What interventions do you use to engage your teams? And when do you do them?  J Richard Hackman author of ‘Leading Teams’, describes three sources of effectiveness as groups interact:

  • Amount of effort members apply
  • Appropriateness of their performance strategies
  • Level of knowledge and skill they apply

He also identifies significant milestones in the life of a team, when a leader may impact positively on team effectiveness.  These milestones threw new light, for me, on the significance of project workshops.

The first milestone; the start. When teams first meet they agree on a number of key aspects regarding the work including:

  • Team boundaries (who’s in and who’s not)
  • Roles and responsibilities
  • Behavioural norms
  • How much effort they will apply to the task at hand

I find these issues surfacing in project-initiation workshops, whether they are on the agenda or not.

Social loafing, the insidious tendency to slack-off in teams, and the resulting loss of team energy, can be minimised when a team is motivated and engaged.  So the first meeting of a team is crucial.  Effective leaders do not leave any issues to chance.  They hold motivational sessions to focus the team on the task.

The other obvious milestone; the end. Effective leaders contract time with teams, at the end of a project, to reflect on how they have worked.  Being free from the anxiety and pressure to deliver, the team is open to learning.  The team can:

  • Reinforce effective performance strategies
  • Reaffirm particular team and individual skills
  • Plan education in areas where knowledge is required

We are not good at realistically evaluating and drawing on members’ knowledge and skills in teams.  We inappropriately weight the inputs of members and rely more on stereotypes than we care to admit.  This drains the value of the talent from the team.

I have found that a carefully led post-project learning intervention will allow team members to surface these issues in a safe environment.

The final milestone is in the middle. I found this really interesting.  RJH shows that it is almost impossible to get a team to discuss how they are going to cooperate with each other (their performance strategy) at the start of a task.  They need to work together before this discussion can get traction.  And before this happens, work in the team is often characterised by mindless application of habitual routines regardless of how applicable these approaches may be to the task at hand.

However at the midpoint of the duration, teams experience conflict.  A natural upheaval in how they relate with each other and the task.  Interventions to deal with performance strategies at this time can significantly improve effectiveness.  By the way, RJH quotes research showing that interventions dealing with team relationships have no effect on productivity.  The leader’s challenge is to focus on the task and harness the conflict.

Now I better understand those times when I have been asked by project teams to facilitate a workshop in which they can review the objective, the plan and how they are working.  Quite often, the opening remarks in these sessions are about a sense of going in circles and getting nowhere, reflecting the conflict.