MOOC: Leading Teams

Here are my notes from Leading Teams MOOC from Michigan on Coursera.

What is the Optimal Team Size?

• Benefits of larger teams
  • More capabilities
  • Moe resources
  • More information and input
  • More ideas and possible solutions
• Benefits of smaller teams
  • More cohesive
  • higher member satisfaction
  • Faster decision making, consensus
  • More effective individual contribution
• For startups, larger founding team size “positively predicts how fast these starts grow, and ultimately, the positive cashflow that these startups experience.”
• For both large and small firms, larger board size also positively impact firm performance. The impact on smaller firms is greater than larger firms.
• “Among other findings, the study suggests that the group size which leads to optimal satisfaction of group member — i.e. between 4 and 5 people — is not the size which leads to maximal effectiveness; both smaller and larger groups performed more effectively than did 4- and 5-person groups…” —Richard Hackman, DTIC Scientific Report, 1971
• Team effectiveness optimal range: 5-10
• “Larger teams suffer from increased relationship conflict, process and coordination costs and social loafing…”

Demographics

• Surface level diversity
  • Observable characteristics
    • Gender
    • Age
    • Race and nationality
    • Education background
• Deep level diversity
  • The non-observable characteristics of a person
    • Personality
    • Values
    • Abilities
    • Beliefs and motives
• “Job-relevant diversity, which would often be things like abilities, has a positive effect on team innovation in this case, whereas background diversity, that would be something like race, nationality. It could be educational background. It could be functional background. On average, at least according to these studies or these data, has a negative effect on innovation.”
• “the variability of age, zero impact on innovation in this case in these banks.”
• “average tenure, the longer the people have been with the team, the less innovation you see.”
• “And the greater the variability in tenure, the less innovation you see.”
• “On average, the more education the team, the more innovative.”
• “And then with functional background, the more variability we have in the team in term of functional background, functional being we have some people form marketing, some people from finance, some people from operations. That would be a high variance in term of functional background, a high variance team. Whereas if everybody was from marketing, that would be a low variance team. What we find is that the more variability or variance we have in functional background, the more diversity. The better our team performance in terms of innovation.”
• Strong demographic faultlines: “where it’s similarity on multiple dimensions, creating subgroups that are extremely strong on these demographic faultlines within the group.
• Diverse and weak demographic faultlines: “everybody’s different on every dimension, function, age, gender, and race.”
• “Demographic faultlines, on average, at least according to these data, have negative effect on team functioning.”
• “demographic faultlines, they reduce cohesion for the team overall, but they actually increase cohesion for subgroups within the team.”
• “the stronger the demographic faultlines is wishing the top management team, the less likely that team is to invest in a novel foreign territory.”
• “Sometimes you’re going to be just given a team. And you’re gonna inherit, or be given, these demographic faultlines and if that is the case, you must develop shared vision, shared goal, shared objective, to offset the negative impact of that fault line.”

Team Diversity: Personality

• “Extroverted people preferring more stimulating social environments versus introverted people preferring that less stimulating less social environment.”
• “Conscientiousness, this is really attention to detail or how much you strive for achievement. Would be the more you strive for achievement, the more attention you have to detail, the higher you are in conscientiousness, the less you do those things, the lower you are.”
• “Agreeable versus disagreeable. We all know people who are highly agreeable, will go along with pretty much anything and we also know people who are generally disagreeable, that will wanna argue just for the sake of arguing.”
• “Same with openness to experience. We know people who are generally open to trying new things, trying new experiences, experimentation. We often know people who are not open to new experiences, they like their routine”
• “emotional stability. These are the folks that if you’re highly emotionally stable no matter how much adversity you face, no matter how much unexpected events come your way, you’re able to stay calm, not too positive, not too negative. As opposed to folks who lack that emotional stability or what we often refer to in the personality research world is more neurotic, where depending on the situation the reader, really high or really low, really positive or really negative, and those are the folks that are less emotionally stable.”
• High openness and high emotional stability improves team performance during high task conflict
• With more people that are high on extraversion or Openness, if high confidence, greater team creativity. If low confidence, lower team creativity.
• “If creativity’s the goal, you want people who are extraverted, you want people who are open. But you are going to have to build that confidence within the team that they can perform and deliver on this creative task. Because if they are not confident, that extraversion, that openness can actually undermine your creativity. So select people who are extraverted. Select people into your team who are open and then work as the team leader to build that teams confidence in their ability to perform this creative task.”
• “The positive correlations mean that as conscientiousness increases, so does team performance.”
• “the more heterogeneous my team is in terms of conscientiousness, the more diversity, the worse my team performs.”

