Balance: The Key to Building Effective Teams

Professor Katherine W. Phillips, the Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Columbia Business School spoke today at the Credit Suisse offices in New York City. The topic, as this post's title describes: teams and leadership.

Increasingly, companies have been exposed to global competition, and key to staying at the forefront of any industry will be possible if many of professor Phillips' ideas are taken into account.

Here are some of the notes I took from her talk:

Don't use a team if there's no diversity of thought

- even if the group is most brilliant, diversity is key
- social distinctions (color of shirts) could represent diversity
- race, gender, etc

In building teams, we are looking for collective intelligence (CI)
- CI is not predicted by satisfaction, or personality
- CI was found to be predicted by proportion of females (r was 0.23); Equality of turn taking (r was 0.41); Social sensitivity (was .26)
- Listen and integrate was key -- stop talking

Bottom line need group of people, with some diversity, willing to take turns and have a relatively strong level of social sensitivity

Formal definition of a team does not require leadership
- As a leader you're not supposed to get in the way- when a leader feels the need to control, he gets in the way of collaboration

Too powerful leaders stymie teams - Power decreases team performance, as high power leaders make other members keep quite
- Leaders need to balance their input

How to find the balance:- Example company: IDEO -- Masters of process / group design
Its not about having the smartest people, but rather perspective sharing

SIX set-up strategies for maintaining balance:

1. Composition: diversity (function, social, education... You name it)
2. Physical proximity: bring people together for the first meeting
3. Team-specific norms and roles: everybody needs to know who's doing what
4. Shared goal: don't assume you know why people are in the same group. Everyone should buy in to the group's goal
5. Status: maximized for the group, minimized within the group. Every company has a department that feels more important - these hierarchies hurt when groups come together. Can't eliminate the hierarchy, but can surely minimize the status within the group. The group needs to know they are important, and appreciated.
6. Meaningful shared activities: find something that brings them together, and gives them ONE identity. Group outings don't fulfill this- make them work together.