Nutshell: What makes a team?

As leaders, we need to understand what makes the best teams tick. That means knowing how teams come (and stay) together and how composition contributes to success.

In the early years of the 20th-century, French agricultural engineer Max Ringelmann conducted a series of experiments designed to explore a conundrum that’s still with us today: how people can work together as productively as possible.

Back then, Ringelmann’s experiments were focused on agricultural labourers. Unsurprisingly, he found that groups outperform individuals, an early modern confirmation of the Greek storyteller Aesop’s claim that “In union there is strength”. But when he asked his labourers to pull on a rope attached to a pressure gauge, he discovered another phenomenon: that groups are not necessarily more than the sum of their parts.

So was born the idea of social loafing, the concept that, if we’re not careful, individuals in groups tend to ease off rather than work to their full potential. In Ringelmann terms, although two people could each pull 100 units on his gauge, together they’d struggle to pull 186 units, not the 200 or more we might expect. Maybe a bit less strength than we might like.

It’s an intriguing concept that speaks to the core leadership skill of how we bring people together for maximum impact. And, with collaboration and teamworking assuming ever-greater importance at work today, it’s a challenge that is at once more important and more complex.

Alongside more traditional departmental or functional teams, in workplaces today we’ll find all sorts of people working together for a whole host of reasons and in a whole host of ways.

They might come together for specific projects, with a specific goal or mission, often on cross-functional lines. Teams might be remote or virtual. They could be dynamic, with leadership and membership shifting and changing as business needs change too. With hierarchies breaking down and patterns of collaboration in flux, we might be forgiven for thinking that Haas and Mortensen’s idea of 4-D teams - diverse, dispersed, digital and dynamic - is just the tip of the iceberg.

So, the question "what makes a team?" might be harder to answer than it once was. But, as teamwork remains at the core of what we do and how we operate at work, it’s crucial that, as leaders, we understand what makes the most effective teams tick, whether that’s a question of their make-up, how they come (and stay) together or how they’re motivated and managed.

What is a team?

Before we delve into all this, it’s a good idea to stop and think about what we mean by the word ‘team’ in the first place.

It’s a word that’s used widely and with a variety of meanings, depending on context. But, at a fundamental level, most researchers distinguish between people working alongside one another in a work group and those who come together as a team.

This might seem like a fine distinction. Both involve two or more people. Both involve relationship building and interaction. In both, information and resources are shared. But they are different in one key respect that Ringelmann might have liked to understand. A group is a collection of individuals who co-ordinate their individual efforts; a team is a group of people who share and work towards a common goal or purpose.

Groups

In work groups, people are independent from one another and have individual accountability. The groups can be informal (forming naturally around common interests or identities) or formal, created by organisational leaders to perform a specific task. Formal groups tend to be more hierarchical, with a single point of leadership.

Individual workers in groups may be working towards a defined outcome, but they work in parallel with one another rather than in a more interdependent way. That can be great for individuals who are developing specific expertise, and it can also be straightforward and efficient: sometimes, having a point person just getting on with the task at hand is what’s needed.

But a lack of more intentional teamwork can leave people feeling isolated. Communication within groups can also be poor, and, because they are only responsible for their own work, people may feel disconnected from wider goals and objectives.

Teams

In contrast, team members work together interdependently to solve problems. They share a mutual accountability, relying on one another to get things done. Leadership in teams tends to come from a range of team members.

Because of this, teams tend to collaborate better, with members having to build strong relationships and to communicate effectively if they are to succeed. Shared goals mean that all members are more likely to be motivated to contribute (and loaf less). And because teams involve a range of people with a range of perspectives, there are ample opportunities for us to learn from other team members. They often make better decisions and are better at solving problems.

That’s not to say that teams are without their drawbacks. Even within high functioning teams, it can be easy to overlook individual needs, and they might not always be as quick or efficient at more routine tasks as those independently operating groups.

