The New Science of Building Great Teams

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team

Managers have long believed that building high-performance teams is an art — not a science. But new research from MIT’s Human Performance Dynamics Laboratory has identified the factors that characterize high-performing teams. These factors are observable, quantifiable, and measurable.

The leading man behind the research is Alex “Sandy” Pentland. He is a professor at MIT, the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program,and the chairman of Sociometric Solutions. He said, “The chemistry of high-performing groups is no longer a mystery.”

At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, they identified that great teams:

  • Communicate frequently. 
  • Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members.
  • Engage in frequent informal communication.
  • Explore for ideas and information outside the group.  

They had deployed them in 21 organizations over the past seven years, measuring the communication patterns of about 2,500 people, sometimes for six weeks at a time.

sociometric

In data collected by wearable electronic sensors that capture
people’s tone of voice and body language, they can see the
highly consistent patterns of communication that are associated
with productive teams, regardless of what kind of work
they do. The data do not take into account the substance
of communication, only the patterns, but they show that
those patterns are what matter most—more than skill, intelligence, and all other factors that go into building a team
combined.

Energy, Engagement, Exploration

In summary, great teams contribute energy, engage each other and explore out of the team.

For more details, you can download this report here: Building Great Teams.

Maximising Rewards & Minimising Threats

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rewards and threats

Dr. David Rock, author and CEO of the NeuroLeadership Group, developed a model that summarises important discoveries from neuroscience about the way people interact socially. It is simple to understand and therefore simple to remember. It is known as the SCARF model (Rock, 2008).

The model is built on three central ideas:

  1. The brain treats many social threats and rewards with the same intensity as physical threats and rewards (Lieberman, & Eisenberger, 2009).
  2. The capacity to make decisions, solve problems and collaborate with others is generally reduced by a threat response and increased under a reward response (Elliot, 2008).
  3. The threat response is more intense and more common and often needs to be carefully minimized in social interactions (Baumeister et al, 2001).

The model is made up of Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. These five domains have been shown in many studies to activate the same reward circuitry that physical rewards activate, like money, and the same threat circuitry that physical threats, like pain, activate (Rock, 2009b).

Understanding that these five domains as primary needs helps individuals and leaders better navigate the social world in the workplace (Rock, 2009b).

SCARF model

The SCARF model involves five domains of human social experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.

  • Status is about relative importance to others.
  • Certainty concerns being able to predict the future.
  • Autonomy provides a sense of control over events.
  • Relatedness is a sense of safety with others – of friend rather than foe.
  • Fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people.

These five domains activate either the ‘primary reward’ or ‘primary threat’ circuitry (and associated networks) of the brain. For example, a perceived threat to one’s status activates similar brain networks to a threat to one’s life. In the same way, a perceived increase in fairness activates the same reward circuitry as receiving a monetary reward.

The model enables people to more easily remember, recognize, and potentially modify the core social domains that drive human behavior.

For more details, download the white paper here: SCARF: A brain based model for collaborating with and influencing others.

There is a SCARF-SA (Self-Assessment) that illustrates the order in which the SCARF elements matter to an individual. This can:

  • Help guide someone in how to navigate within an organization, choosing the right projects or collaborators, for example.
  • Help a person understand why he or she react intensely in certain situations, which can help this person regulate his or her emotions better.
  • Help someone communicate their needs to others.