working alone. For one thing, the fear
of being left out of the loop can keep them glued to
their enterprise social media. Individuals don’t
want to be — or appear to be — isolated. For another, knowing what their teammates are doing
provides a sense of comfort and security, because
people can adjust their own behavior to be in sync
with the group. It’s risky to go off on their own to
try something new that will probably not be successful right from the start. But even though it feels
The fear of being left out of the loop can keep people
glued to their enterprise social media. They don’t want
to be — or appear to be — isolated.
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31
reassuring for individuals to be hyperconnected,
it’s better for the organization if they periodically
go off and think for themselves and generate
diverse — if not quite mature — ideas. Thus, it becomes the leader’s job to create conditions that are
good for the whole by enforcing intermittent interaction even when people wouldn’t choose it for
themselves, without making it seem like a punishment (such as a time-out from childhood).
In some companies, unplugging is enabled by
physical spaces and norms that prohibit collaboration. Meditation rooms and meditation coaches, for
example, are on the rise — not just at Apple, where
Steve Jobs introduced the 30-minute daily meditation
break, but also at companies as varied as Google, Nike,
Pearson, and Nationwide. At Amazon, instead of
jumping right into a collaborative review of bullet
points on PowerPoint slides, meetings may start with
people sitting silently while reading a memo, discussing the topic only after everyone is done reading.
But it’s not enough to provide space and permission for quiet focus. Role modeling by leaders is key.
In an age in which it is transparent to others when
you are plugged in (messaging systems indicate
whether you are online, how recently you were, and
whether you’ve read a received message), leaders send
clear signals with their own behavior. At the most recent Wharton People Analytics Conference, former
CEO of Deloitte U.S. Cathy Engelbert said she realized how closely people watch leaders for cues when
an employee leaving the company (someone she
didn’t even know) said that she “didn’t want to be like
Cathy Engelbert,” working and available to interact
with colleagues “at all hours.” The employee had
inferred this — correctly or incorrectly — from repeatedly seeing that Engelbert’s instant messaging
status was online at night. Unless leaders themselves
visibly unplug, meditation rooms and their ilk may
become the latest equivalent of the dot-com foosball
table, getting used by people who are the most likely
to be laid off during the next downturn.
Other companies are placing stricter limits on the
time colleagues can spend interacting. At the Italian
headquarters of one of the world’s top fashion
houses, the office goes dark at 5:30 p.m., forcing an
end to the workday. In part, the CEO tells us, that is
out of respect to the families who await his employees’ arrival home. But it also signals an end to
collaboration and a start to individual time, something cherished at a company that depends so heavily
on creativity. While 5:30 p.m. may be an unrealistic
cutoff in many settings, leaders can apply the same
basic idea in more targeted ways, for a shorter period
of time or even staggered across individuals or teams,
as was the case with Boston Consulting Group’s
Predictable Time Off initiative.13
The underlying principle here is not new. One of
the most seminal academic studies of work time in
the 1990s showed how a software engineering team
could reduce their feelings of having a “time famine”
and improve productivity by instituting a policy of
mandated quiet time, when interruptions were prohibited.14 Today, that simply means having work
time when all our collaboration tools are turned off,
taking us back to the days when we naturally had an
ebb and flow of collaboration — individual work
time punctuated by scheduled meetings and calls.
Agile approaches to teamwork incorporate
some of this intermittent cycling, given that they
are organized into short sprints during which
groups of people focus on solving a particular
problem. Harvard Business School professor Andy
Wu and his coauthor Sourobh Ghosh have termed
this iterative coordination.15 The challenge is that, as
one executive at a large financial institution told us,
“our sprints have gotten so compressed together
that there is no downtime in between them.” Plus,
just because a team is sprinting doesn’t mean others in the organization won’t interrupt individual
members of the team with collaboration needs that
have nothing to do with the sprint.
Hackathons also involve intense collaboration
for relatively short, predetermined periods of time.
Because they are often organization-wide events —
or at least everyone in the organization tends to
know about them — they are somewhat more immune to interruption by colleagues, especially when
they are sponsored by senior leaders (which provides
implicit permission for out-of-office auto replies).
But hackathons offer space and time for collaborative innovation — not for quiet, individual work.
Leaders must find other ways of bringing that into
employees’ day-to-day rhythm by literally or figuratively flicking off the lights at regular intervals.
Executives have been counseled to be collaborative leaders and to set the example at the top that
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C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : L E A D E R S H I P
they want to see in the rest of the organization.16
They have taken this message seriously, transparently devoting more and more of their days to
in-person and online collaboration. By role modeling such ubiquitous use of collaboration technology,
business leaders have helped define an era of alwayson collaboration. It is now time to role model a more
sustainable, productive rhythm of collaboration.