Team Diversity: Values

• Power Distance (High or Low)
  • “So in power distance for example, if you are my boss and I am high on power distance, a value that I hold. Is I hold you up here on a pedestal and the separation between you and me is much greater then in societies, where power distance is quite low. Where even if you are my superior, I see us as more equals or peers, and that power distance is much lower.”
• Individualism (or Collectivism)
• Masculinity (or Felinity)
  • “It’s not about being male or female in terms of gender, but it’s about the values that are associated with those different genders and so. As a man I can hold certain values that tend to be associated with more feminine association. Or, even as a woman, one might hold values that tend to be associated with more masculinity.”
• Uncertainty Avoidance (High or Low)
• Long-term Orientation (or Short-term)
• “Greater levels of collectivism in groups lead to higher team performance.”
• “You can cultivate this preference for teamwork by insuring that you have goals that are aligned with team performance. You can cultivate this collectivism by creating shared goals, a shared vision for what we can accomplish together.”
• “The more you can get team members to perceive, to feel, to believe that they are aligned in terms of their values with the values of their other team members. The value of their boss, the value of the team as a whole, even the value of the organization, can drive really positive benefits and outcomes for your organization and for your team specifically.”
• “the higher the level of perceived fit on average, fit with the group you get higher satisfaction, higher commitment, higher cohesion, higher performance, and less likely to leave the organization, less likely to quit.”

Goal Setting in Teams

• “Specific learning goals in teams focus individuals’ attention on narrow elements of their tasks, thus reducing coordination, communication and teamwork — resulting in missed opportunities for learning and innovation.”
• “And so what we are now recommending is if you’re going to set a specific performance goal, perfect, fine. But if your focus is on learning you want in teams to set a more general learning goal. And not be as specific as we would if we were applying the smart framework to learning in teams.”
• At the individual level: “For accepted goals, performance increases linearly and significantly with goal difficulty”
• “Learning orientation is the team understands that it’s gonna make some mistakes, but it’s committed to learning from them. And has an open mindset to to taking risks, to trying new things, all in service of learning. When you combine that high learning orientation with difficult goals, you get team adaptation. You get better team performance in these dynamic situations. But if you combine those difficult goals with the absence of that learning orientation, you actually see worse team adaptation and performance.”
• “If you as a manager or leader of your team, if you want to improve performance by setting difficult, challenging stretch goals, you better sure that your team is cultivating and embracing a learning mindset, a growth mindset, a learning orientation, as opposed to that performance orientation. Where they’re trying to avoid making mistakes, or avoid looking silly, or trying to prove to other people how good they are. You want them to be focused on taking a few risks, experimenting, being open to new ideas, and focused on learning”
• “For rejected goals, performance decreases linearly and significantly with goal difficulty”
• “We find something similarly interesting in teams where when the team is committed to its goal, performance generally at the team level improves. But what we find is that is especially true when team members are extremely interdependent with one another.”
• Article: “The Surprising Problem of Too Much Talent” Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprising-problem-of-too-much-talent/
  • Tradeoff between top talent and teamwork
    • “the percentage of top talent on a team affects intrateam coordination. For the basketball study, teams with the highest levels of top performers had fewer assists and defensive rebounds, and lower field-goal percentages. These failures in strategic, collaborative play undermined the team’s effectiveness.”
    • “extreme levels of top talent did not have the same negative effect in baseball, which experts have argued involves much less interdependent play.”
    • “Together these findings suggest that high levels of top talent will be harmful in arenas that require coordinated, strategic efforts, as the quest for the spotlight may trump the teamwork needed to get the job done.”

