Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations - by Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone

Date read: 2023-01-15
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

Meant to be the science behind the best team combinations (e.g., size, type, skillsets, etc.) it falls short of expectations. They've done a great job classifying the different types of teams, but have done little to help optimize teams.

My Notes

TEAM SIZES
From experience and research, the optimum team size is 5–7 members. The team size that continues to function effectively is 4–9 members. Teams are known to function cohesively with a size up to 12 members.

The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.

There are other Dunbar numbers as well:

3 to 5: This is the circle of our very closest friends. Here Dunbar agrees with other social scientists.

12 to 15: The group of friends and family whose death we would deeply mourn. Also, the number of people from whom you can accept a small amount of betrayal without severing ties.

50: This is a new number. Dunbar derives it, as usual, from historical sources; it is “the typical overnight camp size among traditional hunter-gatherers like the Australian Aboriginals or the San Bushmen of southern Africa.”

500 which you might think of as acquaintances.

1,500 who are basically the number of faces you can put names to.

Harvard psychologist J. Richard Hackman once said, “Big teams usually wind up just wasting everybody’s time.”

The fallacy is that bigger teams are better than small ones because they have more resources to draw upon. A colleague and I once did some research showing that as a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate. It’s managing the links between members that gets teams into trouble. My rule of thumb is no double digits. In my courses, I never allow teams of more than six students.

LEADING TEAMS
Top-performing leaders have been shown, on average, to elicit laughter from their subordinates at least twice as often as their less successful counterparts. One reason for this is that laughter appears to increase both creativity and trust within teams. Perhaps more surprisingly, humor also makes audiences listen and retain more of a presentation or conversation.

When the team members think the boss is happy, they feel liberated to try out new ideas; and when they think the boss is unhappy, they hunker down into survival mode. This is probably why positive emotions result in more cooperative and conciliatory behavior.

Communicate regularly, but not constantly, and to use that communication for the dissemination of new information, not for setting boundaries on members’ efforts.

The best teams enjoy a mix of old friends and newcomers. In this way, the team members are comfortable with each other and readily exchange ideas, but they are not so comfortable that they stifle creativity in each other.

Research shows that groups perform best when their task and outcomes are either purely the product of group work or purely the product of individual effort. Hybrid groups—once again, the in-between position, in which tasks and rewards have individual as well as group elements—inevitably struggle with interactions, group stability, and member satisfaction. In hybrid groups, cooperation norms are weak.

Great teams do the following:

They communicate frequently: In a typical project team, a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour seem to be optimal for team performance.

Team members talk and listen in equal measure: Conversation is distributed equally among members. By comparison, low-performing teams suffer from teams within teams. They have members who talk or listen, but don’t do both.

They communicate informally: The best teams use half their time communicating outside the formal meetings or as a “side” during team meetings. Informal communications tend to increase team performance.

They look for ideas and information outside the group: The best teams consistently (if intermittently) connect with multiple outside sources—especially sources with skills or knowledge lacking among the team’s members. Team members then bring back what they’ve learned and share it with the team (that second part is just as important). Especially high-performing teams often feature what’s called a well-intentioned connector: a person who keeps track of these useful outside sources and who on the team knows them. Then when useful information is captured from those sources, this “connector” takes on the task of disseminating that information to integrate it into the expertise of the team.

They adjust their patterns of communication: they learn to communicate and they communicate to learn. Patterns of communication that work best are empirically described, perfected, and then taught to the other members of the team.

Collaboration will not compensate for an inadequately endowed team. Of course, the most effective teams combine the required aggregate abilities, the proper role assignments, and a lot of talking.

When it comes to teams, traditional definitions of “diversity” are meaningless. Cognitive diversity—how people think—is all.

Studies have found that the optimal balance of people on radical-innovation teams requires that 50 percent of the members have the following distribution of personality types:

Creative—20 to 30 percent. Teams with too many creative types struggle with implementation. That’s because (surprise!) creatives are not always practical, are not concerned with rules, and may initiate conflict.

Conformist—10 to 20 percent. Conformists are the backbone of the team; and their key role is to support the creatives. Conformists help boost cooperation and improve team confidence. They make teams predictable, in a good way.

Detail-oriented—As much as 10 percent. Detail-oriented people may often be risk-averse, but they help strengthen important team functions such as budgetary control. The detailers make sure that the team is still there each morning.

The solitary inventor may come up with an earthshaking new idea or invention, but you are better off betting on a team to bring the idea to life.

So just hiring more women as per Woolley works for Page only if those women come from sufficiently unusual backgrounds to think differently from their new teammates. Otherwise, if they are merely cut from the same cloth as the male members of the team, they will have only a minor impact (that is, there will be a comparatively small cognitive difference between the sexes). What matters most are differences in culture, class, and aptitudes.

The more diverse the team, the more hands-on management it will need.

Contents:

My Notes