Even some of the tools’ creators are advocating
this approach: Ryan Singer, one of the first four
employees at Basecamp, a maker of project management software, has written a book (collaboratively
online) based on 16+ years of watching companies
struggle with project-based collaboration. In it,
he writes that “there can be an odd kind of radio
silence” during the first phase of effective project
work, “because each person has their head down”
getting oriented, finding the best approach, and
engaging in exploration — doing what he calls
legitimate work. He claims that it is “important for
managers to respect this phase [because] asking for
visible progress will only push it underground.”17
The Fitbit approach: Track it to hack it. It will
not come as news to anyone that workplace collaboration tools do not just enable collaboration, they
also track it. The result of all the time we spend collaborating online, and increasingly in person, is a
stream of digital exhaust that defines what’s recently
been termed relationship analytics. 18 (See also
“Collaborate Smarter, Not Harder,” in this issue.)
This goes beyond weekly reports on how much
screen time we’ve had, instead capturing each individual’s precise rhythms of collaboration with
others in the organization. For example, Microsoft
now offers two tools that use email, calendar, contacts, and other Office 365 data to provide insights
about collaboration: MyAnalytics (for individuals)
reports on how responsive you are to collaborators’
emails (on average and with specific individuals),
reminds you to book focus time “before meetings
take over,” highlights the “impact of your afterhours emails” on others, and so on; and Workplace
Analytics (for an organization) uses the same data,
anonymized, to shed light on overall collaboration
trends. Ambit, a spin-off of the team at the Stanford
Research Institute that developed Siri’s voice algorithms, captures your voice profile and then, during
times of active collaboration, can track in real time
how well you and your collaborators take turns
(total number of turns, average turn length, longest
turn length) and how each of your voices will be
perceived by others (a so-called tonal analysis that
shows when each collaborator sounds fearful, angry,
joyous, sad, analytical, confident, or tentative).
In the not-so-distant future, we expect that similar tools will draw on large data sets and machine
learning algorithms to seek to directly solve the
challenges we highlighted above. Your device will
remind you to make your collaboration more intermittent when your solutions seem to lack sufficient
diversity and encourage you to come back together
and learn from one another when enough diversity
has been generated. Artificial intelligence may help
us improve our collective intelligence by coaching
us on how to regulate our collaboration.
Although that lies in the future, the promise of
these tracking tools is already evident. Just as our
Fitbit encourages more physical activity by making
our current activity levels visible, these tools affect
our collaboration behaviors by making those visible.
The design approach: Create enlightened collaboration tools. Both solutions above rely on us to
change our own behavior, and that’s hard. If it were
easy to regulate our rhythms of interaction, we
wouldn’t be sleeping with our smartphones.19 But
the same tools that permit us to become addicted to
interaction can, if designed well, also help us make
it intermittent rather than constant.
Some of this has already happened naturally.
Consider Slack, a tool that was initially designed
on the premise that all communications would be
visible to the entire organization, encouraging
immediate responses and constant connectivity.
Under tremendous pressure from its user base,
Slack soon changed its stance and created private
channels, which now account for a majority of the
collaboration in most work spaces. It also created a
status function that allows you to signal when you
are offline for one of any number of reasons.
Indeed, while we are not aware of any social enterprise software programs that initially offered a
feature allowing users to indicate whether they are
available or not, nearly all of them have such a feature now. These changes allow for more “off ” time
and give tacit permission for more intermittent
involvement.
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The world has asked technology companies to create tools
that enable collaboration as much as possible — and
that’s what they’ve done. How to enable intermittent
collaboration is a different problem to solve.
The next generation of these programs is trying
to go a step further by improving the rhythms of
collaboration in live meetings rather than replacing
them. Matthieu Beucher, founder and CEO of
Klaxoon, intentionally developed Klaxoon with
this goal in mind, because meetings themselves can
be sources of intermittent interaction. Here’s how it
works: Meeting participants connect to Klaxoon
with their own devices (cellphones, iPads, laptops)
even if they are colocated. They then select an activity (brainstorm, poll, questions, decisions, and so
on) that supports the group’s immediate task or
objective. Depending on the activity they select, the
tool sets a particular rhythm of collaboration. In
some cases, information and ideas are visualized
for all to see immediately; in others, data is stored
so that the group can make decisions after a period
of reflection or, at the very least, after everyone in
the meeting has contributed their views. Beucher
likens each meeting to a new song and says Klaxoon
is designed “to provide different tools to improve
collaboration for different parts of the song.” As
Klaxoon has evolved, it has given users more room
for intermittent interaction. For example, it now
allows people to turn off the user-identification
and time-stamp features so that they can collaborate on their own terms and avoid judgment, by
peers or bosses, about when or how much they are
or are not collaborating.
The promise of the design approach to balancing separation and connectedness — of using
technology to create constraints that permit,
nudge, or enforce intermittent interaction — is to
make creative and productive skunk works types of
teams routine rather than rare self-organized phenomena. For this approach to come into its own,
however, we need to know more than we do today.