But properly collaborative team working is increasingly seen as the way ahead for forward-facing and creative workplaces where we need to tackle more complex problems. In the words of basketball legend Michael Jordan “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”

How teams develop and grow

Building and leading teams is not without effort. There are lots of teams out there who may meet the basic criteria, but simply aren’t as effective as they could be. Like so much else in leadership, it takes time to build teams with the right mix of skills and experience and to create environments where good team dynamics can develop. Like leaders, teams are made, not born: they do not emerge fully formed and functioning. Nor are teams fixed and constant. As team members change, the composition and dynamics of the team can change too. So, how can we move from teams based on groups of individuals to coherent, goal-focused teams at the top of their game?

Tuckman’s team development sequence

In the 1960s, psychologist Bruce Tuckman identified a four-stage path that teams need to follow on their way to high performance, described in the memorable words:

• • • forming

    • storming

    • norming

    • performing

He later added a fifth stage:

• • • adjourning (or mourning)

For Tuckman, teams are not fully effective until they reach the performing stage, and there’s plenty to think about along the way.

Forming

At this earliest stage, individuals will be feeling their way, not fully up to speed with a team’s goals or purpose, probably a bit unsure about their role and how they’ll need to work alongside their colleagues. They may be excited, a bit anxious, wondering how it’ll all work.

As leaders, this is where we’ll need to be more directive until team members get used to each other and how the team might work together. We’ll need to clarify roles within the team and make sure individual and team goals are clear and understood by everyone.

This can also be a good time to encapsulate these expectations in a team contract or charter, a simple document that teams work on together to agree key teamworking elements such as purpose, goals, roles and expectations about behaviour and working practices.

The power of a team charter can be seen by the example of the tech support team responsible for maintaining the UK’s gov.uk website — a pretty important piece of national infrastructure. The problem was that the site’s developers and engineers would do just about anything rather than take their turn on a weekly rota for providing that support; it became known as “the team that no one wanted to be on”.

In theory, the rota system would make sure everyone was up to speed with ongoing maintenance issues. In practice, it meant that the support team had no real culture or identity of its own, let alone continuity or all-important knowledge exchange. There was little ownership of problems and it had become the place where difficult stuff was parked when no one else wanted to deal with it.

To tackle the lack of shared culture, the wider tech team held a series of workshops that fed into a team charter. Collectively, they explicitly identified why tech support is so important, identified roles and responsibilities, and established some clear ground rules for behaviours and working patterns, including handover meetings between shifts to establish better continuity. The process also led to innovations in automation for more repetitive maintenance tasks.

As a result, the tech team feels more positive about its stints on tech support. Buy-in is improved, expectations clearer — and people no longer want to avoid being part of what has become a properly functioning team.

Storming

As team members get to know one other, there’s likely to be some storming, as people test out boundaries, challenge a leader’s authority or clash with other team members who have different perspectives or ways of working. If roles and responsibilities aren’t yet clear, people might feel overwhelmed or frustrated at a lack of progress.

This may be a natural stage as team dynamics shift and change but, if a team gets stuck at this stage, healthy debate and disagreement may tip over into confrontation or leave people feeling resentful.

We’ll need to invoke our team charter to keep the team unified and co-operating. Remind people of shared values and vision and role-model the advantages of open and collaborative team working. Don’t let team conflict run riot, but remember that a little grit in the oyster will lead to better outcomes.

Norming

When a team moves on to norming, they start to resolve and respect individual differences and to focus more on the task at hand. There’s a stronger commitment to team goals now that they’re clear and team members know how they can best contribute.

As team members know and understand each other better, they’re more likely to work collaboratively, ask for help and seek out or offer feedback.

Leaders can take a step back as individual members take greater responsibility, but we need to make sure that all team members feel safe speaking up and taking part.

Performing

When a team is performing, it’s fully focussed on getting the job done to the best of its abilities. The team knows who is doing what, has the right processes in place to succeed and is able to work together to solve problems.

Because they share a common focus, team members communicate effectively and become more efficient and flexible. Decision-making is collaborative, and leadership becomes more participative.

Adjourning

The adjourning stage may be a natural evolution as projects come to an end or teams are disbanded and redeployed. But this can also be a difficult stage for people who have enjoyed and felt a sense of accomplishment from working on the team (hence the idea of mourning).

