Discovering Hot Water

Discovering Hot Water

In Italian, it’s ‘discovering hot water’. In Hungarian, it’s ‘inventing sealing wax’.

But I’m longing for a deliciously long and compound German word for when something you’ve been saying for years is announced as though it were breaking news.

And if there isn’t one, there should be. Because it happens to us rather a lot here at Belbin HQ.

Both McKinsey and Harvard Business Review have recently published findings on team effectiveness which echo a lot of truths we’ve been telling for half a century…

For too long, apparently, team ‘chemistry’ has been synonymous with alchemy. We’ve all approached teamwork – to paraphrase McKinsey – as an art, when it is really a science.

Myths abound, they say, especially when it comes to the question of… Why Some Teams Succeed and Others Fail.

But a researcher asked this question long ago – and used the scientific method to seek answers, for the benefit of teams, and industry at large.

That someone was our founder, Dr Meredith Belbin. He spent almost a decade researching teams in the 1970s.

He and his team formulated hypotheses and then tested them out with real teams in real time.

He did this by setting up business simulations and making meticulous, coded observations of each team every thirty seconds as they played. It was the original pen-and-paper ‘big data’.

Dr Belbin published his findings in his groundbreaking book, Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail, which introduced Belbin Team Role theory to the world.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine McKinsey’s findings in the light of Dr Belbin’s work.

No, they say. “Effective teams focus on the individual and collective skills and behaviours that matter most, and every role needs fit-for-purpose talent, not necessarily ‘top’ talent.”

A team of superstars does not a great team make. In fact, this has a detrimental effect on performance.

Apollo Syndrome

When Dr Belbin and his team started out on their research journey, their first idea was to create ‘think tank’ teams, called ‘Apollo teams’.

(The researchers decided to give the team a name which said something about the company – a nod to the brains at NASA behind the recent lunar landing – but also, more prosaically, reflected their Syndicate Room: A.)

The hypothesis was that teams of people with strong academic credentials and analytical skills should be the most effective.

But they weren’t.

“It seemed fairly obvious,” Dr Belbin writes, “that a team of clever people should win a game that placed an emphasis on cleverness. Such an elementary principle was at least worth checking before any more subtle variations in team design were made. It was as well that we did. The Apollo team generally finished last.”

Why? Because these teams had a number of destructive tendencies which hindered team effectiveness.

The symptoms of Apollo syndrome were that team members:

●     Often engaged in lengthy debates, determined to prove their point rather than to reach consensus;

●     Were quick to blame one another for their failures, resulting in a lack of trust and psychological safety;

●     Couldn’t reach consensus, so lacked cohesion and operated as individuals, resulting in rivalry and one-upmanship;

●     Sometimes identified that they were spending too much time debating and over-compensated by avoiding conflict altogether, which resulted in no decisions being made.

(In their September/October edition, Harvard Business Review recently characterized these as the ‘shark tank’, ‘mediocracy’ and ‘petting zoo’ respectively.)

It didn’t matter how many stars were in the team, Dr Belbin found. In almost all cases, the lack of teamwork “nullified the gains of individual effort or brilliance”.

Recognizing Diverse Contributions

Members of those Apollo teams prized their intellect and critical thinking abilities, but did they see the value of other contributions to the team?

As McKinsey’s report states:

“The dynamics of how those individuals interact are equally (if not more) important – they make the difference between operating as an individual team and operating as a team of individuals.”

“It’s not just who’s in the room,” echoes Harvard Business Review, “it’s how they behave together.”

Absolutely.

We found those ingredients for success and we’ve been helping teams all over the world to realize their full potential with Belbin Team Roles.

Maybe this is our sign to shout it a little louder.

In the next article in this series, we’ll be exploring the key drivers for effective teamwork and how Belbin helps teams deliver.

In the meantime, if you want to find out how to get your team collaborating, communicating and performing better, don’t hesitate to get in touch.