In general, the world has asked technology companies to create tools that enable collaboration as
much as possible — and that’s what they’ve done.
How to enable intermittent collaboration is a different problem to solve. The best ideas for doing so
are most likely yet to come — perhaps after technology companies learn more about how the
customers who buy and use their products create
their own work-arounds to add intermittency to
these tools.
SOCIOLOGIST GEORG SIMMEL once wrote,
“Usually, we only perceive as bound that which we
have first isolated in some way. If things are to be
joined they must first be separated. … Directly as
well as symbolically, bodily as well as spiritually, we
are continually separating our bonds and binding
our separations.” Intermittent collaboration may
be not only productive but also inherently human.
And yet, to achieve it, we must overcome our
equally human impulses to stay connected in a
world increasingly marked by omnichannel collaboration. 20 Leaders can play a significant role in
providing the policies, data, and tools to establish a
productive rhythm of communication.
It’s also a collective challenge. To return to our
music analogy, leaders essentially do the conducting — but every team member affects how the
collaborative rhythm is played. So culture becomes
a critical reinforcing factor. Unless individuals feel
safe to intermittently disconnect and see that
behavior modeled and rewarded by the leaders
around them, they’re more likely to stay too connected, no matter what their managers say they
expect and what kinds of tools and opportunities
they provide.
Ethan Bernstein (@ethanbernstein) is the Edward
W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he
studies the impact of increasingly transparent
workplaces on employee behavior and performance. Jesse Shore (@jessecshore) is assistant
professor of information systems at Boston University’s
Questrom School of Business; he studies social
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34
C O L L A B O R AT I N G W I T H I M P A C T : L E A D E R S H I P
networks and collective intelligence. David Lazer
(@davidlazer) is University Distinguished Professor of
Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and visiting scholar at the Institute for
Quantitative Social Science at Harvard; his research
focuses on computational social science, collective
intelligence, and misinformation. Comment on this
article at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/61102.
REFERENCES
1. Grand View Research, Team Collaboration Software
Market Analysis Report, 2018, www.grandviewresearch
.com.
2. L.A. Perlow, C.N. Hadley, and E. Eun, “Stop the
Meeting Madness,” Harvard Business Review 95,
no. 4 (July-August 2017): 62-69.
3. M. Chui, J. Manyika, J. Bughin, et al., The Social
Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through
Social Technologies (New York: McKinsey Global
Institute, 2012), 46.
4. K. Sutcliffe and M. Barton, “Contextualized Engagement as Resilience-in-Action: A Study in Adventure
Racing” (paper presented at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, July 2018). Also
see P. Ercolano, “‘Resilience-in-Action’ Is Key to Team
Success, Whether in Backwoods or Business,” Johns
Hopkins University, Aug. 8, 2017, https://hub.jhu.edu.
5. F. Englmaier, S. Grimm, D. Schindler, et al., “The Effect
of Incentives in Non-Routine Analytical Team Tasks —
Evidence From a Field Experiment,” working paper
no. 6903, CESifo, Munich, Germany, Feb. 21, 2018.
the Wisdom of Crowd Effect,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 22 (2011): 90209025; and P.B. Paulus, V.L. Putman, K.L. Dugosh, et al.,
“Social and Cognitive Influences in Group Brainstorming:
Predicting Production Gains and Losses,” European
Review of Social Psychology 12, no. 1 (2002): 299-325.
11. K.J. Boudreau, N. Lacetera, and K.R. Lakhani, “Incentives and Problem Uncertainty in Innovation Contests:
An Empirical Analysis,” Management Science 57, no. 5
(2011): 843-863; and L. Hong and S.E. Page, “Groups
of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of
High-Ability Problem Solvers,” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 46 (2004):
16385-16389.
12. For instance, R. Cross and P. Gray, “Where Has the
Time Gone? Addressing Collaboration Overload in a Networked Economy,” California Management Review 56,
no. 1 (2013): 50-66; R. Cross, R. Rebele, and A. Grant,
“Collaborative Overload,” Harvard Business Review 94,
no. 1 (January-February 2016): 74-79; and R. Cross,
S. Taylor, and D. Zehner, “Collaboration Without Burnout,” Harvard Business Review 96, no. 4 (July-August
2018): 134-137. For a different manifestation of the same
issue, see T.L. Stanko and C.M. Beckman, “Watching You
Watching Me: Boundary Control and Capturing Attention
in the Context of Ubiquitous Technology Use,” Academy
of Management Journal 58, no. 3 (2014): 712-738.
13. At BCG, each consultant was required to have one
scheduled night off per week, and productivity improved.
See L.A. Perlow and J.L. Porter, “Making Time Off
Predictable — and Required,” Harvard Business Review
87, no. 10 (October 2009): 102-109.
6. It’s somewhat surprising that more research hasn’t
been done on the social element of problem-solving,
given that scholars are increasingly discrediting the notion
of the solo genius. See, for instance, K. Clark, “Myth of
the Genius Solitary Scientist Is Dangerous,” Nov. 20,
2017, https://theconversation.com.
