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Welcome to episode 567 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Colin Fisher, author of the Collective Edge. Ready? Let's get started.
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You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
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Hello. Hello, everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. If you've ever been part of a team that feels like it should be firing on all cylinders, but instead feels slow, confusing or mismatched, you're not alone. Teams dominate the way work gets done in every organization or doesn't. And yet most of us were never taught how groups actually function. Hidden forces that make them thrive or fall apart. Today's guest, Dr. Colin Fisher, has spent decades studying group dynamics, from his early life as a jazz musician to his work as a professor of organizations and innovation at University College London. His new book, the Collective Edge, is all about unlocking the secret power of groups and helping us see teams through a collective lens instead of the individualistic lens we're used to. In. In this conversation, we dig into what makes some groups truly effective and why so many don't live up to their potential, even when the people on them are talented. We're going to talk about how people often don't even agree on who's on their team. It's a surprisingly common problem with some shocking stats you won't believe. We're also going to talk about what the research says about the ideal size for teams that actually get stuff done, and why team design, the structure of goals, roles and norms, matters more than we usually imagine. Whether you lead a team, collaborate on projects, or simply want to understand why working together sometimes fails when it should succeed. There's a lot here to think about today really quickly as we get into the conversation. I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 5677. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Colin Fisher, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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Oh yes, I am super excited to be chatting about all things groups and teams today. Going to be a lot of fun. Before we just jump right into the conversation though, can you Share a bit about yourself and the work that you do.
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Yeah, so I am. You might hear from my accent that I am American, but. But I now am in London. I teach at University College London, or ucl, as we call it here. Not ucla, but ucl. And that I. Before I got into being a business school professor, I had a, you know, very typical background, which was I was a professional jazz musician and that I went from thinking about groups and creativity and in the world of jazz to then thinking about it in the world of work. And now I've been teaching in business school for about the past 20 years, studying groups, studying creativity, and trying to figure out how to communicate how we can do that better, because it's certainly a hard thing.
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Yeah, Well, I was super drawn to the musical stuff in the book. I am a vocalist and very envious of anyone who can play instruments because I am really bad at the instrument. That's not my own voice. I once was the band wanted me to just, like, play the tambourine while I was singing. And I actually could not physically do it, so the guitar player had to also play the tambourine, which is kind of sad, but feels like, of course, you know, groups, when we think about a jazz band or a choral group or something, or sports teams, people might say, like, well, that group is totally different than my team at work. Right. They'll never be the same. Do you agree, or what sort of similarities are there between, you know, a jazz band and, you know, my marketing team?
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Yeah, I mean, ideally, the psychology and the structure that we would like to have at work are the same. But I think it's true that most people would say there's this big difference between the feeling we have in the band and the feeling we have in our work teams. And that's partially because the world of music is doing a lot of the things for us that we have to do for ourselves at work. So just like you were saying in. When we're in the band, in music, we have instruments which are. Have roles that we've been learning since we've been learning that instrument, and the kind of skills that go along with, say, being a vocalist and what you have to do when you tend to stand out in front of everyone else and you don't have an instrument in your hands, you know, you can do other things in terms of cueing the band or the things that you have to do with the rest of your body are different than they would be if you played an instrument. And that we learn those things from the Very beginning to kind of fulfill these different roles and, and the norms about what you do when you're a bass player and what you do within when you're a drummer and what you do when you play another instrument are actually pretty well developed and clear to us. But at work we don't have that same advantage. We don't have roles that are nearly that clear. We don't have this kind of people who've been practicing their instrument for as long as most people who have been practicing their instrument in the band. But even more importantly than that, music is a really well designed task. It's something that's so well designed that we do it for fun, that we don't need anyone to pay us to go play music for the most part, although it's very nice when people do pay us. Please pay your musicians. But at work we tend to have much more poorly defined tasks that it doesn't have. These characteristics that research has shown make work motivating. And because of that, we again have to construct it and that if we don't make a task into a good group task, it's going to be much harder for a group to do and to stay engaged and to really care about.
