Teamwork can make the dreamwork, or it could bring a project to a screeching halt. In this MINDWORKS MINI, Daniel Sefaty speaks with team science experts: Dr. Steve Kozlowski, Dr. Tara Brown, and Dr. Samantha Perry, about what makes for a good team.
Listen to the entire interview in The Magic of Teams Part 3: The Future of Teams with Steve Kozlowski, Tara Brown, and Samantha Perry.
Teamwork can make the dreamwork, or it could bring a project to a screeching halt. In this MINDWORKS MINI, Daniel Sefaty speaks with team science experts: Dr. Steve Kozlowski, Dr. Tara Brown, and Dr. Samantha Perry, about what makes for a good team.
Listen to the entire interview in The Magic of Teams Part 3: The Future of Teams with Steve Kozlowski, Tara Brown, and Samantha Perry.
Daniel Serfaty: Before we dive really into the core of this session, I would love for you to think of an example for our audience of the best team you have ever observed, or you've ever been part of. Something in which you were impressed by the, let's call it right now, in a non-scientific way, until we dive later, the teamness of it.
And also perhaps on the other extreme of the spectrum, perhaps the worst team, on a non-attributional basis, that you've ever been part of or you have observed. And why do you think they were best and what do you think they were worst? Who wants to pick that up?
Tara Brown: I can provide a very salient example of a best team experience, and that's honestly a team that I'm currently working with at Aptima, which was nominated for Best Teamwork Award and did not win, although I'm challenging the vote. But it's, ironically enough, a project team that's working on a contract on teams research. And again, we're our own kind of nested team structure where we have an Aptima team along with five university teams and a team from [Go 00:00:17:28], along with ARI, all kind of working together on pushing the future of teams research.
Daniel Serfaty: ARI is the Army research Institute, yes? [crosstalk 00:00:17:39]. For Behavioral and Social Sciences. [crosstalk 00:17:41].
Stephen Kozlowski: And it's a multi-team system because [crosstalk 00:17:44] different organizations involved in contributing those team members.
Tara Brown: Exactly. I think there are multiple levels of goodness of our multi-team system, but really focusing in on our Aptima team, one of the things that has stood out to me from the beginning is we exhibit the team processes and team states that make up a good team. We are a very cohesive unit, both socially and task oriented. We have very shared goals. We're all on the same page in terms of the vision for our team that we execute. We actually like being around each other and like meeting twice a week to contribute ideas. And there's also a very strong level of trust that's developed in our team.
It's a very complex project with multiple moving pieces and different levels of expertise, different types of expertise. We've got mathematical modelers and engineers and UI developers and psychologists and all of those people coming together that have their responsibility and role that they need to perform for our team to succeed, and all of our pieces and parts have to come together. And there has been a development of trust over time that people will complete their tasks. They will do it well. And you can count on people over time.
I think the other piece that's made it a really good team is that we back each other up and provide support in an anticipatory fashion, so we have developed a shared mental model enough that we can kind of anticipate or predict when somebody is overloaded or when somebody might need help or are struggling.
Stephen Kozlowski: Implicit coordination.
Tara Brown: Yeah, it's implicit coordination.
Stephen Kozlowski: Somebody here might've been somewhat responsible [crosstalk 00:00:19:33].
Tara Brown: I don't know. There might've been a paper out there with somebody's name on it somewhere. But we have been able to get to the point where we do implicitly coordinate and we back each other up proactively and continue. We have excellent communication, and as a result, we have navigated a lot of bumps along the way, a lot of external factors and constraints.
You throw COVID into the mix of field teams research, where you're trying to develop a paradigm to collect data with in-person teams during a pandemic, and that's an external factor that you have to consider and adapt to, and I feel like we have been, because of the shared mental models we have developed, because of the cohesion that has built and the trust that has built, we have been able to weather that storm and the challenges that have come up very gracefully and very productively over the course of the last year.
Stephen Kozlowski: It's really cool to hear, even anecdotally, that what the research literature would suggest after 75 years of research on small group and team effectiveness, seems to work.
Tara Brown: That's amazing.
Stephen Kozlowski: That's very comforting. It's nice to know that science works.
Tara Brown: It's almost like the leaders in this field who have done all that research knew what they were talking about.
Daniel Serfaty: It's a disruptive idea, sometimes science works. That's wonderful to hear. Steve, Samantha, do you have examples, either on the positive side of things or even on the difficult side of things, when teams that you have observed tended to break down or to not work?
Stephen Kozlowski: I'll give a short example. I mean, I would echo a lot of the things that Tara says. I have a much more focused team, so it's not multi-team system or people from other... Well, I guess technically they are. So I have a research group that's three of my former grad students, my wife and colleague, who's also an organizational psychologist, and me. So we're a core five group and we've been working together for about a decade. About the time these two guys were at Michigan State those folks were there too.