Team Structure

• Formal Team Structure
  • Departmentation: the grouping of jobs and/or activities
    • Generalist vs Specialist
      • “Specialist structure work best in predictable, routine task environments because of added efficiency.”
      • “Generalist structures work best in dynamic task environments because of added flexibility.”
      • “Teams that shifted from a specialist to a generalist structure performed 6% better than teas that shifted fro a generalist to a specialist structure”
        • “Teams that start out in a specialist structure develop norms for coordination and cooperation because they must depend on each other to get their jobs done. These norms carry forward and are the generalist structure more effective.”
  • Centralization: the distribution of decision making authority
    • For creative, problem-solving task, decentralized structure (flexibility) leads to better team performance.
• • • For executive-focused task, centralized structure (efficiency) leads to better team performance.
    • Centralized Authority
      • Less team interdependence
      • Execution-focused tasks
      • Low complexity tasks
      • High diversity in experience
    • Decentralized / Shared Authority
      • Greater tea interdependence
      • Creativity-focused tasks
      • High complexity tasks
      • Low diversity in experience
    • “That decentralized to centralized switch, really got in the way of the team’s performance.”
    • “And what we find is, teams that switch from centralized to decentralized experience less of a negative impact from that switch.”
    • “So conclusion, switching has cost. If you can afford to stay in your current structure, your team’s gonna perform better on average.”
  • Reward Structure
    • Competition vs cooperation
      • If your goal is speed/efficiency, competition based reward system will result in higher team performance.
      • If your goal is accuracy/quality, cooperation based reward system will result in higher team performance.
      • “Switching from competitive to cooperative reward structures is difficult”
        • “Norms fro competitive structure carry over.”
      • “Switching from cooperative to competitive reward structure is easier (preserve cooperative norms)
    • Individual-based vs team-based
      • Mix rewards have mixed evidence
      • “on average, teams perform better when they are given group based, cooperation based incentives, to really work together as a team.”
    • Folly A, Folly B problem
      • “You say you’re gonna reward one thing, but in reality you’re actually rewarding something totally different.”
      • Common example: Want teamwork and reward individual performance
    • “Reward Your Best Teams, Not just Star Players” By Michael Schrage
      • URL: https://hbr.org/2015/06/reward-your-best-teams-not-just-star-players
      • “For every ‘above and beyond’ award given to a dedicated individual, there better be a comparable honor given to a team that delivered. Teams, not just individuals, should get their fair share of bonus pools. A perceived — or real — absence of fairness can cripple team culture. Organizations that truly want their people to work better together must stop publicly discriminating against teams in favor of individuals.”
      • “People need to feel that the benefits of being team players measurably outweigh the perceived and real costs of compromise and self-sacrifice.”
      • Attribute: “Where acknowledgement sends a signal, attribution assigns credit and responsibility.”
      • “Better team and teamwork metrics and analytics will transform cultural and operational expectations around how people can create new value together.”
  • Virtual Team Structure
    • “degree to which your team is dispersed geographically or nationally; and/or communicates via technology”
    • Effects of virtuality on team performance
      • Geographic dispersion
        • Effect on Innovation: “Reduces contextual knowledge; increases coordination complexity”
        • Key Success Factors: “Foster exchange of contextual knowledge”
      • National dispersion
        • Effect on Innovation: “Introduces different communication preferences; reduces identification with the team”
        • Key Success Factors: “Bridge in-group and out-group members; integrate preferences while allowing for uniqueness”
      • Electronic dependence
        • Effect on Innovation: “Reduces control and monitoring; reduces clarity and communication richness”
        • Key Success Factors: “Increase feedback giving and seeking; develop social cues and learn e-com norms”
    • How to Manage Virtual Team Structures
      • Strategy #1: “Foster Team Empowerment”
        • “If you’re in a virtual setting, if your team feels highly empowered to make decisions, to determine how it’s gonna work together, then you get some positive performance benefits, maybe even better than face to face in some cases.”
        • “Low empowerment combined with low face to face interaction is your worst nightmare, a disaster for your team’s performance.”
      • Strategy #2: “Build Support Structures”
        • Example support structures:
          • “Clear and fair reward structure”
          • “Clear task structures and roles”
          • “Consistent information sharing”
      • Strategy #3: “Build a ‘Safe’ Environment”
        • “When we talk about team dynamics and team process the importance of the safe culture, the safe climate within the team. Where people feel like they can disagree, they can speak up, they can speak their mind. We’re finding that in highly virtual teams, especially when we’re geographically dispersed, if you do not build this safe climate where people feel like they can speak up and challenge each other, your team performance suffers”