This is a time to celebrate a team’s achievements, and to offer individual support to anyone who needs it as they move on.

When thinking about the Tuckman phases, it’s important to remember that there is no fixed timescale for each phase, progress is not always linear and individuals may move through the model at different paces.

For example, a team may slip from norming back to storming if goals change or someone new joins the team. Or we may become complacent at the norming stage and fail to make the transition to performing. Progress also depends on context and situation. The size and composition of the team, what it has to do and organisational, external or cultural factors can all have an impact. For example, we may need to review and change team roles and goals if the business needs to change direction.

Our task as leaders is to assess regularly which phase our team members and teams are at, and adapt how we lead and guide accordingly.

The roles people play

When, in the 1970s, Meredith Belbin began his now-famous team behaviour studies, he not unreasonably expected that, in the competing teams he put together for a business simulation, high intellect teams would succeed where lower intellect teams would not. Surely, maximising the substantial brainpower of his high potential participants would make all the difference.

But no. Through years of observing, categorising and recording all the different kinds of contributions from team members, Belbin and his colleagues found something entirely different. Teams predicted to be high performing based on intellect failed to fulfil their potential. Instead, it was not intellect but balance that made for success. The most successful teams were made up of people exhibiting a range of personal characteristics and behaviours, playing what Belbin would come to identify as different team roles.

As the studies progressed, he was also able to predict the roles that people might play and how the optimum balance might be struck. So was born Belbin’s Team Roles, a diagnostic and guide that has been used by organisations in their team building ever since.

As we’ve seen, the most effective teams work interdependently: they need to marshal all of their diverse strengths — of experience, expertise and thought — and work together to perform. Diversity can also be a difficult thing to manage; individual differences, if not acknowledged and managed, can cause division and conflict.

What Belbin encourages us to do is to understand and recognise difference up front, so that we can harness and deploy people’s different strengths, and accommodate any weaknesses, depending on the situation we face or the task at hand.

It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that the X-Men comics and films have proven to be such a success. They offer a great example of a diverse team coming together to make the most of different strengths in the service of one of the most unequivocal goals of all: saving the planet. Professor X surrounds himself with superheroes who possess powers he himself does not have. They complement his own ability. He accepts that his team has both talents and shortcomings, and nurtures and mentors them so that they can discover and use their talents to the best effect.

Belbin: creating more balanced teams

Belbin defines a team role as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way”. If we understand the role (or roles) people tend to play in a team, then we understand better how everyone can best contribute and work with others. We will also have a better understanding of our strengths and an opportunity to work on what Belbin calls “allowable weaknesses”.

If a team is made up of people who have similar styles of behaviour or play the same team roles, that team can become unbalanced — think of Belbin’s exclusively high IQ teams that ended up competing with one another and just couldn’t get anything done. Or a team that shares the same weaknesses that compromise its ability to compete.

To help us create more balanced teams, Belbin has identified nine team roles, organised into three categories:

• • • Social-oriented roles

    • Thinking-oriented roles 

    • Action- or task-oriented roles

       

Each role is associated with typical behavioural and interpersonal strengths. The trick is to have a good balance of roles across the three categories. This doesn’t mean that teams must have a minimum of nine people to succeed. People tend to have at least two role preferences and we can all learn to play a range of roles when required, even if these may not be the most natural for us. Each role is equally important, and each has its strengths and allowable weaknesses.

Social roles

Resource Investigator (RI)

Strengths: Resource Investigators use their inquisitive and curious natures to explore options, develop contacts and negotiate resources for the team. They are outgoing and enthusiastic, and good at bringing in a range of stakeholders.

Allowable weaknesses: RIs tend to be over-optimistic, and can lose interest once the initial enthusiasm has passed.

Teamworker (TW)

Strengths: Teamworkers are the glue that binds team members together. They are co-operative, perceptive, diplomatic and good listeners. They prioritise team building and helping people to work together effectively.

Allowable weaknesses: TWs can be indecisive when the chips are down and tend to avoid confrontation, which might make them reluctant to make difficult or unpopular decisions.