14. L.A. Perlow, “The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology
of Work Time,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44,
no. 1 (1999): 57-81.
7. B. Uzzi, “Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm
Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1997): 35-67; R.S. Burt,
“Structural Holes and Good Ideas,” American Journal
of Sociology 110, no. 2 (2004): 349-399; R. Cross and
J.N. Cummings, “Tie and Network Correlates of Individual
Performance in Knowledge-Intensive Work,” Academy
of Management Journal 47, no. 6 (2004): 928-937; and
D. Lazer and A. Friedman, “The Network Structure of
Exploration and Exploitation,” Administrative Science
Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2007): 667-694.
16. H. Ibarra and M. Hansen, “Are You a Collaborative
Leader?” Harvard Business Review 89, nos. 7-8
(July-August 2011): 68-74.
8. J. Shore, E. Bernstein, and D. Lazer, “Facts and Figuring:
An Experimental Investigation of Network Structure
and Performance in Information and Solution Spaces,”
Organization Science 26, no. 5 (2015): 1432-1446.
19. L.A. Perlow, Sleeping With Your Smartphone: How
to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work
(Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).
15. S. Ghosh and A. Wu, “Iterative Coordination in Organizational Search,” working paper, Harvard Business
School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 2019.
17. R. Singer, “Hand Over Responsibility,” chap. 9 in
Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That
Matters, accessed July 15, 2019, https://basecamp.com/
shapeup.
18. P. Leonardi and N. Contractor, “Better People
Analytics,” Harvard Business Review 96, no. 6
(November-December 2018): 70-81.
9. E. Bernstein, J. Shore, and D. Lazer, “How Intermittent
Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115,
no. 35 (2018): 8734-8739.
20. See, for instance, C. Newport, Deep Work: Rules
for Focused Success in a Distracted World (London:
Hachette, 2016); and N. Carr, The Shallows: What the
Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 2010).
10. W. Mason and D.J. Watts, “Collaborative Learning
in Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 109, no. 3 (2012): 764-769; J. Lorenz, H. Rauhut,
F. Schweitzer, et al., “How Social Influence Can Undermine
Reprint 61102.
Copyright © Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019.
All rights reserved.
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35
How To Lead a
Self-Managing Team
Teams that are basically
left to run themselves can
be highly efficient and
productive. To be successful,
though, such autonomous
groups require a specific
type of external leadership.
By Vanessa Urch Druskat and
Jane V. Wheeler
T
o get work done, many companies organize employees into self-managing teams
that are basically left to run themselves with some guidance from an external
leader. In fact, comprehensive surveys report that 79% of companies in the Fortune
1,000 and 81% of manufacturing organizations currently deploy such “empowered,”
“self-directed” or “autonomous” teams.1 Because of their widespread use, much
research has been devoted to understanding how best to set up self-managing teams to
maximize their productivity and effectiveness. Interestingly, though, relatively little
attention has been paid to the leaders who must oversee such working groups.
At first, it seems contradictory: Why should a self-managing team require any leadership? After all, doesn’t the group manage itself? In actuality, though, self-managing
teams require a specific kind of leadership. Even a team that is autonomous in terms
of its activities and decision making must still continually receive direction from
higher levels in the organization. And it also must report to that hierarchy through a
person who is ultimately held accountable for the group’s performance. Many managers today are expected to fulfill the role of external leader,
but most receive conflicting signals regarding how to go
about it.2 Should they, for instance, be involved in their
team’s decision-making process? If so, how should they participate without detracting from the group’s autonomy?
To investigate such issues, we conducted a study of 300
self-managing teams at a large manufacturing plant of a Fortune 500 corporation. (See “About the Research.”) We investigated both average- and superior-performing external leaders
at that site to determine the behaviors that separated one
group from the other. Our research has shown that, contrary
to common perception, the best external leaders were not
necessarily the ones who had adopted a hands-off approach,
nor were they simply focused on encouraging team members
in various ways.3 Instead, the external leaders who had contributed most to their team’s success excelled at one skill:
managing the boundary between the team and the larger
organization. That process required specific behaviors that
Vanessa Urch Druskat is a professor of organizational behavior at
the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University
of New Hampshire. Jane V. Wheeler is professor of management at
Bowling Green State University’s College of Business Administration.
They can be reached at vanessa.druskat@unh.edu and jvwheel@
cba.bgsu.edu.
SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
36
can be grouped into four basic functions: relating, scouting,
persuading and empowering. (See “The Work of the External
Leader,” p. 69.) External leaders who excelled at those capabilities
were able to drive their teams to superior performance.
Managing in No-Man’s Land
As recently as the 1960s, self-managing teams were practically
unheard of. Indeed, an early experiment by General Foods Corp.
to deploy self-managing teams on its Gaines dog-food production line more than 30 years ago was something of a sensation.