• Informal Team Structure
  • Team Roles (Behavior Types)
    • Investigator: “explores opportunities, develops contacts; developed stakeholder insight”
    • Teamwork: “helps team gel; listens and averts friction; builds trust in the team”
    • Coordinator: “focuses on team objectives; draws out team members; delegates work”
    • Plant: “fosters creativity; solves complex problems; generates ideas”
    • Implementer: “turns ideas into practical actions; develops efficient work plans”
    • Finisher: “polishes and evaluates work outcomes for accuracy; provides quality control”
    • Evaluator: “provides a logical eye; offers objective evaluation of the team’s options”
      • help avoid group think
    • Shaper: “provides drive and motivation to ensure team maintains focus and motivation”
    • Specialist: “brings in-depth knowledge of a key area to the team”
    • See: http://www.belbin.com/about/belbin-team-roles/
    • “Teams need to be balanced, meaning most/all of these roles need to be fulfilled in the team”
    • “If you wanna get the benefits of that competitive reward structure, you have to have an open, explicit dialogue about these roles within teams. If you don’t, as you see here, in this study, team performance is dramatically reduced.”
    • “Team charters: Getting Your Team off to a Great Start”
      • Source: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_95.htm
      • “Team Charters are documents that define the purpose of the team, how it will work, and what the expected outcomes are.”
      • Context
        • “What problem is being addressed?”
        • “What result or delivery is expected?”
        • “Why is this important?”
      • Mission and Objective
        • “By defining a mission, the team knows what it has to achieve.”
        • “The next stage is to take the mission, and turn it into measurable goals and objectives. These are the critical targets and milestones that will keep the team on track.”
      • Composition and Roles
        • “Look to your mission and objectives to determine who is needed on the team to make sure its goals can be accomplished.”
      • Authority and Boundaries
        • “With the roles defined, you now need to look at what team members can and can’t do to achieve the mission”
      • Resources and Support
        • “This section lists the resources available to the team to accomplish its goals. This includes budgets, time, equipment, and people. In conjunction with the performance assessments, changes to the resources required should be monitored regularly.”
      • Operations
        • “This section outlines how the team will operate on a day-to-day basis.”
      • Negotiation and Agreement
        • “Objectives, composition, roles, boundaries and resources ideally emerge through negotiation between the sponsor, the team leader, the team, and other stakeholders.”
  • Team Norms
    • “regular behavior patterns that are accepted, relatively stable, and expected by group members”
      • “How are decisions made in the team?”
      • “Expected and accepted behavior in team meetings?”
      • “How is conflict resolved?”
      • “How do team members communicate with each other?”
    • Why should you care?
      • “In those teams where cooperative norms were the dominant perception, the individual members in those teams were more satisfied with their jobs. They were rated by others as performing at a higher level, and they were compensated at a higher level.”
      • “The teams that had dominant cooperative norms, they met more regularly early in the team life cycle. Which really help these teams coordinate more effectively over the entire life cycle of the team project.  So, in contrast, teams that did not have those cooperative norms. They didn’t meet as regularly early in the team process. Leaving a lot of that coordination work to come later. Which created all kinds of crises and problems in terms of team functioning down the road.”
      • “When the team members hold themselves accountable, and have high expectations for themselves. The leader, maybe naturally, has less influence on what those norms are. When the team members in the staff have high expectations, they’re defining and setting those expectations. They’re setting and defining what the norms are. However, when you as a leader walk into a team. Where those norms, those expectations among the staff, among the team members are ill-defined or they’re low. You have a huge influence on what those norms are. And that’s the gold or the maize line that you see here. Is when your staff has ill-defined or low expectations, and can’t articulate very clearly what the norms are. As a leader, you setting high expectations, holding people accountable to a higher standard. A higher set of norms for effective team functioning.”
  • Team Charter
    • “formal document that specifies team role, norms, expectations, processes, and rewards/sanctions.”
      • “Individual and team goals (with emphasis on creating alignment)”
      • “Roles and responsibilities (task and social)”
      • “Timelines and key milestones”
      • “Expectations related to meetings, attendance, and communication”
      • “Protocols for giving and receiving feedback”
      • “Rewards for performance; sanctions for non-performance”
    • “the charter can actually help make up for an ineffective strategy.”
      • “as we discover that our strategy is ineffective, the chances of us being able to identify that we have an ineffective strategy, learn from that experience, and adapt and be flexible as a team is much greater if we have invested the time upfront to clarify those roles, norms, expectations and so forth.”

