This Adam Grant podcast pleased me greatly. It centred around designing teams that don’t suck.
Here are my favourite bits
If you and your teammates don’t have a shared goal that you’re invested in together, your team will still flounder no matter how much you like each other.
Evidence from nonprofit professional theaters suggests that which identity the team chooses is less important than whether they’re aligned together around it.
I’ve found in my research that it’s not enough to just talk about how the work makes a difference.
when teams of experts were left to their own devices, they actually performed worse than teams without experts that had one little design advantage – They talked about who would be responsible for what, and how they would integrate their knowledge
Adam Grant
it was just a matter of setting the groundwork and the norms and giving them a kind of script to follow for how to work together
ANITA WOOLLEY
Anita guides them to create a team charter together, a team manual that maps out goals, roles, and routines. The formula for a good charter is the same as the one for good team design:
- who’s in the team
- what they’re trying to do
- how they’re gonna work together
- how they structure decision making
- how they combine their inputs
Before the work begins, you do a pre-mortem: imagine that your team has crashed and burned, and discuss the most likely causes. There’s evidence that a pre-mortem can help to prevent overconfidence and promote better routines.
And as an example, here’s the film Roadhouse, demonstrating how to weed out the ones who don’t fit.