Even, the company’s own senior management expected the project to fail.4 Since then, self-managing teams have become an
increasingly popular way for companies to get work done. Even
so, the role of the people in charge of those groups has remained
somewhat of a mystery.
To be sure, leading a team that needs to manage itself is inherently tricky. The role is highly ambiguous by nature (and, on the
face of it, oxymoronic). In general, self-managing teams tend to
have well-defined job functions and are responsible for monitoring and managing their own performance. Instead of managers
telling them what to do, these teams gather and synthesize information, make important decisions, and take collective responsibility for meeting their goals. What’s left for the external leader to
do? As one of the external leaders in our study remarked, “Maybe
we’re not needed, you know?”
But the reality is that the buck stops at the external leaders.
Specifically, companies hold them responsible for their team’s
performance. If the quality or productivity of a team is substandard, its external leader is taken to task. As another team leader in
our study noted, “The hardest part is that I’m also held accountable. If they make the wrong decision, it still comes back on me.”
In essence, the job of external leader exists squarely in the middle
of a managerial no-man’s land.
Back in 1977, a field study published about that early experiment at General Foods revealed external leaders caught in the
middle: Their teams criticized them for being too controlling,
while their own managers complained that they were being too
lax.5 Not long after, another research study looked at teams in
other organizational settings and found that those three constituencies — team members, external leaders and their upper-
About the Research
We conducted a study of external leaders at a Fortune 500 durable-consumergoods manufacturing plant in the
Midwest. The facility employs more than
3,000 people and is the world’s largest
manufacturer of its particular product.
We chose this site because it offered a
rich research sample: The plant had transitioned to self-managing work teams
almost five years prior to our data collection, and there were 300 such teams
reporting up through 66 external leaders. This large pool of external leaders in
one location provided a wide range of
individuals in that role and allowed us to
control for organizational context.
Our method was to select samples of
high-performing and average external
leaders and to discover through interviews how their behaviors, strategies and
attitudes differed. We used three criteria
for selecting our key participants: nominations from team members, nominations from managers and objective
performance data for the leaders’ teams.
We then conducted intensive three-hour
interviews with each of the 19 individu-
als selected, regarding critical incidents
they recalled. The interviews were conducted blind to the “superior” or “average” status of the leaders. A content
analysis of those interviews allowed us to
develop an exhaustive list of actions and
behaviors that were noted consistently
by superior leaders but not by average
ones. Initially, our exhaustive list contained approximately 30 behaviors that
we hypothesized made a difference
between the “superior” and “average”
performers. Iterative readings of the
interview transcripts helped us to winnow down that list to the 11 distinct
behaviors reported in this article. Two
expert coders, who were blind to the
“superior” and average” status of the
leaders, coded all transcripts for the
presence of the 11 behaviors and determined the reliability of the codes. The
mean reliability was 92%. Statistical
analyses also revealed that 10 of the
behaviors were demonstrated significantly more often by the superior-performing leaders. (The exception was
“diagnosing member behavior,” which
was demonstrated often by both average
and superior performers.)
To help interpret the findings and
to develop our model of how these 11
behaviors emerge as the process of
effective external leadership, we also
spoke with a total of 90 team members:
52 in focus groups and 38 in one-on-one
interviews. We supplemented that information with interviews of the 10 managers to whom the external leaders
reported, and we also collected information via questionnaires from the broader
group of senior managers and directors
at the plant.
Furthermore, we later examined the
applicability of our findings by interviewing external leaders at other organizations and in different industries,
including those for product-development
groups in a design organization and
executive-level teams at a bank, a healthcare organization and a manufacturing
company. This subsequent work suggests
that our results have broader applicability for any leader of an empowered team,
regardless of the group’s level or task.
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37
External leaders find themselves caught in the middle: Their teams criticize them for
being too controlling, while their own managers complain they are being too lax.
level managers — all had different ideas about the role.6
Unfortunately, that lack of consensus generally remains
today. Prior to and since our study, we have found confusion
about the external-leader role in other companies and at all
organizational levels. Consider the senior executive of a large
Midwestern bank who desperately wanted to empower his team
of high-level bank executives but was unsure how to go about
that. When he attended meetings, he felt team members relied
too heavily on his opinion, but when he stopped going to meetings, he felt stuck in an information black hole. Even with his
many years of experience, he really did not know how to manage that group.
The problem is that a self-managing team requires leadership
of a very different sort. Researchers agree that the external-leader
role is more complex than the traditional manager role.7 This is
true partly because the typical external leader is in charge of several self-managing teams at any one time. (In our study, they
were responsible for as many as eight.)