Conflict and Trust among Team Members

• Coordination
  • Interdependence
    • Pooled Interdependence: “This is when your teammates work on separate, independent tasks that jointly contribute to the overall product.”
    • Sequential Interdependence: “occurs when the outputs of one of the teammates become inputs for the other”
    • Reciprocal Interdependence: “the situation when the outputs of one of the teammates becomes inputs for the other, and vice versa, often in very reciprocal, cyclical interactive fashion.”
  • Team size: best between 6-10 people
  • “Have clear goals and performance standards”
  • “Minimize links in communication” i.e. members communicate directly.
  • “Division of labor should be focused on the ultimate goal of the group”
  • “Don’t give the most important task to the least committed person!”
  • “Try to preserve equity across projects and not within individual projects”
• Common Information Effect
  • Common information = information shared by all the teammates
  • “It turns out that in teams, we overwhelmingly discuss common information. And that’s what’s known as the common information effect.”
  • “Probabilistically is more likely to come up”
  • “Instantly reinforced”
  • “More likely to be recalled after meetings”
  • “Perceived is more credible than unique information”
  • “Overshadows unique information in making group decisions”
    • “it defeats the entire purpose of teams. We use teams to a large extent to build on unique insights and information possessed by our team mates.”
  • Strategies do NOT help mitigate common information effect:
    • “Increase the amount of discussion”
    • “Separate information review and decision”
    • “Increasing size of the team”
    • “Increasing volume of information”
    • “Increasing team/individual accountability”
  • Strategies that work
    • “Encouraging norms of debate and critical thinking vs. just consensus and getting along”
    • “Frame as ‘problem to be solved’ rather than a ‘decision to be made’”
    • “Rank-order alternatives instead of choosing best option”
    • “Alert team to different expertise possessed by teammates”
    • “Minimize status differences among teammates”
    • “Pay attention, alert teammates to unique information, ask questions and engage others”
  • Participation as a function of group size
    • “In typical 4-person group, 2 people do over 62% of the talking”
    • “In a 6-person group, 3 people duo over 86% of the talking”
    • “In an 8-person group, 3 people do over 77% of the talking”
    • Need to engage team members to get unique information
•  Social Loafing
  • “So why do we see this effect? You know, the major reason is diffusion of responsibility, our hiding in the crowd. We expect somebody else to pick up the slack.”
  • What can we do about this effect?
    • “manage the size of the group and use smaller teams.”
    • “You want to address social loafing early, before these dysfunctional norms set in which are then very difficult to reverse.”
    • “Assign meaningful tasks”
    • “Assign unique roles and teams”
    • “Make individual contributions identifiable”
    • “Use hybrid (team-individual) reward structure”
    • “Invest in relationships formation in teams”
• Language
  • “Research by Sidon Yillah from Harvard shows that we often equate language fluency with expertise and competence and as a result we can wrongly dismiss insights and contributions from those teammates who are less fluent in that language.”
  • As a fluent speaker
    • “Solicit inputs from teammates prior to the meeting”
    • “Prepare written handouts in advance”