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Definitely I'm gonna have us hold off on defining those things for groups for a little bit to be able to. So it's like, stick around world, we're gonna get there. But for right now, as we think about then how you define a group, perhaps just because I really like the term groupiness. It's my new favorite as used throughout the book, like, so you have that example of like where you're, you know, you're watching a jazz band that was playing, you ended up going up on stage and basically like, you know, leading, playing with the band for the whole second set, but you're not part of the band. And like, but anybody watching would think you're part of the band, but you in the band know you're not in the band. Like, how do you define what, what makes a group? You know, how does that kind of come into play? What are some key terms or things to think about that most people don't think about when they're thinking about groups or teams?
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B
Yeah, I mean, it's such a thorny question when you really get into it, like, what is what makes a group a group? And that researchers came up with what I thought was a really unhelpful word to understand that, which was group entitivity, which, you know, I had to practice saying before I run around Talking about groups. And that group identitivity is, is actually a concept that comes from the eye of the beholder. And that's where somebody like watching the jazz band might think, I'm a member of the group. And that, that this kind of tendency to try and figure out our clusters of individuals, a coherent group, is really embedded in our psychology. And, and you can understand why if you sort of think about, you know, hunter gatherer times and you're wandering around, you see other people maybe at a watering hole or something, and you need to figure out, you know, are these people a threat? And in a way this kind of just a sense of is that cluster of other people a coherent group? Which to most of us makes it a little bit more threatening. Whereas if it's just a bunch of individuals, it's a little safer to approach them. And so this kind of, you know, processes that we're doing, we're looking at cues that are things like proximity, are people close together, do they have some kind of visible commonality, whether it's dressing the same or looking, you know, bearing a familial resemblance? And do they have some kind of coherent shared pattern of activity? You know, so when we're up on stage, we're all playing music, we're all doing something that's very coherent, invisible, that we, we are a group. So from, from observers perspectives, we're always arraying any cluster of individuals on this continuum of group entitivity or as I call it, groupiness, that, you know, a cluster of individuals can be not very groupy when they don't have many of these characteristics, or they can be very, very groupy to the point that often we call these groupiest groups teams where we have really high levels of interdependence, shared goal. And it's very clear who's in and who's out of, of that group. But then this comes to the, the other question of why do I know I'm not part of that group? Well, from our own perspective, our membership in groups comes from identity and identification. And so basically, if we don't think that we're in a group, and especially when that sense is shared with group members themselves. So if you asked all of us who are on stage, is Colin in the group? And everybody says no, then it's very clear that I'm not in the group. And so, you know, our own membership in groups is somewhat of a choice and an identity as well. And so there's kind of this two sides to the equation of what makes up A group.
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Absolutely. And it's interesting, I think, about that from the work dynamic and thinking about, like, promotions or like how titles really come into play with a lot of that. Right. So it's like, I don't have a C in my title, so I'm not in the group. But I go to every meeting and I'm not like paid like the rest of that group. And they would say I'm not in the group, but they rely on me as if I'm in the group. Like, you can see where there's some problems and like, especially if outsiders, everyone believes it's like you're on the team, you know, that that can stop. Start to create some animosity that in various points, you know, needs to be addressed. But it's good to be aware of how that perceived groupiness can either be working for or against you in that way.
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Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And it's a. It's a big. It's a much bigger problem at work than people think. So there's a great study by my colleague and mentor, Ruth Wagaman, where she studied senior leadership teams. And so they had this survey of, I think it was 111 senior leadership teams. And they asked a really simple question. How many people are there on your senior leadership leadership team? And the kind of phenomenon you were talking about, where there are people who are going to meetings and people aren't sure whether they're on the team or not, is really pervasive. So much so that of the, of Those teams, only 7% of senior leadership teams agreed on how many members were on the team. 93% had disagreement about how many people were on the team. And so it's, you know, it's not just this, you know, small problem that we don't actually know who we're supposed to be working with, who, who's responsible for this collaboration, who's not. It's. It's a very big problem. And that it actually often gets more and more severe as you move up the organization that at the very upper echelons, it's often the least clear. Whereas, you know, if you have like a project team on the front lines, that's often much more clear than it is who's on the senior leadership team. Yeah.
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And I mean, only 7% agreed on who's on the team. Like, that is bad news. Right. They want to work on fixing that because whether it's, I believe you're on the team and you don't think you're on the team or, you know, Any of these combinations of factors there. Like, you definitely want to make sure people know that they're supposed to be working together and who they report to. And we know that becomes a problem, which is potentially why so many people hate working in groups and teams and feel like, oh, man, just like, let me do the whole thing. I don't want to have to rely on you. We've been, you know, burned by bad school projects or something where you had to carry everyone's weight. But we also hear that, like, the whole is better than the sum of its parts. So, like, is there a clear, like, groups are better slash, worse, you know, as people are listening, that it's, like, worth doing, or should we always do a group? Should we just let people be on their own? You know, what sort of advice, as we think about those, like, pros and cons of groups?
