By Stephen Lynch, chief operating officer of Global Operations at RESULTS.com
Interesting research conducted by MIT measured the key factors that are common to great teams – those which function effectively and achieve business execution success.
Interestingly, the notion that you need to recruit the smartest people you can find, and assemble them into a team, matters much less than you think.
Here is our take on the research:
Great teams communicate frequently
The more frequently a team communicates, the more successful the team is likely to be. A lower frequency of communication leads to a decline in performance. This has implications for office layout and design, as well as your meeting cadence. For virtual teams, there needs to be a way for team members to quickly and easily share information with their colleagues – business execution software makes this easy.
Great teams talk and listen
Lower performing teams have dominant members who do most of the talking (but who are not so good at listening). Open two-way communication is important for superior performance. Less dominant, introverted team members need to be encouraged to have their say and feel like they were listened to in order to build a high trust, high performing team.
Great teams have frequent informal communication too
The best teams spend a lot of time discussing ideas outside of formal meetings. Therefore it is important to create as many opportunities as you can for these “water cooler” chats. The more frequently this informal communication occurs, the better the team performs.
Great teams seek outside information.
The tendency for “group think” (where everyone thinks the same) is a trap to be guarded against. The best teams frequently connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team for debate.
In summary, it seems that more communication is better (daily meetings), we need to ask everyone’s opinion (and learn to listen better), create more opportunities for informal discussions (when was the last time you took your team out for lunch?), and get out of the office more to expose ourselves to new ideas.
