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Summary The changing ecology of teams

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  • December 4, 2018
  • 7
  • 2018/2019
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By: mbirnie • 5 year ago

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Sessie 6: The changing ecology
of teams
The overcommitted organization (Mortensen & Gardner)
Across the world, senior managers and team leaders are increasingly frustrated by conflicts
arising from what we refer to as multiteaming—having their people assigned to multiple
projects simultaneously
Advantages:
 It allows groups to share individuals’ time and brainpower across functional and
departmental lines.
 It increases efficiency.
 Spreading expensive resources across teams that don’t need 100% of those
resources 100% of the time. As a result, they avoid costly downtime during projects’
slow periods, and they can bring highly specialized experts in-house to dip in and out
of critical projects as needed.
 Multiteaming also provides important pathways for knowledge transfer and the
dissemination of best practices throughout organizations.
Disadvantages:
 The costs are substantial and need to be managed.
 Teams discover that the constant entrance and exit of members weakens group
cohesion and identity, making it harder to build trust and resolve issues.
 Individual employees pay a big price as well. They often experience stress, fatigue,
and burnout as they struggle to manage their time and engagement across projects.
Why this matters now
Why is multiteaming practically ubiquitous (= alomtegenwoordig)?
 First, organizations must draw on expertise in multiple disciplines to solve many large,
complex problems.
o Organizations can’t rely on generalists to come up with comprehensive, end-
to-end solutions. They must combine the contributions of experts with deep
knowledge in various domains.
 Second, with crowded markets and reduced geographic and industry barriers,
organizations now face greater pressure to keep costs down and stretch resources.
 Third, organizational models are moving away from hierarchical, centralized staffing
to give employees more choice in their projects and improve talent development,
engagement, and retention.
o More and more people have at-will contracts and work not only on multiple
projects but for multiple organizations.
Managers see some of the benefits and some of the drawbacks firsthand but rarely all at
once, because those things play out through different mechanisms and at different levels.
For the most part, the benefits of multiteaming involve efficiency and knowledge flow, while
the costs are largely intra- or interpersonal and psychological.
MANAGING THE CHALLENGES
Priorities for team leaders

1

, Coordinating members’ efforts (both within and across teams) and promoting engagement
and adaptability are the key challenges for team leaders. Focusing on those goals early on,
before your team even meets for the first time, will help you establish stronger relationships,
reduce coordination costs, ease the friction of transitions, ward off political skirmishes, and
identify risks so that you can better mitigate them. Here’s how to do it:
 Launch the team well to establish trust and familiarity
o It forges strong bonds and interpersonal trust, which team members need in
order to seek and offer constructive feedback, introduce one another to
valuable network connections, and rely on one another’s technical expertise.
o When multiteaming, in contrast, people tend to be hyperfocused on efficiency
and are less inclined to share personal information.
o Make sure team members spend some time in the beginning getting to know
their colleagues.
o Formally launching the team—in person, if at all possible—helps a lot,
especially if members open up about their own development goals.
o Research shows that team kickoffs can improve performance by up to 30%, in
part because they increase peer-to-peer accountability.
 Map everyone’s skills
o Figure out the full portfolio of capabilities that each person brings to the project
—both technical skills and broader kinds of knowledge, such as familiarity with
the customer’s decision-making process, or a knack for negotiation, or insights
about an important target market.
o Make sure everyone knows how each teammate contributes. This increases
the chances that members will learn from one another.
o We’ve found that even familiar teams are likely to hold outdated assumptions
about individuals’ potential contributions and often disagree about their
teammates’ expertise.
o It also streamlines communication (no need to “reply all” if you know who’s
actually responsible for an issue). And it equips members to hold one another
accountable for high-quality, on-time delivery, which is otherwise tricky when
people are frequently coming and going.
 Manage time across teams
o As you form a team, explicitly talk about everyone’s competing priorities up
front. By preemptively identifying crunch periods across projects, you can
revamp deadlines or plan on spending more hands-on time yourself at certain
points. Making the topic “discussable” so that people won’t feel guilty about
conflicts allows the team to openly and productively handle these issues when
they come up later.
o When you plan other team meetings, invite exactly who’s needed and no one
else, to minimize scheduling conflicts with other teams.
 Create a learning environment
o Learning makes work feel more meaningful, and it’s supposed to be a major
benefit of multiteaming—but it often gets crowded out by time pressures.
There are other obstacles as well: Even if you’ve worked to build trust and
personal connections, it’s harder for multiteamers to give effective feedback
than it is for dedicated team members, because people whose time is divided
among several projects are less likely to regularly observe their teammates’
actions or to be present at a time that “feels right” to offer critiques.


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