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Yeah, I mean, for your most important, most complicated work, you probably, you know, it's not a matter of just wanting a group that you often need a group, that there's no way to solve a lot of the problems in most organizations without multiple expertise, multiple skills, multiple perspectives. And that, you know, groups are the way that we integrate these different skills, knowledge, and perspectives. And so for. For a lot of time, you just don't. Don't have any option that, like a band, you know, you can't, you know, make this album without a group. There's no way. There's no way to do it. So I think there's this kind of necessity that. That we have to have groups and that at their best, the best groups can clearly outperform collections of individuals that there really is. There are times that groups are more than the sum of their parts. But as my mentor, Richard Hackman used to say, well, groups, you know, have the potential to do the best things in the world, but don't count on it. And that's. And that's because, you know, groups are really hard and that some parts of group life are a little bit at odds with our culture and our psychology, such that we have a lot of trouble. One just seeing the group as an important entity with a mind of its own, kind of that. Like, the group is not just this collection of individuals. It's its own thing which needs its kind of own care and keeping that most people don't think about. And that's really why I've written the book and why I've gotten into doing this, is that just getting people to think about groups is often more than they're doing before. And that when you start to think about, have I organized this situation? Have I structured this group to set it up for success? The answer is often no. And that's why we have these bad experiences that most student projects are not very well thought out, even by the instructors. My apologies to my colleagues who set up group group projects that, you know, they're not assignments that require a group or that there's not a clear way to divide it up and to actually tackle it as a group. And therefore we have bad experiences. We're like, why are we doing this as a group? We could have done this as individuals. And if you're saying that, you know, that's a good question, why are you doing it as a group? Because coordination costs are real. That communicating, coordinating with other people has to have a payoff. There's got to be some reason that we need to do that. And if we could just break it up and not bear those coordination costs, hey, you know, go for it. But the, the reality is that's really only true for tasks that we know really well that are relatively well defined and often are more simple, such that we don't need different expertise, different perspectives to do it and that. So I think once you're in any world where you're saying like, I'm not really sure that we know how to do this and it's really important, then you probably do need a group and that then the key is, well, have we actually designed this group in this situation for collaboration or not?
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Definitely. Well, as we transition and start to talk about how people can set up those groups for success and you know, thinking about that as a leader, looking to create a group, as we think about how much importance comes down to the way that you sort or set up your group. And I know this is going to sound super weird to everyone else, but you're going to know why I'm asking is who is the real villain of Harry Potter?
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Yeah, so yeah, I, I start off the book with this, with this anecdote about the true villain in the Harry Potter series not being Lord Voldemort. My apologize for saying, apologies for saying
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the name right, he who must not be named.
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But this really get the first time I read Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat came into that, I really thought this was going to be a little bit of a dark, malevolent character in, in the book because this, this sorting hat is sorting 11 year olds into the categories based on, you know, it's read of their brains and nobody ever switches the house to which they're assigned. That once you're put into this category or this box, you're stuck there. And then, you know, the spoilers for the, for the Harry Potter series, but the, the wars that bookend this story are both the same dividing lines that the Sorting Hat drew. And to me, when you're trying to say like, well, are we creating a structure that's going to enable collaboration, peace and all these things, you know, putting a bunch of kids into categories, having them compete against each other for seven years and then never, you know, never letting them out of these, these groups, it's not a recipe for doing that, that there is almost no, you know, cross house collaboration in that series. And so I, you know, kind of tongue in cheek say the, the real villain of the Harry Potter series is the Sorting Hat.
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Yeah. And like, as you pointed out, like, yeah, right. So like what if you had seen. I. So you don't know this, but the many in the audience know, oh, I love Harry Potter. I love Harry Potter so much. So whenever books and like in the collective most lovingly said nerdom of folks that I have on the show, we end up talking about Harry Potter more often than others might.
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Yeah, I, I can, I can probably hang with you pretty well for that.
