South African Rugby is in shock! Beaten by Japan? The newspapers and armchair selectors kick-in. The team is too old, too white and too arrogant. And of course there are particular players who should not have been on the field. It’s a maul out there. A maul. I am comfortable to observe without inserting my opinion. But in the issue of selecting people for your team I found some interesting information.
J Richard Hackman, late of Harvard University spent a lifetime observing and collecting experimental evidence on what makes teams work. Here is a link to a note introducing the Five Conditions for ‘Effective teams’. Here is a note on ‘Great Leaders’.
JRH suggests 3 considerations as you select team-members:
- Review task capabilities.
- Consider teamwork skills.
- Evaluate training and experience.
Select team-members for task capability
We have been cautioned to hire for attitude and train for skills. But how important is capability? JRH cites an experiment that focussed on the innate abilities of team members and the impact of spontaneous collaboration. Subjects worked in pairs to navigate through mazes and pick up selected objects. One person navigated with a joystick while another tagged the objects with a mouse button. Test subjects were evaluated to establish their expertise at either navigating or tagging. They were grouped based on expertise.
Pairs with the right skills in the right role (navigator and tagger) performed best. There was little or no spontaneous collaboration. They knew what they had to do and got on with the job.
Pairs with the right skills but in the wrong roles spontaneously shared their knowledge. These teams learned to perform satisfactorily through collaboration.
And here is the surprising result:
When both of the members had the same skill but as a team lacked the other, collaboration impaired their performance. No amount of interaction could compensate for lack of the critical competence.
Explicit consideration of task capability is therefore essential as you select team-members.
This experiment focussed on specific task relevant competencies in a simplified setting. In more complex settings leaders compiling teams can fall back on general intellectual ability. The selection criteria for the organisation in which the team operates may serve to provide a high-level of competence in your area, from which you select team-members.
JRH suggests three selection strategies to avoid:
- Mindlessly picking from whoever is available in the office.
- Choosing for representation rather than ability. Selecting an equal number of members from communities or teams who have a stake in the work of the team will sideline key skills.
- Composing your team based on the political or ideological leanings of your client.
Select team-members for teamwork skill
Not everyone can work in a team. It is possible for someone with excellent task-skills to be too disruptive in a team. Openness in teams, our capacity to question our own presuppositions when someone else seems to be sprouting nonsense, is a valuable, rare and hard-won capacity. You have a problem when team-members:
- Are unable or unwilling to understand the perspectives of others.
- Undermine their team-mates.
- Say one thing in a meeting but do the opposite later.
- Bring out the worst in your team.
It is a good idea to create strong barriers around someone who is consistently disruptive. When the person with the technical brilliance, drives everyone in the team bananas it may be possible to keep them out of the team to work on their own but deliver their wisdom in non-damaging ways.
The opposite strategy is far more powerful. This requires you to constantly scan your environment for people who will be especially constructive as members of your team.
Select your team based on their training and experience
As you build your dream team, without poaching, you can observe and attract the core players.
JRH does not promote psychometric tests. He suggests that you should rather find out what people say about the people in whom you are interested. You can ask their peers, their staff and their managers what it is like working with them. But he provides two cautions:
- People sometimes deal with their own uncertainties by splitting-off their positive and negative feelings and projecting them onto someone else in the team. The whole team unconsciously picks a specific person to reflect these positive and negative components. Criticising or hero-worshipping the ‘scapegoat’ or ‘charismatic prophet’ allows people live with their flaws and the terror of their gifts. This is a common but rarely acknowledged phenomenon. When I showed the model to an executive team who had just fired their IT manager, their Ops manager and their HR manager in short succession, they assured me, categorically, that this rule was not in play. I have written more about this in the eBook on change.
- People with different disciplinary backgrounds can bring rich training, experience and networks of influence to the team. When Humanists, Engineers, Scientists and Creative Artists collaborate there is potential for individual and team learning. However this does not happen without effort. Harvesting the benefits of diversity requires us to recognise the potential in others and suppress our natural response to denigrate the contributions of those who come with a different background of experience and discipline.
So there are some issues about selecting team members. How you compose the individuals into a team is also important, how you consider size and mix. Scope for another note.
