"Teams compose a large part of our private and public lives. We depend on them for both our success and our happiness."
- Team Genius, page xiv
"Every one of those teams is currently at some point in its life cycle. Some of these teams are clearly dysfunctional; others are suboptimal in their performance; and still others are approaching the end of their usefulness. Even great teams are always being challenged to do all that they are capable of doing."- Team Genius, page xvii
The authors recommend twenty questions you should ask about teams you manage and are a member of:
Questions you should always ask:
Questions about your own skills in creating and managing teams:
Questions about your organization’s capabilities:
Asking these questions will help you define where your team is in it’s life cycle, and ultimately work more effectively.
"Humans constantly form teams - usually first as pairs that coalesce into larger groupings—but, in emergencies, we have been known to form coordinating, effective, and trusting pairs in seconds… the astonishing range of types of teams, beginning with pairs, shows the universality and flexibility of this phenomenon in daily life."- Team Genius, page 113
The authors provide great advice for evaluating the success of teams and how to manage those that appear either healthy or unhealthy. Though I am aware of other descriptions of the team life cycle, I must admit I loved the way Karlgaard and Malone describe them, as it made more sense to me in today’s environment. They are briefly summarized below:
Formation: Individuals band together, establish relationships whilst defining goals and delegating the right tasks to the right members.
Establishment: Rules, metrics, milestones and communication methods are identified as work starts on the task. Norms and team culture are established.
Operational: Focus shifts from structure to working on task content.
Functional This involves resetting milestones and deadlines, coping with member personalities, idiosyncrasies and strengths and weaknesses; external forces may put further stress and confusion on the team whose still immature interpersonal relationships may not yet be strong enough to handle them.
Cultural: Events become the legends and experiences that define team culture.
Sustainable: Departure and arrival ceremonies occur to maintain the team’s sustainability.
Maturation and Consolidation: Maturity brings together and consolidates disparate operations toward a final goal. Consolidation is accomplished with a robust infrastructure, clearly established lines of communication and rules of behaviour.
Completion: Work starts on packaging the results for senior management and/or investors.
End: Successful teams are shut down or transformed into a new team with a new task.
Aftermath: The period following the retirement of a team.
"At no point in the development of civilization, and across six millennia, have small, fundamental teams ever been abandoned as unnecessary or obsolete. Rather, they remain essential building blocks in the structure of ever larger institutions."- Team Genius, page 18
The human drive to form teams is a survival mechanism for individuals: evidence shows that solitary individuals have shorter life spans than their more social counterparts. Teamwork goes back to the dawn of time, recent studies have confirmed that working together beyond kin with snap decisions results in more cooperation. The longer we think about a decision the more selfish we are inclined to be. Working in a team climate impacts our mammalian brain and levels of oxytocin where social norms can shape behavior with reduced requirement for rules and regulations to enforce it and can also make us less stressed and ultimately happier. By embracing teams as an expression of our natural state, we can get more done, and create better solutions than we could working on our own.
A new science of teams is critical if we are to be ready for the continuing changes and advances we are likely to witness. Teams must be capable of surviving on their own and be designed to work with, not against, team members’ individual approaches to work. Teams must be given the requisite support to reach their full potential. Team size and composition is critical for achieving strategic goals. The authors discuss the importance of cognitive diversity in creating successful teams and other aspects of creating team genius. The reader is under no illusion that managing teams is easy or straightforward, nor is it always successful. Great advice and guidance is provided on how to handle this. I encourage individuals currently leading or planning to lead teams read this book for their own takeaways and learnings.
Michael S. Malone is one of the world’s best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter, where he was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world’s largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom.