Co-ordinator (CO)

Strengths: Co-ordinators are sometimes known as a team’s “chairperson”. They tend to be mature, calm, confident and good at picking up on, and harnessing, people’s strengths. They clarify team goals and are keen to delegate.

Allowable weaknesses: COs can be seen as manipulative and might offload their own share of the work with a bit too much delegation.

Thinking roles

Plant (PL)

Strengths: Plants are highly creative and are good at finding unconventional ways to solve problems. Free-thinking, they tend to come up with new ideas and approaches.

Allowable weaknesses: PLs are not always great at the detail and might not respond well to criticism, or working within boundaries or parameters. They can also be too pre-occupied to communicate effectively.

Monitor Evaluator (ME)

Strengths: Monitor Evaluators provide a logical eye, able to act impartially and weigh up a team’s options accurately and dispassionately. They are shrewd, strategic and discerning.

Allowable weaknesses: MEs sometimes lack the ability to inspire others and can be seen as detached, reactive and overly critical. Weighing up the pros and cons of all the options might lead to slower decision-making.

Specialist (SP)

Strengths: Specialists bring in-depth knowledge of a key area to teams. They pride themselves on their skills and abilities and tend to be single-minded, self-starting and dedicated.

Allowable weaknesses: Because SPs tends to focus on their own areas of expertise, their contribution might be limited (although invaluable in the right context). They often dwell on the technicalities and fail to see the bigger picture, and might overload everyone with too much information.

Action roles

Shaper (SH)

Strengths: Shapers provide the drive that keeps everyone moving forward without losing focus or momentum. They are challenging, dynamic, thrive on pressure and are not fazed by obstacles. They like to question norms and shake things up to make sure the team does not become complacent.

Allowable weaknesses: SHs can be argumentative and blunt, and can easily cause offence. They can become aggressive and bad-tempered in their drive to get things done.

Implementer (IMP)

Strengths: Implementers get things done. They are good at creating plans and carrying them out as efficiently as possible. Practical, reliable and organised, they turn ideas into action and organise the work that needs to be done.

Allowable weaknesses: IMPs can be inflexible and slow to accept new possibilities. Once they have a plan, they might want to stick to it a bit too rigidly, and can be resistant to change.

Completer Finisher (CF)

Strengths: Completer Finishers are the people who see that the team’s work is completed thoroughly. Painstaking and conscientious, they are the quality controllers, deadline-driven, picking up on errors, polishing and perfecting.

Allowable weaknesses: CFs can be anxious and inclined to worry. They are perfectionists and are often reluctant to delegate.

Having a balance of roles in a team offers us a range of resources we can call upon as circumstances dictate. For example, teams with no Plant might struggle to come up with new ideas — but one with too many might find it hard to sort the good ideas from the bad.

We might need some Monitor Evaluator behaviours to help sort the wheat from the chaff.

Shaper-less teams might lack direction, but having too many Shapers is likely to lead to infighting. We might need some Teamworker behaviour balm to ease the tension. If we have an important project to deliver to a tight deadline, a Completer Finisher will be a very useful person to have on board.

Like other diagnostics, Belbin Team Roles is not, of course, a silver bullet. The roles we play are just one of many factors involved in creating a high performing team. Belbin Team Roles have also been criticised for being culturally biased towards white middle-class men.

But the idea of team roles and behaviours does remind us that diversity of behaviours and approach matters. Belbin can provide a useful (shared) language for us to identify the dynamics and compositions of our teams, and to help us to talk about strengths and weaknesses in a safe and non-confrontational way.

Does size matter?

As well as the range of behaviours and skills people bring to a team, another key factor in team composition is size.

Ever since Ringelmann suggested that social loafing becomes progressively more prevalent for every person in a group beyond five or six people, researchers have been fascinated by the impact size can have on team cohesion and performance.

But just how big should the perfect team be?

Much depends, of course, on the type of team we’re talking about and what it needs to do. A team of 30 people will clean an office building faster than a team of five or six, but, if we’re dealing with more complex tasks that require co-ordination and collaboration, anything above a team of six makes communication more complex and is likely to lead to sub-groups, whether we plan for that or not.

Too small, though, and we run the risk of a lack of diversity and bottlenecks because there are not enough of us to get things done.