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All right, so with that though, as you think, like, what if instead you say, hey, like this person has the potential to be a pretty terrible monster. Maybe I put them in Gryffindor instead or I let them hang out with the Hufflepuffs and see if it can tame that versus like, oh yeah, you're super evil and joy Slytherin, like that seems like a bad idea.
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Yeah, I mean, yeah, it was very clearly a bad idea. Right. Like the whole, the whole idea of, oh, everyone who has any of these kind of, you know, narcissistic antisocial characteristics, we're going to stuff them all into Slytherin was, was not a good.
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And then pit them against everyone else in this way that can just like bubble over. So as we make a bit of a leap and think about this, we'll say for siloed teams, right. In organizations, knowing that we're not calling any of the teams in your organization a Slytherin versus Gryffindor. Right, but and if for people that don't know the terms and you think we're talking gibberish, we're, we're moving on. So with that. But so often I see, you know, teams in companies you end up with like marketing is different from, you know, the finance team and sales actually doesn't like to communicate with any of them and wherever else. Right. And they get kind of pitted against each other. What do you, what advice do you have if you have for leaders that are handed a group or they've been in a group where it's a very siloed organization, any way that they can sort of like undo those dividing lines? Assuming, you know, the advice is maybe to get out of those.
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Yeah, it's hard. I mean it's such a pervasive problem that we were put into these organizations that have structures that, you know, they make some sense at the time, just like, you know, maybe sorting kids into houses had some, some convenience, but that they over time kind of create these anti collaborative structures that we literally like have more trouble working together because of the, the way modern bureaucratic organizations are composed. And one of those things is these kind of functional silos that we, when we only work with people who have the same orientations towards what's important in the business to each other, the less we're going to, you know, think about, understand the perspective of people in other parts of that business. So I mean, often teams, these cross functional teams are themselves the antidote to functional siloed organizations. But the mistake I see a lot of leaders make is they think that's all they have to do. So it's like, oh, we're getting too siloed here. Let's make this cross functional project product development team and we'll put one, one from every function on this team and there we go, problem solved. But there they haven't done the exact things that I was alluding to where you haven't changed anything else in the organization. You haven't changed people's reporting lines, you haven't changed their incentives. So the same person that they're reporting to for the same KSAs is still evaluating them. The, you know, same people are deciding whether they're promoted, rewarded or punished in different ways. And that those things are really powerful. And unless you make those same ways that we are thinking about assessment, the ways we're setting goals, the way we're charting people's careers values, the work that they're doing in those cross functional teams that they're going to value all their other work above and beyond that, and they're just going to kind of go right back to the same sorts of behaviors that you had before you had those teams. And the very first case I teach in to my master's students is actually a case about this very thing. It's a siloed organization. They create A team, sort of experimental, cross functional project, product development team. But they don't change anything else. That's all, that's all they do. And then this team has all these problems because people are sort of serving multiple masters at the same time. They are trying, they're trying to do the work on their team. But they also know that like this is probably a one off and that I probably ought to put more emphasis on what my manager is asking me to do than I am on this sort of experimental product development team. And it has predictably bad results. And then everyone concludes, oh, that was a terrible idea, we shouldn't do that. But it's really more of a case of if you're going to try to encourage teamwork in your organization, you do have to create a structure that's friendly to teamwork. And if you're not, if you're trying to do one without the other, the sort of rewards and punishments and incentives that we know are so powerful and influencing human behavior are likely to win out in the long term. So you have to be willing to change a lot of very fundamental things about your organization if you're going to really encourage collaboration across the structure that you have right now.
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I love that advice. One of the things I talk with my own clients about and on the show all the time so often we get stuck in that status quo and you know, of course with how our brains are wired, that's sort of the jam, right? Familiarity bias that it feels like, well this is the, the way the group was set up. And so I, I am like stuck in the way we've always done things, which is, you know, the common language at work all the time and so, but being able to step back and say like, hey, so like maybe I'm stuck with some things, right? I'm stuck with how who's on the group, in the group, right? But like how often we meet and who's accountable for what and if there's a, a lead or not and if we have subgroups within the team and when something is due and anything, right? Like there's a lot of stuff that you can change. If you actually take a moment to stop and say, hey, this, this group, you know, we'll just say this group sucks. How do I fix this group that is not working. Well, the things that it feels like a lot of people would go to, to change are not everything that can be changed and that's most likely to actually have some improvement. And so you mentioned there about, you know, people don't set up the structure to be conducive to having good teamwork. And so like what, what are those things that they should, should set that up with?
