Recently, I have been thinking over and over about the following passage from Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen’s article called “The Secrets of Great Teamwork” (Harvard Business Review, June 2016). As they write:
“In the past teams typically consisted of a stable set of fairly homogeneous members who worked face-to-face and tended to have a similar mindset. But that’s no longer the case, and teams now often perceive themselves not as one cohesive group but as several smaller subgroups. This is a natural human response: Our brains use cognitive shortcuts to make sense of our increasingly complicated world, and one way to deal with complexity of a 4-D team is to lump people into categories. But we also are inclined to view our own subgroup - whether it’s our function, our unit, our region, or our culture - more positively than others, and that habit often creates tension and hinders collaboration.”
I believe that the above paragraph should be unpacked sentence by sentence. All 4-D teams and their team leaders need to understand what is normal and common.
One way to deal with this normal problem is to focus on building shared knowledge. As they explain, “Incomplete information is likewise more prevalent in 4-D teams…. Information won’t provide much value if it isn’t communicated to the rest of the team. After all, shared knowledge is the cornerstone of effective collaboration; it gives a group a frame of reference, allows the group to interpret situations and decisions correctly, helps people understand one another better, and greater increase efficiency.”
This spring, as I have been working with more 4-D teams and their leaders, we have explored team building plans and team maintenance plans. One element of these plans is to increases the creation of and use of common language, perspective and understanding. It takes time to do this but given what the above research points out, it is time well spent.
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