New Science on Building Great Teams

We’ve been able to foretell, for example, which teams will win a business plan contest, solely on the basis of data collected from team members wearing badges at a cocktail reception.

Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect.

* Social time turns out to be deeply critical to team performance, often accounting for more than 50% of positive changes in communication patterns, even in a setting as efficiency-focused as a call center.*

Our data also show that exploration and engagement, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because they require that the energy of team members be put to two different uses.

in a typical high-performance team, members are listening or speaking to the whole group only about half the time, and when addressing the whole group, each team member speaks for only his or her fair share of time, using brief, to-the-point statements.

making the tables in the company’s lunchroom longer, so that strangers sat together, had a huge impact.

The best-performing and most creative teams in our study, however, sought fresh perspectives constantly

we found that the more of these charismatic connectors a team had, the more successful it was.

Observation: I wish I had a tool for writing short notes on things I read. It seems I end up doing this in the form of HackerNews comments.

I think I want conclusions.

You've hit upon the key point that many remote workers neglect. It doesn't hurt, and oftentimes greatly helps, to consciously make the extra effort to relentlessly, while appropriately, seek out moments for personal bonding time between team members. Remote staff may need to take this to gentle professional extremes to glean tidbits of personal information on their teammates (i.e. small talk).

Examples:

- Few minutes early to conference calls? Don't always let the line remain silent.

- Schedule formal 1-1 calls and purposely build in some "meandering" time into the agenda (especially for managers of any team who should be scheduling 1-1s with their directs anyway on some cadence).

- Jump on rare lulls, pauses or other appropriate moments during phone calls or IM chat conversational flows.

- Reach out and IM somebody during a known break period (admittedly, this has a low success rate for me due to differing timezones).

Remote staff are starved for information about their teammates. Some remote staff don't care. Others are clueless, in which case they should be classified as-such and you may adapt your style of interaction. From my personal experience[NB] managing remote technical consulting teams, most people do in fact crave more personal connections across teams, but they need to make continuous, concerted (and sometimes disconcertingly) conscious effort.

This type of cognitive overhead is fair to classify as "extraneous" and "bothersome" by certain people, and some extreme cases of successful remote teams (examples: interacting almost entirely via mailing lists, high ratio of long form vs. short emails) do not seem to maintain or require this overhead.

However, for the rest of us working in 99% of other organizations, remote staff can generate the same type of buzz, high-energy and high-performing team outcomes that Dr. Pentland studied, iff the remote team members are collectively willing to build personal relationships with each other.

[NB] Anecdata trigger warning