For Jeff Bezos, teams should never be bigger than the number of people who might comfortably be fed by two pizzas. Depending on how greedy we are, this instinctively leads us to teams of between five and eight people.

This instinct is borne out by the work of anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. What has become known as Dunbar’s number proposes that human groups have a comfortable limit of between 150 and 250 members. In a further refinement, he suggested that groups vary in size depending on closeness. So, the 150 figure relates to a loose social grouping (like casual friends); 50 to a group of closer friends; 15 for a close-knit group, and five as a close support network.

This seems to be borne out by the world of social media and online gaming. Research in 2009 suggested that people have, on average, 120 Facebook friends. World of Warcraft guilds tend to vary in size from 50 to 150 people, but, for the games themselves, player groups restricted to five or six players is the norm.

The late psychologist and team dynamics expert J Richard Hackman believed that “Big teams usually wind up just wasting everybody’s time”. For Hackman, that’s because larger teams face the twin challenges of motivation and communication. The bigger the team, the more links and connections between people that have to be maintained; the cost of co-ordinating, communicating and building relationships becomes greater, and individual and team productivity is compromised.

In summary, although size is not the only factor at play in team dynamics, it does matter. If we want close-knit, cohesive teams able to tackle complex tasks or problems, Jeff Bezos’ pizzas might not be such a bad rule of thumb.

Are virtual teams different?

Haas and Mortensen’s 4-D team characteristics — diverse, dispersed, digital and dynamic — might be made for a world where teams are as likely to be virtual as fixed in a particular location.

In many ways, virtual teams these days are simply a fact of life, and the principles relating to how they are formed, their composition and positive dynamics are the same as for any other team. They also, however, bring specific and different leadership challenges.

In their book, Virtual Teams, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, define a virtual team as one that “works across space, time and organisational boundaries with links strengthened by webs of communication technologies”. The book also offers a three-part framework to help us understand and lead teams virtually.

The framework consists of three components — people, purpose and links — each of which splits into three sub-components that they call virtual team principles:

As with all teams, Lipnack and Stamps see people as the most important element of virtual teams too. Purpose is the glue that holds people together. The final component, links, provides the means of communication that allows virtual teams to operate co-operatively.

People

Because members of virtual teams are often selected for their specific expertise, they may be more independent than in other teams, and share leadership when that expertise is required.

We need, therefore, to acknowledge that virtual teams tend to operate at different levels — individual and team — and often interact with other, completely separate, teams too. In leadership terms, this all needs to be integrated.

Purpose

A great advantage of virtual teams is that they are not constrained by physical boundaries or location. But that also makes purpose and clear goals even more important to bring and keep people together.

To perform effectively, virtual teams must formulate clear, co-operative goals to help them work together on interdependent tasks. These goals connect to overall purpose and the concrete results we see when a virtual team is successful.

Links

For virtual teams to work, they need the right tech, and Lipnack and Stamps suggest a range of media to underpin effective communication.

However, the tech is a tool for, rather than a solution to, the tricky issue of how virtual teams establish and maintain their links. To do this across organisations and cultures, and especially without the additional cues we can take advantage of when meeting face to face, virtual teams need especially high levels of trust and trusting relationships.

In whichever way our teams operate and for whatever reason, how well (or not) we bring people together at work is likely to have a fundamental impact on how we perform. This can be challenging, as Henry Ford reminds us: “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is a success.”

Understanding how teams come (and stay) together, and team composition, can help us to understand that thorny problem of just what makes a team. With balanced teams — not too big and not too small, and with the right mix of skills, experience and behaviours — we’re much more likely to succeed with the other key component of team success: the dynamics of how we work together. Despite what Ringelmann might think, maybe we are stronger together after all.

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Test your understanding

• Describe Tuckman’s five stages of team development.

• Identify the three categories Belbin used to group his nine team roles.

• Outline two reasons why team size matters.

What does it mean for you?

• The Belbin website and has a range of resources for leaders. Consider whether running a simple Team Roles Circle exercise with team members might help you to understand better different strengths and weaknesses, and whether your team is as balanced as it might be.