Group Formation and Creating High Performing Teams

Today, the group formation process came to an official end. Now it's time to get on with figuring out what each group will do for a prototype project. As agonizing as the group formation process was at times, I suspect the really hard work is yet to come.

Dave, the faculty member who lead us through this process, is a pretty cool guy. You get the impression that he's not fazed by very much. Part of that confidence must come from the way he tackles his work. As an expert in managing people in organizations, he takes a view of the process that is quite unlike anything I have witnessed in a work situation. I'd say it reminds me more of practices I have come across in coaching (career, family, sports etc). He takes more of a systems approach to analyzing and describing groups, teams and organizations. His understanding of and background in family therapy helps him to view how groups work as systems of interaction between group members. Every member plays a different role on the team. And he's not just talking about project manager, research, architect and administrator.

His position is that all teams, organizations and societies will have those who make stuff happen, those who support it happening, those who let it happen and those who oppose it happening. Eliminate those who oppose stuff happening, and someone, somewhere will move into that role and they might be even worse than the person they replaced. So the object of the exercise is not necessarily to eliminate or convert the dissenters but to recognize them as legitimate players in the system and make sure you know what their beef is because it might be something important.

This idea of system interaction also reminds me of the stuff I was exposed to at work this summer that tried to consider the cultural landscape in Canada as a system, a cultural ecosystem. In this instance, we were trying to understand how there are many different roles to be played in a cultural ecosystem (content producer, creator, funder, policy developer, infrastructure provider, consumer etc). How all these players interact within the system is an indication of its health, dynamism and viability. Over dependence here and under-functioning there can cause it to shift out of whack.

When we first met with Dave, during our first week at the media lab, we were all strangers and he coached us through the process of team building. He set us all sorts of tasks designed to build trust and communication between the group of 10 residents. He talked about 4 key stages in group forming (forming, storming, norming and performing), stating that we will go through each stage: the first two stages being process driven and the last two about achieving end results. In any group, we are likely to have some people who are more invested in or comfortable with process and others in the end result. The key to becoming a high performing team is in when and how we move from the process-oriented stuff to getting an end result.

The hope is that we will spend the time we need generating ideas and exploring options and that our guiding principles will help us in focussing on the core idea and executing it with some sophistication and impact.

Check back with me in mid-February to see how all this actually worked out.