01. Overview 02. Knowledge 03. Collective Intelligence 04. Talent 05. Diversity 06. Specialists 07. History 08. Size

What science can tell us about

Building Great Teams

Assembling and managing successful teams is a core leadership skill, whether you are convening a temporary task force, managing a full department, or running a school fundraiser.

But how well do you understand what makes a great team?

If you think it’s simply assembling a group of highly talented people and letting them do their thing, then you’re in good company. Research shows that’s what people tend to believe. But, unfortunately, you’d also be wrong.

Teams are more than the sum of their parts. In fact, sometimes having lots of top talent on a team actually hurts performance. We’ll get back to that in a minute.

First, let’s look at why it’s become increasingly important to know how to lead, and be part of, teams.

Teams are more important than they used to be because there’s so much more to know in a given field.

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You’ve likely been taught the importance of teamwork since you were in kindergarten. Today, those lessons are more important than ever, as teams have become a mainstay in organizations.

The world of scientific research offers a telling example: a study of 19.9 million scientific papers and 2.1 million patents generated over 5 decades shows that teams are increasingly producing more work than individuals are. And, those teams are getting bigger over time.

Teams also generally produce research and patents that are more frequently cited—a measure of the paper’s or patent’s impact within its field—than research by individuals. That trend has also increased over time. (Wuchty, Jones, and Uzzi, Science, 2007.)

Here’s one way to explain the trend toward teams: As technology advances, the quantity of knowledge in the world grows. With more and more to know, it becomes harder and harder for any one person to have a deep general knowledge in a field. Instead, people are joining forces to combine their specific knowledge and cover more of a field. Another study on 2.9 million patents issued from 1963 to 1999 shows that team-size increases are bigger in fields with a larger “depth of knowledge,” such as biotech. (Jones, Review of Economic Studies, 2009.)

Teams have their own level of intelligence, which is separate from the combined intelligence of their team members.

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A well-assembled team can be more than the sum of its parts. Research shows that teams have their own level of intelligence, dubbed “collective intelligence,” which is a measure of the group’s ability to perform a wide variety of tasks. And, importantly, having a lot of individually intelligent team members does not mean the team will have a high collective intelligence.

Lab experiments in one study had teams spend several hours on a variety of exercises, from brainstorming to solving visual puzzles. The results point to three ways to increase a team’s collective intelligence:

Have more members who are socially sensitive, meaning they’re perceptive of their teammates’ views and feelings.
Have more women on the team (in large part because women tend to be more socially perceptive).
Make sure team members take turns talking instead of being dominated by just a few voices.

(Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, and Malone, Science, 2010.)

Sometimes building a team with lots of really talented people actually hurts the team’s performance.

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Packing your team with top talent boosts success—but only up to a point. Research from the world of professional athletes shows that in sports that require a lot of interdependence, there’s a point at which lots of talent starts hurting performance.

This happens because top talents don’t always coordinate effectively, perhaps because superstars are angling to be top dog instead of focusing on winning. (The researchers note similar findings in the animal kingdom, citing a study of chickens. Having too many high-producing egg layers in a colony reduces overall egg production “as a result of intense conflicts.”)

The human-based study found that professional soccer and basketball teams suffer the diminishing returns of top talent, but Major League Baseball teams do not, likely because the nature of baseball means players can coordinate less and still win games. (Swaab, Schaerer, Anicich, Ronay, and Galinsky, Psychological Science. 2014.)

Another reason not to focus solely on the best of the best: you want diverse thinkers

By definition, those who are highly skilled at something have, well, lots of skills. But sometimes those top performers share the same skills as their high-performing peers. And this is another reason that overemphasizing top talent can hurt teams.

One study looked at the relative merit of having a team made up of the very best problem-solvers versus a team whose members were accomplished problem-solvers but had a diverse set of approaches for tackling those problems. The results showed that the diverse teams outperformed the teams made up of the very best individuals. (Hong and Page, PNAS, 2004.)

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Diversity is often an asset for teams, but can also lead to common pitfalls. So be thoughtful and deliberate in how you lead diverse teams.

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As the importance of teams has grown, so has the diversity of the American workforce. Yet, there’s no simple prescription for how to effectively lead diverse teams. Sorry, even researchers disagree on the nitty-gritty pros and cons.

