241. Team Spirit: How to Make Group Work Work

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: We are all members of multiple groups and teams, our families, our coworkers, our friends. The ability to communicate effectively in groups is critical. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Today I am really excited to spend time with Colin Fisher. Colin is an associate professor of organizations and innovation at University College London School of Management. His research focuses on helping groups and teams in situations requiring creativity, improvisation, and complex decision making. His latest book is The Collective Edge: Unlocking The Secret Power of Groups. Welcome, Colin. I'm really excited for our conversation.

[00:00:52] Colin Fisher: Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Looking forward to it.

[00:00:54] Matt Abrahams: Excellent. Shall we get started?

[00:00:56] Colin Fisher: Yeah.

[00:00:57] Matt Abrahams: Like you, I have long been fascinated by groups and their impact. I used to teach classes on group communication, and I always start by talking to my students about the benefits and perils of groups, so I thought it would make sense for us to start there too. From your perspective, can you share what are the advantages and some of the disadvantages of groups and the work we do in them?

[00:01:19] Colin Fisher: The advantages of groups are, on some level, they're almost so obvious we don't even think about them, that we bring more minds to the problem. We bring more people's labor, that the idea that many hands make light the work, is why we come to groups. We can accomplish things that we could never do if we tried to go it alone. Groups can be, in my mind, the pinnacle of human accomplishment. But as your question implies, there's some downsides too.

[00:01:51] Groups can also be these engines to produce conformity, to really restrict people's individuality, that we have terms like group think or you know, that we call these groups, that have these extreme conformity pressures to be cults. And that groups have all these tendencies within them as well to restrict us to, to take away our individuality and to sometimes make us the worst versions of ourselves where they bring out of us this kind of tribalism that is at the root of war and intergroup conflict and all kinds of terrible things in the world. So, so groups really are this dichotomy. 

[00:02:31] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. On one side we have this notion of creativity, which really can bring out the best in us. And then we have on the other side, extreme conformity, which can really lead to a lot of negative things. So the trick becomes how do we maximize for the benefits of groups and minimize for those negatives? So what are key ingredients for successful teams, teaming, and teamwork. I think about things like diversity of participation, psychological safety, having clear purpose, clear roles. What do you see as some of the most important aspects for successful group work? 

[00:03:06] Colin Fisher: You got some of the really important ones right off the bat there. The benefits of groups come from having diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives. The, the kind of synergy that we talk about in group work really only emerges when we don't all think the same thing, when we don't all have the same knowledge and skills, and that we share them with one another. So we need to compose groups carefully. But one of the things that we often make a mistake in when we compose them is that we don't think about how big those groups should be, and so we end up often with groups most commonly that are too big.

[00:03:45] Prototypical example of these are meetings. We can all imagine one of the worst things to be in is a meeting that's got twenty people in it, because we know we're not gonna be able to really hear everyone's perspective. We're not gonna be able to know what everyone knows, what everyone thinks. The only thing worse than this meeting of twenty people is a meeting with twenty-five people or thirty people. We have to be thoughtful about how big a group can really be to have this kind of synergistic interaction. 

[00:04:15] Matt Abrahams: So I'm curious, what does the research say about group size? Is there an ideal group size? Does it depend on the task you're trying to complete?

[00:04:22] Colin Fisher: It does depend on the task you're trying to complete. I like to give a fairly definitive answer to this because it doesn't depend as much on the task as we'd like to think. One is a line of research that looks across different tasks at the effect of group size on team performance, and the there you get answers depending on the task, anywhere from three to seven. But then when you ask people, when do you feel like the groups you're in are too big or too small? You get the line of my group is too big and my group is too small, they cross, right about four point five. We feel that groups are the right size between four and five, and that we see performance measures be anywhere from three to seven. And so I think those are pretty good guidelines for thinking about how big your group should be. 

[00:05:11] Matt Abrahams: I think having an anchor for group size is really important because there's a tendency to want to include more people, or perhaps because other communication challenges exist within an organization, meetings become the only way to convey information. So more is better, is often the mindset, but it sounds like that's not the case. I'd like to dig a little deeper into a couple of the other aspects. We had Amy Edmondson on, we talked a bit about psychological safety. Curious to get your perspective on how we go about building groups that can be more effective by making sure that those diverse points of view and perspectives feel comfortable being shared.

[00:05:49] Colin Fisher: If you've talked to Amy, you've really gotten the best advice that's out there. Psychological safety, as you were saying, it's so important because even if we get this diverse mix of knowledge, skills, and perspectives onto our team, we still aren't gonna take advantage of it unless people are comfortable sharing it. They're comfortable speaking up with different ideas. They're comfortable asking questions. They're comfortable admitting mistakes and trying experiments and failing. And the way that we build that psychological safety is that first we ask for it, that we say the work that we're gonna be doing is gonna require us to share our different knowledge, skills, and perspectives. It's gonna require us to take risks, that we're gonna have some things to learn. And that's always true because any new team has to figure out how to work together at a minimum.

