How to make the team greater than the sum of its parts
Read Time: 2 mins
Teamwork can be tricky. It requires individuals to understand what others in the team do, know where they fit in and have interpersonal skills to navigate areas of difference.
Working with colleagues with the same professional background takes some negotiating but working in a multidisciplinary team, with diversity of thinking, can be even more complex. As Professor De Dreu and Weingart found in their 2002 study, when you throw people of different professional backgrounds together conflict can increase.
Multidisciplinary teams are rapidly becoming the norm. IT developers, security, operations, business and marketing people, who have been happily working in teams of their like-minded peers, are being relocated into agile teams made up of a mix of skillsets.
When conflict increases it can significantly impact individual and team performance. Conflict within a team is demotivating and can lead to missed deadlines, poor quality work and budget overruns.
Here’s a recent example from a team I worked with. The team was made up of data analysts, developers, product owners, marketers and IT operations people. All highly capable individuals. Their task was to build a customer facing cloud-based IT solution. But they spent a lot of time in heated discussion arguing over what the solution should look like rather than agreeing a way forward. In the end the project was significantly delayed, further increasing tension between team members.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If that team had a better understanding of the different ways each member worked and were able to use those differences in the development of the solution rather than resisting against them, the outcome might have looked very different.
Ensuring that, as diverse teams are brought together, they are well prepared to have robust conversations, without triggering conflict, can reduce the risks of working in a professionally diverse team.
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni notes that teams that communicate, trust and value each other are more efficient and effective. Google’s Project Aristotle has amply demonstrated exactly this theory in real life. The name is a nod to the well-known quote from Aristotle: ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. They looked at the elements of an effective team and found that it mattered more how the team worked together than who was in the team. Psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact were the factors that were correlated with team success.
A lot of my work is helping executives, managers and team members develop a common identity and understanding to accelerate team performance. It’s a small shift in thinking that can have a big impact on teams and outcomes, and I see the benefits every day.
Trish Kensell