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Yeah, the structure, the kind of bones of good teamwork with which when I refer to structure of teams, I'm talking about first its composition. So who's on the team. And that is something that's really important. The goals that that team has. So why were we formed? What are we trying to achieve? The tasks that we have to do and then the social norms, the way that we interact, the kind of unspoken rules that we have here within that team. And you're right, there's still a lot of variation between teams even in the same organizational structure in how well they do these things. Because some of those things are things you can change internally that you really can. Can affect them. So when you're. You're trying to create that structure, that's the sort of basic stuff you want to pay attention to, you know, really before the team ever even exists.
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Oh yeah, definitely. So we, we get in there, we know that those are those four things that are going to matter when we go setting up the group. And if we have a group that's not quite working well and we want to kind of tear it up, what are some maybe like questions that people could be asking or ways to kind of get at the root of what their problem is? Because in the same way where only 7% of the people can agree to who's even on the team. Right, But I bet if you asked them before, like, well, do you know who's on the team? Like, oh, yeah, yeah, we know who's on the team. Right. But then you stop and think about it and go, oh, actually we do not agree at all as to who is on this team. So maybe we should have a further conversation about that. Right. So like, are there some key tips, questions like things to ask for someone to figure out, like where to start and what might actually be hindering their performance more than just like, you know, Susie is difficult. We'll say Molina. Molina is really difficult and blaming me because I ask a lot of questions. So I'm probably the worst. Uh, what, what are the go tos? And it could be that I'm the worst, but what else?
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B
Yeah, well, I mean, if you're asking a lot of questions, you're probably using one of the main tools that you would want to use to, to surface these things. So I mean, I think especially for people who don't, who, you know, aren't formal leaders, they don't have a lot of control over, you know, the composition of the team, or maybe they don't feel like they have control over the goals or the tasks that they're given. But one of the main problems is still that even very tiny deviations in people's perceptions of what the goal is can lead to a team falling apart. That, you know, if we take that sort of example of a project development team, again, you know, we can say, oh, our goal is to make the best product for the client by, you know, September 12th. Okay. But even within that, this kind of on time versus quality, there may be trade offs in that. So what happens if we're, you know, three weeks away from the deadline and one person's thinking, oh, you know, it's most important that we prioritize quality there. And someone else is thinking, it's most important that we prioritize on time. So, you know, if we're going to compromise on quality to meet the deadline versus we're going to ask for an extension to make something a little bit better. But if we don't talk about that, then we may start working at odds with one another. And actually these kinds of small differences and perceptions of what we're trying to do, what's important here are a lot of the seeds of conflict in teams. And so asking, you know, hey, you know, what's going to happen if, you know, we need an extra week to do this? Is that, is that within the realm of possibilities or even, you know, I'm confused. Why did you call this meeting? Why are we here? What's going on?
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A
Like, no one's ever been in a meeting where that was asked. Right?