[00:06:40] They've gotta figure out how to communicate, and they're going to need to do some of this learning and some of this experimentation to make it happen. Another way that you can build this kind of psychological safety is to model it. So especially if you're a leader for you to admit your own mistakes, for you to ask questions that you might worry are dumb questions, for you to do experiments and say, hey, I'm learning too. This is what I'm gonna try. Let's see how it goes. And to model those kinds of behaviors. And then of course, to not shoot the messenger and not to, when people do speak up, they do share their ideas, they do ask questions that are on their mind, that you reinforce that with positive reinforcement, you encourage it. You don't criticize people for doing those things.

[00:07:27] Matt Abrahams: So it's about setting expectations for this sharing of different viewpoints that mistakes are acceptable and actually needed for the group to be successful. And as a leader or somebody who has a leadership role, demonstrating this in your own actions, role modeling, I think those are great ways to help people understand that this is important and reinforce these values. Are there certain things we can do when a group forms that really helps set us on a path of success? You know, this notion of forming sometimes happens very quickly. There's a crisis and we have to pull people together. Other times it's more thoughtful. Can you give two or three best practices for group formation that can really set you on a good path?

[00:08:11] Colin Fisher: So group formation is such an important time in a group's life that the stuff that we do when we first get together tends to be really sticky. We all can imagine the first time we meet with a new group at work or a new class at school, people tend to sit in the same place the whole time. Where we sit, who talks first, who talks the most. These kinds of norms form really early, and so we wanna manage that really carefully. Now with group formation, some of the work should happen before we ever get in the room. The work of thinking about the task, thinking about composing that group well, the group size and diversity of knowledge, skills, and perspectives, all those things should be done ahead of time.

[00:08:56] But then once we're, what I would call launching the group, and there's three big tasks. One is we need to bring that goal to life and make sure we all understand it similarly. So we need to have a very clear and vivid communication of that goal. So the kind of classic business school examples of these are like when John F. Kennedy repurposed NASA, which had a very ambiguous goal, prior to his charge, for them to put a man on the moon within ten years. So that was a very clear, vivid goal that everyone can imagine. So even if we don't have a clear idea of what we need to do first, or what we need to do tomorrow, the fact that we can all imagine the future vividly, that we need to get to collectively, allowed people to stay coordinated and to synchronize their efforts.

[00:09:48] So we need these kinds of clear, vivid goals to, to get us together. And then second, we need to establish these initial norms. So the fact that norms are sticky and they form really fast, we can use that to our advantage by doing some of the things we talked about when we're establishing psychological safety. To say, I wanna have a team where we all share what we know, where we speak up when we have an idea, and how can we do that. We can have that conversation. But the most important things I think are close to your heart are norms about communication. How are we gonna communicate with one another? And that some of these are really basic things like, what communication channels are we even going to use?

[00:10:31] I can't tell you how many teams I've seen where some people are communicating through one channel, and a few people don't use that channel, don't know. So some people aren't signed up for Slack, they don't get notifications, they don't know what's being said there. So some of it's really basic about where are we gonna communicate, but then we also need norms for how quickly are we responding to each other. That, when do I think you haven't seen this email, is it one day, two days, a week, you know, and that different teams can have different norms, but as long as we're clear, we can communicate effectively. And then we need to have understanding of the individual responsibilities and work that we're gonna have between now and the next time we talk.

[00:11:17] And this could be the beginnings of roles, they could be really formal roles, but that needs to be clear what I need to do between now and the next time we're gonna be collectively accountable to one another. So if we do those three things, that we have clear vivid goals, we have norms, especially norms for how we're gonna communicate and that they're promoting psychological safety, and we know what our responsibilities are, and we know the deadline by which those responsibilities to the group are set, then we have a pretty darn good launch.

[00:11:48] Matt Abrahams: Vivid goals that people are aligned towards, norms, which are simply just expectations for what and how we will interact, and responsibilities for the actions that we'll follow up with. Very important. And, and the key thing you've said there is that work has to happen in advance. We have to think about these things before we pull people together. And in fact, thinking about these things might determine who we pull together and how many. I wanna switch now and talk about the way in which we do group work, which is primarily meetings and most people don't like meetings. What is your advice on how to make the group time in meetings more effective? What are things we can do to have better meetings?

[00:12:28] Colin Fisher: So that's a great question, and it's such a common one. Sometimes I ask myself the same thing in my organization. The number one tip is to not ask what can I do to have a better meeting, but to ask should we have this meeting in the first place. As we said, norms are really sticky. And so if we start having this norm that we're gonna have boring meetings, that people are gonna be disengaged and not speak in these meetings, not contribute what they know, that norm's likely to stick even if we go from a meeting that really wasn't necessary and that was one way communication, information sharing, and the next time we have a meeting where we do need people to speak up, they're less likely to do it.

[00:13:10] So eliminating those meetings that we didn't need has the added benefits of you're gonna start to develop better norms for how people contribute in the meetings, where you really need their contribution. So step one, eliminate unnecessary meetings, and that will make the meetings you do have much better. But then step two is likely you are inviting too many people to these meetings. So just like we said, when we wanna get real work done and we wanna have everyone's contributions, we wanna know what they think. We wanna have them participate in decision making, communicate well. We really need to have this kind of core group of three to seven people around the table.