    • “Adjust your vocabulary and pace of speech”
    • “Refrain from dominating the meeting”
  • As a less fluent speaker
    • “Resist avoidance behaviors”
    • “Prepare, prepare, prepare!”
    • “Ask if people understand what you are saying”
    • “Ask colleagues to repeat if you missed a point”
    • “Refrain from switching to native language”
• Managing Conflict
  • Task (Cognitive) Conflict
    • Origins
      • “Divergence on the process”
      • “Task interdependence”
    • Signs and Signals
      • “Focused on work and tasks”
    • Consequences
      • “Can be benign”
      • “Can break groupthink”
      • “Can foster creativity”
  • Relationship (Affective) Conflict
    • Origins
      • “Divergent values & goals”
      • “Escalating task conflict”
    • Signs and signals
      • “Focused on personalities and relationship dynamics”
    • Consequences
      • “Highly destructive”
      • “Threatens viability”
      • “Diverts energy”
  • “the teams that are described by low levels of task and low levels of relationship conflict, are the teams that avoid any sort of disagreement, any sort of debate. They’re focused on getting along. These are the teams that are particularly prone to groupthink”
  • “the teams that have high levels of relationship conflict, and that conflict is detrimental for team performance.”
  • “the teams that are high on both relationship and task conflict. Most typically what happens here is that teams are unable to control escalating and increasing levels of task conflict. That spirals out of control and transforms into relationship conflict. One of the major causes of relationship conflict is increasing and escalating task conflict.”
  • “the one that are high in task conflict and low in relationship conflict, that are most likely to capitalize on the benefits of constructive debates.”
  • “high levels of task conflict, exceptionally high levels of task conflict, can make implementation difficult because it might be harder to reach consensus.”
  • “high levels of task conflict can lower satisfaction in your team.”
  • “And keep in mind, that even if task conflict producers benefits for your team performance. You’re typically at a higher risk of developing relationship conflict.”
  • Mitigate Relationship Conflict
    • “Establish and reinforce norms that make vigorous debates the norm rather than the exception”
    • “Address early!”
    • “Try to transform relationship conflict into task conflict”
    • “Avoid inflammatory language and ask people to re-state their views”
    • “Manage task conflict iteratively”
  • Resolving Task Conflicts
    • “One broad way of resolving conflicts is by using power, formal or informal.”
    • “Even if you hold the power advantage, using power to resolve conflicts can inflict irreparable damage on the relationships.”
    • “We can also resolve conflicts by using standards and rules, such as a standard of fairness. Keep in mind, however, that our interpretations of those standards can become egocentrically biased. And so that approach can fail too.”
    • “By far, the most effective approach to resolve conflicts would involve your attending to your interests and the interests of the other party. This way we can transform a dispute, an episode of conflict, into a negotiation.”
    • “The most effective way to resolve conflict is to recognize, that in most situations, we can add other issues to a negotiation and begin to make trade-offs across those issues. So practically, I will do this for you, if you do such-and-such for me, is the most effective way to approach the resolution of any conflictual episode.”