We do a different sort of brand of team research. We'll probably talk about it later. But we've been a very productive, cohesive, and innovative group. And it's all the things that Tara talks about. It's also our specialization and our ability to coordinate and, I don't want to say optimize because that sounds a little too engineering like, and we can't prove it, but to really kind of try to maximize what each individual is really good at in terms of our collective product or the effort that we create. And we've gotten really good at that.
Usually as graduate students graduate, they don't work with their former professors anymore. They're discouraged from doing so, and there are other impediments. but we have created such a great team that we're all motivated to keep working together on this team and just kind of manage any of those negatives from other views.
I would say when a team doesn't work, I have a different research team and it began to break down. And the breakdown was basically when people stop communicating and making decisions without collaborating, and then trust gets undermined, you no longer have that sense of cohesiveness, you don't have the common mental model, the shared goals begin to break down because it feels like someone's pursuing their own individual goals at the expense of the collective, and so then you begin to do what you're required to do like there's some professional sense or some contractual sense and no more, no less, and, when you can, you exit. I've recently exited that team.
Daniel Serfaty: Maybe that's something we will pick up in a second, because teams being lifeforms, in a sense, have the beginning of their life and the middle of their life and even an end-of-life. We don't talk very much about sometime the need, not just the happenstance, but the need to let the team go.
Tara Brown: [crosstalk 00:23:19]. I was going to say, sometimes that's the most adaptive strategy, is to let the team fall apart.
Stephen Kozlowski: Yes.
Daniel Serfaty: Sam.
Samantha Perry: I was [crosstalk 00:23:28] in my example, it wasn't one specific moment, but I observed many medical teams. Some work extremely well, some not as well. And it's not necessarily because of a lack of outcome, but the team process component can sometimes break down, but still patient outcomes remain stable.
Stephen Kozlowski: Or not.
Samantha Perry: Or not, [crosstalk 00:23:53] I've seen really bad team processes where the patient didn't suffer, which is excellent, but you could see that they weren't a very good team. Now, a lot of medical teams of different fields, like emergency medicine, are very...
Now a lot of medical teams of different fields, like emergency medicine, are very ad hoc. They come together, they do a task, they treat a patient, they break apart. You get different people from different specialties who respond, but it's a very short-lived team. So, thinking about those teams is completely different than thinking about a project team or a business team or something within an organization. How do you frame team dynamics and those ad hoc teams can be very different and distinct than how I would expect the people I'm looking at here to act like a team.
I wouldn't expect the same assumptions on cohesion and mental models, except as it relates to my tasks and my job. And I'm anticipating that Tara, being another organizational psychologist, can come onto my team and have a certain basis of knowledge that I can rely on.
And so, when you have these ad hoc teams that are functioning versus non-functioning, it's interesting to me to look at the reasoning why and where the breakdown is in the team, and how does that perpetuate through the different tasks that they're trying to accomplish? So, that's both positive and negative examples in my mind.
Tara Brown: I was thinking about medical teams as my example of poor as well. And I remember reviewing videos of emergency medical teams, students or residents who were training through these simulators, and one of the things that you saw break apart or fail was monitoring and backup behavior.
Specifically, being willing to correct somebody else's mistake if that person was viewed as higher on the hierarchy. So, if a nurse noticed the doctor making a mistake, they weren't always willing to vocalize that at the detriment of the patients and the breakdown of the team processes. And so, really-
Samantha Perry: And that involve the air crews as well, there's a lack of backup behavior and speaking up, and there isn't that psychological safety [crosstalk 00:01:45].
Tara Brown: So you see that a lot. And I think that's something that needs to be at the forefront of people's minds as they're examining the reasons that teams break down. I think oftentimes it's that lack of psychological safety or that lack of trust in that context where people see something that's not right and are afraid to speak it.
Stephen Kozlowski: And that brings in leadership, right?
Tara Brown: Yeah.
Stephen Kozlowski: Leadership becomes another one of those. Everyone needs it, but not everyone has it. You know, do you have good leadership that has a team is doing well, but leadership should basically be very unobtrusive if you're already did his or her job by getting the team to that place. And if the team's not doing well with the leader is stepping in to help get it back on track, whatever that might be. Certainly in the case of what Tara is grazing and Sam, in terms of the medical teams that creation of psychological safety, that's basically the leader not having done what needed to be done sometime in the past. The team now has this, I feel I can't speak to power and say, "You just sowed an instrument inside that patient. I think I learned in medical school group, that's not good." Or "It looks like that heart has stopped. Do you think maybe we ought to take care of that?"
Daniel Serfaty: Thank you for those stories. I think they are very useful for our audience to situate a little bit, the space of teams.