[00:13:53] Once we've even got a group of ten, if I've got an hour long meeting and a group of ten, especially if they're ten academics like us, or it's in the university situation, the chances that we're gonna get through that and everyone's going to say everything that they have to say is really low. And if we're over ten, if we're fifteen, we're twenty, we're twenty-five, it's almost none. There's almost no way we're gonna have that meeting. So if we can have meetings that have very concrete outcomes, that we're there to make a decision, we're there to generate new ideas, we're there to develop a new strategy, that there's some reason that we're meeting, it's clear to all members, and then we invite people who have something really to contribute towards that goal, we're likely to have better meetings.

[00:14:41] One way communication, if it could have been an email, or if you prefer it could have been a video message or an audio message to the team, then do that. Don't have a meeting, but that when you do have meetings, they have clear purposes, they have agendas, and only the people who need to be there are invited to those meetings. That's gonna go a long way towards improving your meetings. 

[00:15:03] Matt Abrahams: Amen. Do we need a meeting? Are there other ways to communicate? Super important first question. Then what are we meeting for? What's the purpose? Do we have a clear agenda? Does everybody understand it? Excellent. Then finally being willing to cancel a meeting or not hold a meeting if not necessary, really important. Thank you for sharing that. And may everybody adopt that and may meetings be what they truly can be, which is really productive opportunities to accomplish work and to feel connected. So thank you. Colin, this has been a fantastic conversation. Before we end, I like to ask three questions of my guests. One I create just for you, and the other two are similar across everybody I've interviewed. Are you up for that? 

[00:15:45] Colin Fisher: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:15:46] Matt Abrahams: So there's so many things about you that are really interesting to me. One is you're a professional jazz trumpeter. I tried to play the trumpet early in my life and failed miserably, so I'm in awe of your ability to do it professionally. What is one thing that you've learned as a professional jazz trumpeter that has helped you in terms of how you interact with people in groups? 

[00:16:05] Colin Fisher: The essence of all kinds of music really is listening. I had a really famous teacher, his name was Bob Brookmeyer, who said, when you're improvising, you have to keep one ear on your head and you have to take the other ear and put it over on the piano, oversee the whole interaction. And so I think it's made me listen in different ways. It's made me more open to both what somebody who's speaking is saying and the whole ensemble of the group of the communication. And just to really attune me to the importance of listening. 

[00:16:38] Matt Abrahams: It always amazes me that people who study and teach communication come back to listening, and it's an important lesson for all of us. We think of communication as broadcasting, getting information out, but receiving it is really important. Thank you for sharing that. Question number two, who is a communicator that you admire and why?

[00:16:56] Colin Fisher: I have to continue to give credit to my mentor, Richard Hackman, who I owe so much of the book too as well, who took this complicated world of groups and really started to give order to it. I think what I respect about him as a communicator was finding terms that were really accurate. His famous theory is work design, right? And that's not like a fancy academic set of terms. I make fun of the term group entitativity in the book where it's like we come up with these like mouthfuls of things that are really hard to say. But just calling it work design theory already was such a powerful communication move to not only be clear within the academic community, but also to be clear to everyone else about what it is we should be paying attention to that we weren't paying attention to at the time, which was the tasks and the way that we are thinking about structuring the work that we do. So I think he would be one of the best communicators that I've encountered. 

[00:18:00] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for reinforcing the idea of clarity, concision, accessibility, are really important. Final question for you, Colin. What are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

[00:18:13] Colin Fisher: So I'm going to say listening again. When I first started studying teams, I thought I was gonna see these people who were these expert diagnosers of group dynamics, that they were gonna walk into a room and they'd look at a team and go, oh, I know what's wrong with you. Instead, when I started studying these great coaches of teams, what they did was they asked more questions. They said, oh, how are you doing? So they didn't magically diagnose people. They asked them what was going on. You ask questions, you listen to the answer, and then you respond in ways that both show you're concerned with that person's intent and wellbeing and emotional message that they had, but then you build on it and it's this kind of idea we find in theater improvisation of yes and-ing. That you say, yeah, I see what you're saying and now I'm gonna add something onto it. So I think if we ask good questions, we listen to the answer, and then we both respond and build on those responses, we're gonna have some great communication. 

[00:19:19] Matt Abrahams: Excellent three ingredients. I echo that very much. I think those are really important. Ask questions, listen genuinely to the answers, and we've done a lot of episodes on the value of improv and this notion of responding and adding to what people say. Colin, thank you so much for bringing insight into a type of communication that we all do all day. We are parts of many different groups. Learning to be more effective in how we establish groups, how we make groups work better, and ultimately, how we feel more productive, really can be helpful for all of us. Thank you for your time.

[00:19:54] Colin Fisher: Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about setting groups up for success, please listen to episode 174 with Priya Parker. And to improve your meetings, check out both episodes, 125 and 125 with Joe Allen, Karin Reed, and Elise Keith. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering before extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.