More and more challenging work gets done in a team setting, yet the context in which teamwork takes place is becoming more challenging by the day.
Collaboration is the cornerstone 0f team success. In today’s complex business environment, despite the newer hurdles and tougher battles, effectiveness of teams still hinge on a core set of fundamental norms and values of group collaboration. And this is true in spite of the changing face and composition of today’s teams – more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic.
J. Richard Hackman, who has put in more than 40 years of research and is a pioneer in the field of organizational behavior, presented a path-breaking insight: what matters most to collaboration is not the personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles of team members, but certain “enabling conditions”. Three of Hackman’s conditions – a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context – are especially critical to team success in today’s business world. What emerges as the fourth condition is a shared mindset, as modern teams are additionally vulnerable to the twin banes of inadequate information and “us versus them” mentality. Let’s explore the enabling conditions that foster 4D teams – diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic – in increasing their efficiency and effectiveness to deliver superior results.
Compelling direction: Every great team has a sense of direction that engages, energizes, and orients its members. Teams that aren’t aware of what they are working towards or aren’t driven by explicit goals are far from inspired. Goals must be challenging yet not unrealistic so as to make members dispirited. People must be genuinely driven to achieving the goals for both tangible extrinsic rewards, like pay and recognition, and intangible ones like a deep sense of fulfillment. Direction is especially crucial for 4D teams so as to prevent far-flung members of diverse backgrounds from holding varying views of the group’s purpose.
Strong structure: High performing teams boast of members that have the right balance of technical skills with the social graces. The right mix of members with diversity in knowledge, age, gender, experience, views and perspectives, optimally designed and divided tasks ensure high performance and positive dynamics. Large teams also benefit when they comprise cosmopolitan and local members, blending global exposure with regional insight. With larger 4D teams, assignments are required to be designed with an eye to members getting an understanding of where and how they fit into the larger picture. The following example would explain this. 24X7 developments are common in the IT world with companies using time zone differences to their advantage. Software firms of USA send chunks of code to their counterparts in India, that need working overnight. ‘One such team spoken to in Bangalore, India mentioned that it found such division of labor demotivating, as it left them with a poor sense of how the pieces of code fit together and with little control over what they did and how. Moreover, feedback to the developers came when what they sent back didn’t fit.’ Motivation and engagement was found to increase tremendously along with quality and quantity, when the work was repartitioned to give them ownership over an entire module.
Supportive context: Supportive frameworks that meet learning and development needs, enable access to information and technological assistance/material resources, and reinforce extraordinary performance with reward systems, promote team effectiveness. For teams that are geographically distributed and digitally dependent, ensuring a uniform supportive context may be difficult because resource availability differ, yet leaders can head off many a problem by getting the essential pieces in place from the start. And they must also be wary of destructive dynamics like withholding valuable information, casting blames, avoiding responsibilities that totally ruin collaborative efforts.
Shared Mindset: While the first three enabling conditions are empowering by themselves, today’s teams need an additional component, shared mindset, with factors like distance, diversity, digital communication, and changing team composition coming into play. Sharing knowledge and expertise are central to effective team functioning, yet with dispersed and changing teams prone to “us and them” outlook, this is often a far cry. Digital dependence has its flip side too. ‘In in-person meetings, for instance, we can sense the individual and collective moods of the people in the room – information that we use (consciously or not) to tailor subsequent interactions. Having to rely on digital communication erodes the transmission of this crucial type of intelligence.’ When organizations consciously foster a shared identity and shared understanding, barriers to cooperation and information exchange can be broken down.
To assess how a team is doing, the following three criteria of team effectiveness can be considered:
Output: Whether customers are happy with the output (quality, quantity, and delivery) Collaborative Ability: If the team dynamics genuinely promotes members working and growing together
Individual Development: If, alongside work, individual team members are found to be improving their knowledge, skills, and abilities
Subsequently, there must be evaluation vis-à-vis the above “enabling conditions”.Though teamwork has never been easy, gaining success with “global, virtual, and project- driven” teams has become far more complex today. Adopting a systematic approach to forming, nurturing, and periodically analyzing how teams are poised to succeed and plugging the gaps suitably can make all the difference!