More importantly, the external leader absolutely must avoid
any heavy-handed attempts at managing. Case studies have
shown that external leaders who struggle with their role usually
end up exerting too much control, which then undermines the
self-managing team’s ability to get work done.8 Because of that
and other issues, various researchers have labeled external leaders as the most common impediment to the success of selfmanaging teams.9
Confusion about the role of the external leader might be tolerable if that function weren’t so crucial, but a variety of studies
have shown that the success of a self-managing team greatly
depends on its external leader.10 A newly created group, for
example, often needs both effective coaching and a champion
who can represent its decisions to other executives in the organization. Teams also depend on external leaders for help in acquiring resources. That’s why it’s common to see an underperforming
team successfully turn itself around with only the change of its
external leader — or to see a once-great team suffer after its
external leader departs.
Four Functions, 11 Behaviors
Although the essence of a self-managing team is autonomy, the
quality of its link to the organization is pivotal to success. Some
external leaders perform that role much better than others, with
the superior ones tending to excel at relating, scouting, persuading and empowering. Each function requires specific behaviors,
of which there are a total of 11. In the exhibit “The Work of the
External Leader,” the relating activities are shown at the beginning of the process because, without the formation of those relationships, external leaders will find scouting difficult. Scouting,
in turn, equips external leaders with the information they need
to persuade. And various aspects of scouting and persuading
help pave the way for greater empowerment of a team, which
then contributes to the group’s ultimate effectiveness.
The well-known key to making self-managing teams work
is to delegate considerable authority to the group, granting it
tremendous flexibility in making its own decisions.11 What is
less well-known are the kinds of leadership activities and behaviors that are needed to build the foundation for team empowerment. Relating, scouting and persuading are those critical
building blocks.
Relating External leaders must continually move back and forth
between the team and the broader organization to build relationships. Success in this area requires three behaviors: being
socially and politically aware, building team trust and caring for
team members.
Being socially and politically aware. During our research study,
we heard stories of both team triumphs and irritations. In one
case, an external leader recounted the time he allowed one of his
teams a freedom that was inconsistent with the company’s informal policies. Later, he was taken aback by the backlash he experienced from his peers in the organization. Recalls the leader, “This
person sends a note to my manager, to his manager and to my
colleagues … saying, ‘Since when did this policy change?’” The
leader was also vehemently attacked by another team leader for
his “ineffective supervision.”
What happened? Clearly, the incident suggests a lack of
political awareness: The leader simply didn’t anticipate the
impact of his decision on others. Nor did he perceive the need
to build a broader consensus. Incidentally, in our study the performance of that leader had been categorized as average. By
contrast, the superior external leaders had consistently demonstrated an understanding of the broader organization, including
the individual concerns and decision-making criteria of impor-
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38
Average leaders tend to see team members’ personal problems as impediments,
whereas superior leaders view them as opportunities to build relationships.
tant constituencies, such as the engineering and human
resources groups. As one superior leader bluntly put it, “I’ve got
a good rapport with all those groups, and most things I ask for
get done. … You can get moved to the top of the list for things
in a hurry if you’re not [upsetting] people.”
Building team trust. Superior external leaders also consistently
recognized the value of building good relationships with their
teams, even to the point of achieving insider status. Given that
the leaders had little time to spend with any one team, such
acceptance was far from automatic. In fact, one leader in our
study was impeached by her team members, who did not trust
that she had their best interests in mind. Contrast that with the
experience of another leader who, when his team complained of
problems with new equipment, said, “Whatever it costs, if you
guys aren’t happy with it, we’ll get another system in here …
because you’re the ones who are gonna have to work with it.” The
team was incredulous. One member pointed out that the new
system had cost $23,000 to install.
Caring for team members. In our study, average leaders were
more likely to see the personal problems of the team members as
impediments to getting work done, whereas superior leaders
more often recognized them as opportunities to build relationships. One superior leader described an incident in which one of
his employees had a problem with her disability leave. The leader
took it upon himself to call the insurance department in the
health center to clear the dispute, which had been an ongoing
source of worry for the worker. “It was … instant relief for that
person,” recalls the leader. “It was not a big problem, but it was
big to her.”
Scouting To scout effectively, external leaders must demonstrate
three behaviors: seeking information from managers, peers and
specialists; diagnosing member behavior; and investigating problems systematically.
Seeking information from managers, peers and specialists.
Superior leaders appeared to be significantly more likely to seek
information from others in the organization, whether as advice
or simply in response to technical questions from the team.
Sometimes the leaders used that information to influence team
decision making, especially when they wanted to persuade people to take into account broader organizational considerations.
For example, when a team wanted to hire a colleague who had
filled in for absent members in the past, the group’s external
leader wisely decided to step in. The leader wanted his team
members to be able to make their own choice, but he also sensed
that their lack of knowledge and respect for a new hiring policy
at the company could create problems with management. “I
could tell this was going to be a sticky situation,” he recalls,
because the new policy was more formal and favored candidates
with greater seniority. So the leader talked to HR as well as other
external leaders as to how they filled their jobs. He then
informed his boss about the situation and invited him to the
team’s next meeting. At the meeting, the team members were
able to persuade the external leader’s boss to delay implementing the new policy so that they could hire the person they
wanted. By seeking and relaying all the pertinent information,
the leader was able to enable his team to make its own decision
(without disrupting the organization), which helped boost the
team’s morale.