Creating Sustainable Team Performance and Learning

• Evaluating Team Performance
  • Subjective performance vs Objective performance
  • “The teams that are low on objective performance and low on subjective performance. Those are the teams that are underperforming. They need help, they’re struggling and they know it.”
  • “I would also worry about teams that are high on subjective performance, but low on objective performance. Those are the teams that probably need a reality check. They feel like they’re doing spectacularly well in their performance until they get that sales report or the customer satisfaction scores.”
  • “And we would also worry about those teams that are high on objective performance, but low on subjective and perceived performance. Now those are the teams that did really well on objective performance metrics, sales statistics, cost reduction statistics. But don’t feel good about their performance. One of the reasons for this is that the teammates are not entirely satisfied with their experience of being in a group.”
  •  Questions for evaluating team performance:
    • “how did the team do on objective performance metrics?”
    • “are your teammates satisfied with group interaction.
      • Effective teams contribute to personal individual levels of satisfaction of their teammates and to the overall wellbeing of the team.”
    • Ae you getting professional development opportunities that improves your knowledge and skill set?
      • Is the team improving in a way that will enhance future performance?
• Creativity
  • “individuals working independently come up with more than two and half times the number of ideas and nearly three times the number or percentage of good ideas, as evaluated by independent experts.”
  • Factors for lower team creativity
    • Production blocking: “In a team meeting, we need to take turns to speak, and that naturally reduces the number of ideas each one of us can communicate.”
    • Evaluation apprehension: “we’re often concerned that people will judge us by the quality of our ideas and that fear of judgement, fear of negative evaluation leads us to not share some our ideas.”
    • Dynamic of anchoring: “when we are given a piece of information, we’re only incrementally just off of that piece of information.” “So in the team brainstorming meeting, I can subconsciously influenced by the ideas my teammates are communicating. And as a result, my ideas are likely to be much more similar to their ideas, which you can see in the aggregate reduces a diversity of ideas our team generates as a whole.”
    • Social loafing
  • Best practice: “Solicit creative ideas from teammates individually, before the meeting”
  • Nominal Group Technique
    • “Step 1: Each participant works alone to write down his/her individual ideas”
    • “Step 2: Each participant presents his/her and write them down on the board (no discussion is allowed until all ideas are on the board)”
    • “Step 3: After alludes have been presented, teammates conduct an open discussion of all ideas for clarification purpose only. No evaluative comments allowed.”
    • “Step 4: Group members vote by secrete ballot to rank-order ideas”
  • Time Limit
    • “Set a tight timeline for a brainstorming session (e.g. 10 minutes)”
    • “After 10 minutes, challenge your team to double its performance in the next 10 minutes.”
• Psychological Safety
  • Psychological Safety: “A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.” source: Edmondson (1991: 350)
  • “So if I feel like my team is high in psychological safety, I’m more likely to point out what I think can be errors in our decision making. I’m more likely to ask questions without the risk of appearing incompetent.”
  • “teams that have well-developed psychological safety make fewer errors, they’re much more likely to overcome the common information effect and capitalize on the unique information insights of its teammates. And they are much more effective in learning and acquiring new knowledge.”
  • Drivers of psychological safety:
    • Team leader behaviors
      • “Being accessible and approachable”
      • “Explicitly inviting input and feedback”
      • “Modeling openness and fallibility”
    • Trusting relationships
      • “invest in interpersonal relationships”
    • Practice fields
      • “Trial (‘dry’) runs, off site and off-line meetings, simulations”
    • Organizational support
      • “Access to resources and information”
  • “Rules without relationships equals rebellion” — John Beilein
• Transitive Memory
  • two key components
    • “One is the stocks of knowledge possessed by your teammates.”
    • “And the second is awareness of who knows what in a team.”
  • Benefits
    • “Better search and acquisition of information”
    • “Tacit coordination & eliminating coordination losses”
    • “Less likely to fall into common information trap”
    • “Teams perform better on tasks that require memory and information retrieval”
  • Developing Transactive Memory
    • “Training in work teams”
    • “Training focused on the task to be done”
    •  “Especially relevant for execution-focused teams”
• Facilitating Team Learning
  • “Emphasize strategic imperative of learning”
  • “Foster continuity in team membership”
  • “Post-action debriefing”
  • “Sharing workload”

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