However, research does point to a benefit in having a diversity of thinking on teams that tackle complex tasks. Meaning, teams of people who approach problems differently (often, but certainly not always, as a result of gender, cultural, or educational diversity) are usually better at solving those problems.

But that diversity brings a set of potential pitfalls as well. Scholars generally agree that these include the following:

Team members may splinter into subgroups of similar people.
These teams can have higher turnover.
Teams tend to lose their diversity over time as members start thinking similarly.

But researchers have also identified ways to prevent these pitfalls. Here are some tips for leading diverse teams in ways that boost their performance.

Make sure your team understands the value of diversity

It’s unlikely to solve all of diversity’s conundrums, but here’s one easy tip: explain to your team that a diversity of thinking can help them succeed. This was the takeaway from a study of four-person teams of university students, comprised of two men and two women. When teams were told ahead of time that gender diversity helps with team decision-making and group processes, they performed better on a complex decision-making task. (Homan, Knippenberg, Van Kleef, and De Dreu, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2007.)

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Make sure teammates really “get” one another

Another study found that diversity enhances group performance when teammates have a mutual understanding of each other’s skills. Meaning, if Luisa considers herself creative and hard-working, then her teammate Larry also sees these traits in her.

Roughly 400 MBA students were grouped into small, highly diverse teams. The members of each team assessed themselves and one another on 11 attributes, such as leadership ability and competitiveness. The groups then worked together on creative tasks for four months.

The researchers found that diversity improved team performance in groups with a high level of mutual understanding. Yet diversity hindered teams at the opposite end of the spectrum. (Polzer, Milton, and Swann, Administrative Science Quarterly, 2002.)

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Double up on diverse teammates

A study of NBA teams points to a beneficial way of structuring diversity for organizations that have two clear tiers of workers—think partners and associates, or physicians and residents. On the court, these two tiers are the starters and subs.

Researchers analyzed 23 years of league data, using players’ college conferences as a measure of diversity, since different conferences tend to have different playing styles. The results show a benefit to having a diversity of playing styles among starters that is duplicated among bench players. Teams with this sort of overlapping diversity won 10.7 percent more games per season.

The researchers point out that without this redundancy of diversity, people might forget about the skills that make them unique. (Smith and Hou, Organization Science, 2014.)

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Don’t always opt for a generalist. Sometimes you need a specialist.

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The allure of recruiting a jack- or jill-of-all-trades is strong. So strong, it seems, that managers are biased against recruiting and rewarding specialists—even when a specialist is exactly what their organization needs.

This was the finding in a set of experiments, where participants were tasked with assembling a fictional team. They were more likely to favor generalists, even when a specialist would have a bigger impact. Why? We have a natural tendency to compare people against one another, the researchers say. And when you compare specialists who excel in a single area to generalists who are high-achieving in multiple areas, those specialists don’t look as impressive.

The lesson: evaluate job candidates on their own merits, as opposed to in contrast to another candidate, when you know a specialist is what your team needs. (Wang and Murnighan, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2013.)

Talk through how to incorporate your specialists onto the team

Simply bringing a specialist onboard, though, may not be enough to make your team hum efficiently. Team members should talk through how to use their expert before embarking on a group task.

This was demonstrated in an experiment with four-person teams that had to crack a hypothetical terrorist plot. To do so, the teams needed experts in facial recognition to analyze security footage and experts in verbal memory to analyze email evidence. Teams with these experts performed better than those without them only when they started with 10 minutes of collaborative planning before diving into the challenge. (Woolley, Gerbasi, Chabris, Kosslyn, and Hackman, Small Group Research, 2008.)

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Team members’ history together, especially if it’s been successful, can help a lot.

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There’s a euphoria to being part of a winning team, whether you claimed the championship title or nailed the product launch. And, research shows, winning together also predicts future success—over and above simply having highly skilled people on your team.

In looking at four professional sports leagues and a multiplayer online game, researchers found that the level of talent helped to predict whether a team would win. But taking into account a history of shared successes also helped predict wins—above and beyond the effect of talent. (Mukherjee, Huang, Neidhardt, Uzzi, and Contractor, Nature Human Behaviour, 2018.)