Not surprisingly, external leaders who routinely sought
information from the broader organization were able to advocate more effectively for their teams. They were able to help
their teams gain valuable political awareness and build social
capital for them — all of which would often pay off in less obvious, but no less important, ways. The team members themselves
realized the importance of having an external leader who could
get information faster than they could, had access to data they
didn’t have and could easily make contact with upper management. On the other hand, when team members felt that an
external leader was not keeping them adequately informed, they
tended to develop an “us against them” attitude. As one such
member put it, “[They] don’t want to give up information; it’s
their power.”
Diagnosing member behavior. Because external leaders are
typically responsible for the performance of several teams, they
are rarely on the scene when something critical occurs within a
specific group. As a result, they must often gain insight after the
fact. To do so, they frequently need to add to their incomplete
information by analyzing and making sense of verbal and nonverbal cues from team members. One leader described an
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39
The Work of the External Leader
External leaders must perform 11 behaviors that can be grouped into four categories: relating, scouting, persuading and empowering. The behaviors are distinct but mutually reinforcing, and they require the external leader to continually cross the border between
the team and the broader organization. In this model of external leadership, social and political awareness of the broader organization provides access to the individuals and groups that can help the leader best meet the team’s needs; strong relationships allow
the leader access to information in the team and the organization, which aids the leader in making sense of the needs of both parties; good information enables the leader to encourage or persuade the team to behave in ways that facilitate the organization’s
effectiveness; and the sense of control afforded by that influence allows the leader to empower the team more fully, resulting in
greater team effectiveness.
OrganizationFocused
Behavior
Relating
Scouting
Persuading
1 Being
socially and
politically
aware
4 Seeking information from
managers,
peers and
specialists
7 Obtaining
external
support
Empowering
Team
Effectiveness
Organization/Team Boundary
TeamFocused
Behavior
2 Building
team trust
3 Caring for
team
members
5 Diagnosing
member
behavior
6 Investigating
problems
systematically
episode when his team had done months of benchmarking
research to suggest a policy change to the directors of the organization. But the directors quickly shot down the proposal and
instead told the team members that their time might be better
spent improving their quality and productivity. When the
leader heard the news he had mixed emotions. He was upset
because he knew how much time his team had spent on the proposal, yet he also knew he had to support the directors’ decision
because, after all, he was part of management. So he went to the
team members and started to give them a pep talk but quickly
stopped himself. “I could tell they thought I was full of youknow-what. You could see it in their eyes,” he recalls. So, he
instead offered people a sympathetic ear and acknowledged
their well-intentioned efforts.
Interestingly, both the superior and the average leaders in
our study talked about the need to read their team members
accurately. In fact, it was the leadership capability they most
commonly identified as important.
Investigating problems systematically. When superior leaders
got wind of a potential problem, they were significantly more
likely to deploy an inquisitive and systematic approach to investigate the matter. They would begin by asking the team members
myriad questions to collect data and identify the issues, after
which they might visit an external constituent to collect additional information. “You’ve got to be down on the floor,” one
8 Influencing
the team
9 Delegating
authority
10 Exercising
flexibility
regarding
team
decisions
11 Coaching
superior leader asserted. “When the line is down, I’m over there
within a minute.” By collecting firsthand information from the
team members, superior leaders were able to fully understand
their group’s perspective, enabling them to make informed recommendations that would be acceptable to their teams as well as
to external constituents. In contrast, average leaders were more
likely to attempt problem solving with less data or input from the
team members.
Persuading With respect to external leadership, effective persuasion requires two behaviors: obtaining external support and
influencing the team.
Obtaining external support. Teams often need support from
the broader organization, and superior leaders are able to perform this advocacy role more effectively. One such leader
remembered a time when his team members were having
equipment problems. After talking with them, he used their
ideas to sketch a new piece of machinery and came in during
other shifts to gain additional input from other teams. He was
then able to obtain management’s authorization to build the
new piece of equipment. In our study, team members agreed
that leaders were most helpful when they were able to get the
attention of important external constituents. Average leaders
seemed to seek such external support less frequently, and when
they did they were less successful in obtaining it. One average
SPECIAL COLLECTION • HOW WINNING TEAMS WORK • MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW
40
Superior leaders develop strong relationships inside the team and across the
organization; average leaders tend to relate well to one of those parties but not to both.
leader remembered an incident when he pleaded with the
scheduling department to make a change for one of his teams.
But because he had not built relationships with that department
and had not expended the effort to obtain the information necessary to support his case, his request was denied.
Influencing the team. Effective external leaders were also adept
at swaying their teams to decisions that best met the needs of
the organization. Keep in mind that prior to doing so, these
superior leaders had already established trust with their teams,
had systematically investigated the problem at hand and had
used their external contacts to obtain all necessary information.
