Individual team members talk to each other, not just the boss.
Those interested in doing a better job of managing people – supporting them, inspiring them to greatness – can find plenty of advice out there. The problem is that it is not clear which advice to follow. Management philosophies are a dime a dozen.
The issue is a vital one, and not just for companies that want to improve their bottom line. A large part of what people do is done in groups. And since there are fundamental principles of management, their wide application could do a lot of good for a lot of people.
The DNA of Successful Teams
An answer to this particular management philosophy or approach is “data.” In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Sandy Pentland describes years of work outfitting people with electronic badges to track their office interactions. The results suggest that successful teams have a clear signature – a DNA of team brilliance – and that lower performing teams can be readily improved with simple changes.
Pattern of Communication
Pentland is certainly not the first person to try to turn the study of management into more of a science. That’s an effort that goes back many decades. But he’s created a rich, new source of data. And in the twenty-one organizations he’s studied over the last seven years, one central idea has emerged: What really matters is the pattern of communication. It is so powerful, Pentland argues, that the communication pattern – who is talking to who, when, how – is a more significant factor in excellence than any of the more obvious possibilities, such as the intelligence of team members, their personalities, and skills.
Look Who’s Talking
In a healthy team, all the individual members talk to each other, not just the boss. Everyone listens as much as they talk. There is frequent communication, but it tends to be fairly fast. And people regularly make forays outside the team, learning new things, and then share when they come back.
Pentland and his colleagues generate graphics with their data and the results are striking. They draw a circle of everyone in a team, with lines between them showing the intensity of communication. In dysfunctional groups, you see a few heavy lines – the boss issuing orders to his lieutenants, say – and lots of light lines. People don’t talk among themselves. But in bastions of creativity and productivity, the boss-man does not dominate discussions and everyone is talking to everyone else.
Change the Schedule
Pentland tells the story of a large bank he worked with, which was trying to improve its call centers. He gave them a tip which turned out to be worth millions: change the coffee break schedule. The bank was doing the logical thing, which was to have people on the same team stagger their coffee breaks. But when they had the whole team break together, they found that employees’ performance and job satisfaction jumped. People were talking to each other more. The bank is going to make the change in all its call centers and predicts an annual productivity boost of $15 million, according to the Harvard Business Review article.
The Best Bosses are Charismatic Connectors
Pentland’s data offers clear lessons for the bosses of the world. The best ones, Pentland says, are “charismatic connectors.” They talk to everyone, not just the bigwigs. They listen as much as they talk. They put people in touch and understand that the good ideas are not going to just pop into their heads, but are a product of people sharing what they know.
Pentland offers a great way of thinking about this: a beehive. When a bee gets back to the hive after a successful foray, she does not write a memo to the queen. She does a little dance, sharing the news with her coworkers.
“You need to think of the group as an information harvesting and winnowing machine,” says Pentland. “You want to get a bunch of ideas, bounce them off of everyone and see what sticks.”
*The movie was “Cool Hand Luke,” 1967, starring the late Paul Newman.