It’s Super Bowl week, so we here at Kellogg Insight are thinking about teams. Specifically, we’re thinking about one consequence often faced by growing teams: as they expand, it may get tougher for team members to talk to each other. New research from Jillian Chown, an associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, looks at how communications change when an organization spreads its team across multiple locations.

Plus: Harry Kraemer, a clinical professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, offers practical leadership advice on improving relatability and mental health.

An office divided

Chown and her colleagues looked at a Canadian oncology center’s 2016 expansion to understand what happened when many of the center’s clinicians were moved into a different facility. The move distanced some clinicians from the center’s radiation-treatment planning room, which housed specialized hardware and software and was the go-to space for interdisciplinary teams to congregate and plan treatments for cancer patients.

After the expansion, the room got a lot less usage by the clinicians who were relocated and by those who stayed. And face-to-face interactions dropped among members of the treatment team. Many teams turned to email for treatment planning instead for all but the most complex cases.

When expanding an organization, one unintended consequence that leaders may want to keep in mind is that shifting teams around will likely change the ways they communicate.

“Organizations that are growing or moving can create disruption among their employee interactions,” says Chown. “It can affect both communication and collaboration, and this research shows that organizations need to be prepared for those consequences.”

Read more in Kellogg Insight.

Looking out for a team’s mental health

As a former Fortune 500 CEO, Kraemer has a lot of experience leading large teams. For him, supporting the mental health of his teams was critical to their collective success, both economically—with missed work amounting to $47.6 billion dollars a year in productivity losses for U.S. companies—and for every employee as an individual.

“If we say that every person matters, then addressing the behavioral, emotional, and mental health needs of others is the responsibility of every leader,” Kraemer writes. Part of addressing a team’s individual needs comes down to making the effort to relate to them one on one and getting to know what makes them tick. This will help “team members know that they are seen and cared for by their boss.”

Kraemer suggests bundling this genuine concern with concrete steps to reduce unnecessary pressure on team members, including by allowing for greater schedule flexibility.

When coupled with a collective understanding that failure should not be stigmatized, team members can relax and prosper.

“To reduce the team’s worry, fear, pressure, anxiety, and stress, you let them know that failure is to be expected,” Kraemer writes, “especially if that failure happens early on and they learn from the experience.”

Read more from Kraemer in Forbes.

See you next week.

Fred Schmalz, Business and Art Editor
Kellogg Insight