Today our organizations are becoming increasingly complex, with projects spanning multiple teams, managers, and even continents. In our highly interdisciplinary and global world, the teams that end up achieving the most success are the ones whose members can access resources outside the team—those who can acquire assets and get help from experts who might be useful to the primary team. [1][2][3]
Here’s what organizational greats Deborah Ancona and David Caldwell have to say about making great cross-boundary teams.
1. Know Your Type
While bureaucratic workplaces vary from broken water coolers to segways, a team’s structure—based on its members’ involvement and the group’s position in the broader organization—typically falls into one of four quadrants.
First we have the seven-year-old soccer squad, where no one passes the ball and everyone gets watermelon after the game. These teams have low internal cohesion and low external pressures, and are more accurately characterized as groups providing aggregated output divorced from the broader organization.
(Don’t tell your aspiring soccer stars!)
Next, we have teams with high internal pressures and low external demands or
timelines. Think brainstorming groups—or aspiring musicians backed by their billionaire families. Because all the information used for hitting goals in this group is found within the team, the trick for managers here is to find members who possess all the necessary information for the goal at hand. [4a]
The third group is a rare breed. It’s rare to find teams that only have external demands and low internal demands, and they might just be a construct by Ancona and Caldwell (gasp*).
However, teams of the fourth variety—those that need to juggle both high internal and external demands—are becoming increasingly common as work becomes more interdependent and complex. In these industries, the key is to find members who not only possess the right skillsets, but who can also harness the skills, expertise, and resources of others’.
Here’s how you can engineer a team for success.
2. Pick People with Different Essential Strengths
Research shows that teams comprised of members with more functional areas perform at higher levels than others [7]. Just like when Tom Cruise formed his
team in Mission Impossible, your first step in forming an effective team is to
recruit
individuals with skills in all the functional areas necessary to
accomplish the mission—or for the rest of us, to build the product.Functionally diverse teams offer a two-fold benefit. They have more frequent internal exchanges of information, allowing for more innovative decisions than less diverse teams. They are also more likely to communicate more frequently to outside groups, making them them better at acquiring external resources. [8]
(The one caveat to this is that if you load your team in one functional area, members will start to compete for status. Just like in the animal kingdom, balance is important!)
3. Build a Diverse Network
To maximize the chances of success for your group, include both individuals with strong and weak relational ties. Strong ties exhibit high reciprocity and high time investment (i.e. every serious romantic relationship you’ve ever had);
weak relational ties exhibit low reciprocity and time investment (i.e. every Tinder match you’ve ever had) [9]. Each type of tie has its advantages, and you want both for your team.Networks characterized by strong ties have high information value but low variety. Although there are fewer options to choose from, the value of those relationships can can be effectively transferred to the team. Networks characterized by weak ties have low information value but high variety, as weak ties require less energy to maintain and provide high access to information. However, because those ties are weak, transference of information is more difficult.
Ideally, you want to the best of both worlds. Recruiting individuals with strong and weak ties is the best strategy to cultivate a highly connected team with a large information flow.
4. Offer Temporary Roles
Bring in the interns! But actually ;)
Expanding a core team is expensive in terms of energy, finances, and time. Temporary positions can be a great solution.
Teams can get the added information and resource boost of expansion by bringing in experts for limited times or specific functions, offering membership contingent on the progress of a project, assigning part-time roles, or providing tiered membership options
5. Send Fewer Emails—But Make Them Count!
A study of 45 product development teams found that team productivity was boosted when individuals participated in activities to promote their team, secure resources, or strengthen bonds with groups linked in the work flow [1].
The study also found that while the frequency of communications members had with other teams had little impact on effectiveness, the quality of their interactions did.
One good voice message left every 3 months could do a better job of staying in touch then daily “hey” text messages. Repeatedly spraying your business cards like Rick Ross sprays dollar bills may not be as effective as you (and only you) think.
Remember, the quality and content of a team’s external communications are significantly more important than the frequency of those interactions [4][5]
6. Focus
Before you engage your valuable resources, it’s important to know what you’re looking for.
When groups engaged in unfocused attempts to acquire key information outside the team, broadly scanning the environment for resources, performance among team members suffered, particularly later in the production life cycle [1].
Once a product idea was developed, less successful teams sought out general information, while more successful teams cut down on broad, generalized communication, increased the number of communications aimed at acquiring specific information, and began coordinating distinct tasks.
Takeaways to Keep You Cool
If you want to form a team that works and plays well with others, consider the following questions:
- Do the people I’m selecting have the skills and experience to match their assigned goals? Can they actualize their own projects?
- Do potential members have connections to relevant networks inside and outside organizations? Do they have relevant contacts who can help them out?
- Does management understand what the team can and can’t do? How much does the team need to rely on others? How much of the work needs to be outsourced?
- What is the political structure of the organization at large?
- How does the group’s product fit into the broader strategy of the organization?
- What are the expectations for the group by management?
- Which key resources do members need from other groups?
- Where is the location of outside information that would benefit the group?
