On sustainable team performance

In the last post, we looked at several aspects of team dynamics like coordination, conflict management etc. In this post, we will look at creating sustainable team performance.

Evaluating team performance

	Low subjective performance	High subjective performance
High objective performance	20.3%	32.6%
Low objective performance	27.2%	19.9%

• High objective + low subjective is dangerous; sustaining performance is going to be hard. 
• The team is somehow unhappy working together; they probably do not want to work together. 
• Next offer comes, they might not stay.
• Low objective + high subjective: Needs a reality check
• Low objective + low subjective: Team is struggling, needs help, and they know it 
• How do we evaluate team performance?
• Did the team achieve objective goals?
• Are teammates satisfied with the interactions in team?
• Effective teams contribute to personal satisfaction, and overall well being 
• Is the team learning?
• Teammates are challenged, and get development opportunities, improve their knowledge and skill sets.

Creativity

• The same number of individuals are better than a team at generating ideas: both in quantity and quality (research here and here). 
• Why do teams perform worse?
• Production blocking: If you take turns, you need to wait to speak, might get distracted, lose train of thought. 
• Evaluation apprehension: Not discuss ideas because you are afraid of being judged (even if no evaluation actually happens)
• Anchoring: Subconsciously influenced by teammates' ideas, and incremental thinking to a few ideas that were already proposed. "Yes and" might reduce evaluation, but also reduces diversity of ideas. 
• Social loafing: Don't work as hard in groups. Also, there is a feeling of high performance in teams (Dunning-Kruger effect). 
• Strategy to do better
• Nominal group technique
• Each teammate writes his/her ideas independently (reduces social proof, anchoring, production blocking) 
• Each teammate presents their ideas (reduces social loafing, because of the recognition), and writes them on a board
• Open discussion on the ideas. Only clarifications, no evaluation (reduces evaluation apprehension) 
• Secret vote to rank-order ideas (reduces social proof) 
• There is an illusion of high performance in teams during brainstorming. One reason is the lack of a benchmark performance. 
• One technique is to brainstorm for 10 minutes, and ask that the output be doubled in the next 10 minutes (research here). 

Psychological safety

• A shared belief that the team is safe (without negative consequences for status, careers, self-image) for interpersonal risk taking (research here). 
• More likely to raise errors
• More likely to ask questions 
• Strategies for promoting psychological safety
• Team leader behaviors set a standard for what's acceptable
• Being accessible and approachable
• Explicitly inviting feedback and input from others
• Modeling openness and fallibility; accepting responsibility instills the same in teammates. 
• Trusting relationships 
• Invest in relationships within the team, so people feel comfortable opening up in team settings. Connect with people outside of work, to be able to draw them out. 
• Practice fields
• Simulated environments/prototypes, where the cost of failure is low
• Communicates the importance of learning, it's ok to not succeed on the first try
• Organizational support 
• Access to resources and information: promotes more sharing, and lower insecurity in sharing

Transactive memory

• The institutional memory of the team, combined with the info of who knows what. 
• Benefits 
• Better search and acquisition of info (you know who to talk to for a given topic)
• Reduction of coordination effort (you instinctively know the division of labor)
• Lower common information effect (because you believe there are experts in team)
• Perform better on tasks involving memory and info retrieval
• Strategies to improve transactive memory
• Teams are better at recalling better, with fewer errors, and are seen as having more coordination (research here). This is, in part, due to transactive memory built up as a team. 
• Teams tend to build transactive memory naturally (research here). Better than individuals randomly put together, or new teams formed from preexisting teams.  
• Training with your work team helps a lot. A note for training classes, which pool employees from different teams (not going to be very effective). 
• Training on the particular task at hand; simulated experiences help, especially for execution-focused tasks like surgery, flight etc. 
• Continuity of teams helps (because of institutional memory and the loss that occurs when people leave teams). 

Team learning

• Learning is critical to maintaining high performance over time (all the earlier notes on the importance of reflection etc. support this).
• Strategies to promote learning 
• Emphasize the strategic importance of learning (make them part of SMART goals)
• Continuity in team membership 
• Important for transactive memory, psychological safety
• Post-action debriefs 
• Reflection enhances learning, even in low performing teams (research here)
• Sharing workload with all teammates 
• Con: Increases coordination costs; so make an appropriate trade-off