The New Science of Building Great Teams

The chemistry of high-performing groups is longer a mystery

By Alex “Sandy” Pentland

- Identified the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing teams –

those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to surpass other
teams
o These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measureable
o Teams can be thought how to strengthen them

Looking for the “It Factor”

- The key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the
manner in which it communicates
o Communication plays a critical role in building successful teams
o Found patterns of communication to be the most important predictors of a
team’s success – they are as significant as all the other factors (individual
intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussion) combined
- The best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside
formal meetings (e.g. engaging in a coffee break)
- Firms now can obtain the tools and data they need to accurately dissect and engineer
high performance  Building great teams has become a science

Why do patterns of communication matter so much?

- Ancient patterns of communication still shape how we make decisions and
coordinate work among ourselves
 Looking at our evolutionary history, we can see that language is a relatively recent
development

Overcoming the Limits of Observation

- When we sense esprit de corps, it is the result of our innate ability to process the
hundreds of complex communication cues that we constantly send and receive
o Until recently we were not able to objectively record such cues as data
o Advances in wireless and sensor technology have helped overcome these
limitations, allowing to measure that ineffable “It factor”
- By comparing data gathered from badges from all the individuals on a team with
data, we can identify communication patterns that make for successful teamwork
- Patterns vary little, regardless of team and its goals
o Productive teams have certain data signatures, and they are son consistent
that we can predict a team’s success simply by looking at the data- without
ever meeting its members
- Successful teams share several defining characteristics:
1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping
contributions short and sweet
2. Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are
energetic
3. Members connect directly with one another – not just with the team leader
4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversation within the team
 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring
information back
• Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one
might expect
 The best way to build a great team is to learn how individuals communicate
and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication
patterns

The Key Elements of Communication

- Three aspects of communication that affect team performance:
1. Energy – Measured by the number and the nature of exchanges among team
members
▪ Most valuable form of communication: face-to-face
▪ Nest most valuable: phone or videoconference (less effective if more
people participate)
▪ Least valuable form: e-mail or texting
▪ Energy levels within a team are not static

- A, C and E give off more information energy than the rest of

the team does
- A, B and C contribute a lot to the team, while the others
contribute nothing
- Pattern is associated with a hierarchical team
C: boss
A and B: lieutenants (reinforce C’s directions
- “team within a team”
- Leaders often don’t know how much they dominate a team

2. Engagement – The distribution of energy among team members

▪ In a three-person team, engagement is a function of the average
amount of energy between A and B, A and C, and B and C
▪ If all team members have relatively equal and reasonably high energy
with all other members, engagement is extremely strong
▪ The effect of a partially engaged team was particularly common in
widely spread teams that talked mostly by telephone

- Engagement skews heavily to the same three people (A,

B, and C)
- G is making an effort to reach the decision makers
- Use this map to assess “invisible” team members and
play the role of a “charismatic connector”
 3. Exploration – communication that members engage in outside their team;
The energy between a team and the other teams it interacts with
▪ Higher-performing teams seek more outside connections
▪ Scoring high on exploration is most important for creative teams
which need fresh perspectives
- Exploration and engagement do not easily coexist because they require that the
energy of team members be put in two different uses
o Energy is a finite source
o The more that people devote to their own team (engagement), the less they
have to use outside their team (exploration), and vice versa
- Successful teams must do both – oscillate between exploration for discovery and
engagement for integration of the ideas gathered from outside sources

- Management is doing a lot of exploring

- Although internal energy is low, that is ok
- In a high-functioning organization, there would be more
exploration among all the teams

How to read these maps:

Beyond Conventional Wisdom

- Data add an unprecedented level of precision to our observations, quantify the key
dynamics, and make them measurable to an extraordinary degree
o 35% of the variation in a team’s performance can be accounted for by the
number of face-to-face exchanges among the members
o the “right” number of exchanges is as many as dozens per working hour –
going beyond that ideal number decreases performance
- Typical high performance team:
o Members are listening/speaking to the whole group about half the time
o Other half of the time members engage in one-on-one conversations, which
are usually quite short
- Social time turns out to be deeply critical to team performance, often accounting for
more than 50% of positive changes in communication patterns
 - Refined view of exploration: Most companies don’t do it the right ways as the seek
outside counsel repeatedly from the same sources and only at certain times
 best-performing teams sought fresh perspectives constantly, from all other groups
in (and some outside) the organization

How to Apply the Data

- Data can now provide a foundation on which to build better individual and team
performance which can happen in three steps:

Step 1: Visualization
- Can create maps of how the team is doing on the dimensions – visualizations that
clearly convey the data and are instantly accessible to anyone
- Maps highlight weaknesses that teams may not have recognized
- Identify low-energy, unengaged team members who, even in the visualization, look
as if they’re being ignored
o When such people are spotted, one can dig down into their individual badge
data  Energy and engagement maps will make the problems clear
 Once identified the problem, we can fix them
- Exploration maps reveal patterns of communication across organizations
- Time-lapse views of engagement and exploration will show whether teams are
effectively oscillating between those activities
- Possibility to layer more detail into the visualizations (e.g. breaking down different
types of communication)

Step 2: Training
- Improve performance of teams through iterative visual feedback  Visual feedback
helps people improve quickly
 Visual tools to improve teamwork through objective analysis

Step 3: Fine-tuning performance

- Using the badge data to map energy and engagement against performance metrics
- The closer the patterns come the those of high-performance ideal, the higher the
productivity rises
- The self-reporting on effectiveness mapped to the improved patterns of
communication
- Though such maps we often make important discoveries (e.g. energy and
engagement must be in balance)

Successful tactics
How do I go about improving energy and engagement?
- Reorganizing office space and seating
- Setting a personal example
- Policy changes
- Switching out team members and bringing in new blood
- Leaders should use the data to force change within their teams (people can learn e.g.
to interrupt less)
The ideal team player
- In both productivity-focused and creativity-focused teams, we have discovered a
data signature of what we consider best type of team member
 “charismatic connectors”:
▪ Circulate actively, engaging people in short, high-energy conversations
▪ Are democratic with their time – communicate with everyone equally and
making sure all team members get a chance to contribute
▪ Not necessarily extroverts, but feel comfortable approaching other people
▪ Listen as much or more than they talk – “energized but focused listening”
▪ Connect their teammates with one another and spread ideas around
▪ Appropriately exploratory, seeking ideas from outside the group
 the more of these charismatic connectors a team has, the more successful it is

Team Building
- A science, but is young and evolving
- Imagine a company’s entire staff wearing badges, creating “big data” in which to find
patterns for everything from team building to leadership etc.
- Can vastly improve long-distance work and cross-cultural teams which are so crucial
in a global economy
- Beginning to create the “God’s-eye view” of the organization
o It’s an amazing view and will change how organizations work

Mapping Communication against performance

- Visualizations can be used to compare energy and engagement with established
performance metrics

- High-energy and high-engagement teams are the most efficient

- Low-energy, low-engagement teams outperform teams that are out of balance