One superior leader, for example, collected statistics from the
accounting department to persuade his struggling team to think
of ways to improve its productivity. Using that data, the leader
impressed upon his team how much the company lost in profits every minute a manufacturing line was down. “This is the
money that we didn’t make,” the leader told the team. “If somebody is cutting the line off just to eat a sandwich, it is costing
everybody.” Three months later, the group’s performance had
improved markedly, and whenever the team was about to fall
behind schedule, people would work a little longer to stay on
track. Interestingly, those team members were going the extra
distance without their leader having to ask (let alone demand)
that they do so.
Empowering External leaders of self-managing teams can
empower those teams by demonstrating three behaviors: delegating authority, exercising flexibility regarding team decisions
and coaching.
Delegating authority. External leaders typically have great discretion over the amount and type of authority that they delegate. In general, the superior leaders tended to empower their
teams with more responsibility. For example, when one team
was told by management that it had to move its assembly line,
its leader left it up to the team to work out the details. “They
very much had ownership,” remembers the leader. “They knew
what we needed to do and took it from there. This needed to be
their baby.” However, average leaders tended to be more fearful
about delegating authority, and they would often make decisions for the team and solve its problems covertly. It is impor-
tant to note that the average leaders’ reluctance to delegate
authority was not because they were leading the poorer-performing teams. In fact, many of the superior leaders in our
study had been transferred to a problem team and had worked
with it until they felt comfortable delegating authority. Eventually, as the team gained more and more ownership, its performance improved.
Exercising flexibility regarding team decisions. Sometimes a
team proposes something that is outlandish or that appears to
reflect poorly on its leader. In such situations, average leaders
were likely to express their reservations, whereas superior leaders
frequently replied with comments such as, “It’s not what I think;
it’s what you think.” One of the teams in our study, for example,
wanted to present its quarterly performance results at the department meeting by performing a skit. At first, the team’s leader was
a little hesitant because nothing like that had been done before
and the meeting would be attended by all of the managers in the
organization. “I thought, ‘Oh, we could look so foolish on this,’ ”
she recalls. But she gave the team her approval and, as it turned
out, the skit went over well, which boosted the team’s sense of
cohesion and identity. Of course, teams don’t always make good
decisions, and a major responsibility of external leaders is to prevent serious mistakes. But even when a team has to be reined in,
superior leaders did so only after considering the proposal as
open-mindedly as possible.
Coaching. Coaching involves a number of activities, including
working one-on-one with employees, giving feedback to the
team and demonstrating certain behaviors (such as effective
meeting facilitation) for others to model. Past research has
found that superior leaders tend to be active in educating and
coaching others,12 and our study confirmed that. In particular,
superior leaders focused on strengthening a team’s confidence,
its ability to manage itself and its contributions from individual
members. A common coaching behavior was for leaders to
work with people who had just taken on roles of greater responsibility. For example, after a meeting in which people argued
for 20 minutes about coffee, one superior leader helped the
team member in charge to run more efficient meetings, first by
developing an agenda and then by keeping the group focused
on that agenda.
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41
Self-Management in the Long Run
For external leaders to relate, scout, persuade and empower,
they must frequently — but quietly — cross the boundary
between the team and the broader organization. The idea that a
leader must manage this boundary is certainly not new; past
research has linked it to the effectiveness of traditionally managed teams,13 and several studies of empowered teams have
proposed that it is the central focus of the external leader’s
role.14 Our own research supports those findings. Specifically,
the superior leaders in our study were able to develop strong
relationships both inside the team and across the organization.
In contrast, average performers tended to relate well to the team
or to those in the broader organization, but not to both.
The four functions — relating, scouting, persuading and
empowering — are important for the leader of any group but
particularly so for those in charge of self-managing teams.
(After all, if a team has not been empowered, how can it manage itself?) And the same process would be useful for leaders of
geographically dispersed teams, given their similar challenge of
having to rely on imperfect information to influence behavior
from a remote location.
An important thing to remember about team autonomy is
that self-management is not an either-or condition. Instead, it’s
a continuum, and external leaders should also be constantly
guiding and developing their teams so that they become
increasingly independent. In fact, the ultimate goal of the external leader should be the delegation of all 11 of the behaviors
described. For example, external leaders should be developing
their teams’ relationships with relevant individuals and other
groups in the broader organization, eventually relinquishing
that primary activity to the teams themselves. And when teams
do become less dependent on their external leaders, the leaders
will theoretically be freer to assume the responsibility for an
even larger number of groups.
The teams in our study had made the transition to self-management five years before our research commenced. At that
time, the superior participants were already performing the 11
essential behaviors of external leadership. We would not be surprised to learn today that those individuals have since moved
their teams further along the continuum of increased autonomy
and independence. In fact, we would be greatly surprised if that
were not the case.
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Reprint 45410. For ordering information, see page 1.
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