Having a history of collaboration matters for scientific teams, too. A different study looked at researchers in cell biology and physics and found that some groups of scientists had collaborated frequently enough to be dubbed “super ties.” Those super ties were a significant boon to a scientist’s career, leading to more published papers and a higher rate of citations on those papers, which is an indicator that the papers were considered higher impact. (Petersen, PNAS, 2015.)

Don’t get too insular. Make sure you bring in new people and ideas.

Relying on super ties alone would be a mistake. You want some inflow of new people and ideas. But how much?

One study looked at the six-person teams that create Broadway musicals. (These creative teams tend to be made up of a composer, lyricist, librettist, choreographer, director, and producer.) The researchers wanted to explore the best way to assemble teams within tight-knit fields where the same people often collaborate with each other or with people who have one degree of separation from previous collaborators.

They found that both critical acclaim and financial success peak when there is a medium level of these tight-knit connections: Too much, and new ideas don’t flow in. Too little, and there aren’t enough of the common bonds that allow teams to establish trust and enable members to vouch for each other’s innovative instincts. (Uzzi and Spiro, American Journal of Sociology, 2005.)

Another study looked specifically at the benefit of bringing new people into team brainstorming exercises. In several experiments with three-person teams, groups that retained their same makeup generated fewer total ideas and fewer different kinds of ideas than did teams that had one of their three members swapped out.

And it wasn’t simply that the newcomers came in with their creative guns blazing. The study showed that having a productive new person join a team increased the productivity of the old-timers, as well. (Choi and Thompson, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2005.)

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This extends to financial services, too ...

So Broadway musicals and brainstormers benefit from some turnover. But how about the very different world of private equity? Indeed, investors often seek out team stability among private equity managers with the assumption that this cohesion boosts profits.

But a study of 138 private equity managers over 20 years shows that this is not the case. Some degree of team turnover actually improved fund performance over both the short and long term. This is likely because turnover helps get rid of poor performers while also bringing in team members with new skills, which helps private equity companies adapt to a changing environment. (Cornelli, Simintzi, and Vig, Working paper, 2019.)

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As well as to scientific ideas.

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How big of a team should you convene? It depends on what your ultimate goal is.

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How big of a team should you assemble? It depends whether you are trying to advance the field by building off prior discoveries—in which case a large team is best—or whether you're trying to disrupt your field by going in a totally new direction—in which case you might want a small, nimble team.

That’s the finding from an analysis of 65 million scientific papers, patents, and software products from 1954 to 2014. This may be because large teams need to secure significant and ongoing funding, so they are less likely to pursue something risky and novel—whereas smaller teams or solo authors are able to take more risk, as they have less to lose. (Wu, Wang, and Evans, Nature, 2019.)

It also depends on how easily you can delegate tasks.

Delegation is nothing new. But it has become increasingly easy, as advances in technology allow highly skilled professionals to offload more of their work to subordinates in order to focus on the tasks that require the knowledge that they, alone, possess. So managers within these “knowledge hierarchies” should ensure that their teams are big enough to accommodate sufficient delegation.

Take lawyers, for example. Once upon a time, law partners were the exclusive fonts of knowledge in their firm, holding much of the institution’s information and expertise in their brains. This made it difficult to delegate to associates. But new technology, like the legal search engine Lexis, changed that by collecting much of that knowledge in a place that associates can easily access. One study of all U.S. law firms found that these and other changes helped increase the productivity boost that partners got from delegating to associates by 30 percent between 1977 and 1992. (Garicano and Hubbard, Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization. 2018.)

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Takeaways

Teams are more important than they used to be because there’s so much more to know in a given field.

Teams have their own level of intelligence, which is separate from the combined intelligence of their team members.

Sometimes building a team with lots of really talented people actually hurts the team’s performance.

Diversity is often an asset for teams, but can also lead to common pitfalls. So be thoughtful and deliberate in how you lead diverse teams.

Don’t always opt for a generalist. Sometimes you need a specialist.

Team members’ history together, especially if it’s been successful, can help a lot.

How big of a team should you convene? It depends on what your ultimate goal is.