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B
Right. Yeah, but like, that's really it. It can really spark more powerful conversations that get people on the same page. And, and so if you don't have any other tools in your tool, Tool belt. Questions are a great one, especially questions about the goals, questions about what tasks are being done, and questions about the norms about why do we do things the way we do them. And especially when you're a newcomer to a team, that's a great time to affect some reflection about, you know, why do we do things the way we do them this way? Might there be, might there be another way to do them? So I think, you know, when that's sort of one set of things that you can do that are kind of like small acts of informal leadership and that questions are one of the best ways to do that, but that if you, you know, you do have some control over the structure of your team that the best advice is always still to try, try and get as much of this right as you can from the beginning. Because norms in teams are very sticky. And although they do change over time and that there, there are sort of gradual changes that we can trace, it's much easier to get functional norms in place when there really aren't that many norms than it is to change norms once they've taken root. And if people have this idea that we're going to come to meetings and it's okay if I kind of get on my phone or it's okay If I come 15 minutes late or I skip, you know, a lot of these meetings, it's really hard to change that. And so, you know, I really encourage leaders to invest a lot of energy in making things clear, especially in their very first meeting with the new team, because they're going to have to work way harder to get good norms in place after that first meeting than they will during that first meeting. But if that ship has already sailed for you, then, you know, I think having explicit conversations about the four elements of structure that we've talked about, the saying, like, here's what I think our goal is. What do you guys think? Does that match your understanding what you know, do you think that's a good goal? How could we improve it? How could we make this more clear? How could we make sure we're even more aligned in what we think we're trying to do and kind of go down the line for each element of structure and think about that, and that, especially if you do control the composition of the team, thinking about if the team's needs have changed since it was formed, that a lot of conflict can come from the fact that we're trying to make do without a critical skill that we have or that we needed, you know, somebody's skills and perspectives at the beginning of this task, but now we don't need them so much. And the reason everybody's upset with them for seeming like they're disengaged, not doing anything is because actually we don't have as much need for them to be at every meeting to be on the team as we used to. And so it doesn't hurt to reflect on. On these things and try and get it, get it a little more right. But that if you, you know, the kind of, I, I'm relatively pessimistic about the ability of real time coaching. So just getting together and talking about it, trying to motivate people, trying to come up with a new strategy to Compensate for problems in your structure. So if you have problems in your structure, all the coaching in the world is probably not going to completely fix your team. The thing I end up recommending the most for existing teams, teams that are having these kinds of problems, is to do what I call a relaunch. And that is to say, let's pretend like we're starting over, and we're going to try to do as much as we can to create this sense that this is a new team doing a new task. So that means changing where you meet. That might mean changing who's leading the discussion. Whatever you can change. Wear a different outfit, use different colors, markers, whatever you can do to create this sense that it's new. But that in really selling this to everyone else and saying, I think we want to change how we're operating, I'd like to propose that we relaunch and that we really start like this is day one, and that we really try and change and improve the way we're doing, working together. But that going along with that, you should reflect on, do we have the right composition? Do we have the right kind of way? We're thinking about what our goals are and what our tasks are, but most importantly in that usually what people can change are their norms. And that the sort of thing that works against relaunches a lot of times is teams that have some dysfunction often are not very psychologically safe, that you can have a discussion and say, hey, what do we think our goal should be? Is this a good goal? Is this a bad goal? But if people aren't speaking up, they're not sharing what they really think, they're not willing to take those interpersonal risks, then it's hard for that discussion to really be valuable. And so if you've lost that sense of psychological safety in your team, which usually if somebody's asking, hey, I've got this team having problems, which I do, that's usually the case. You're going to have to really double down on saying, like, maybe we haven't always been a team where we're speaking up when things are going wrong. And we've all been kind of silently tolerating some things we shouldn't have been silently tolerating. I really want to change that. I really want to hear from everybody. I. I need these suggestions for us to improve. And I'm going to, you know, if you're somebody who's maybe not been the most receptive to those kinds of suggestions or people speaking up, you're going to have to Convince everybody you changed, otherwise none of these things are going to really work. And that, you know, that if you have a team that's having a lot of problems, a lot of organizations would be better served by restructuring their teams and really having an actual fresh start and not just a simulated one. So I know that's not always what everyone wants to hear when they ask what's the research backed way to fix my kind of broken team? And the answer unfortunately is research is not very optimistic about your potential to fix your broken team. It's relatively pessimistic. And, and so the stakes of getting stuff right at the beginning are, are actually quite high.
- [38:50]
A
Well, using that as a great transition point. So let's imagine someone's coming in, they are at an organization that has said, all right, we're, we're starting fresh. Whether it's, you know, we're going to leverage our fresh start effect. I know you referenced Katie Milkman, good friend of the show, in the book, like, so, you know, first of the year, first quarter, whatever else, we're going to like relaunch everything, start new. What are the tips for them as they go to set up those ideal teams? And specifically I was so excited of that you have in there of the ideal number of people in a group which I feel like doesn't get set. It's so much of it depends out there, so that has to be included. And anything else that you want to share?
- [39:34]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, that was, that was right on the tip of my tongue as you were asking that question. Because this is. Yeah. The most common easy change for most organizations, or maybe not easy, but very understandable change is most teams and organizations are too big. And that if you think about you were having a dinner party and you invite 15 people over to your house, but you want to have one conversation and everybody's kind of focused on one thing. Like that doesn't sound like a great dinner party to me. Right. Like, it's like if we've got 15 people, that's a little too big. Like, I mean, I don't hear as well as I used to. I've been playing music for too many years. And even like hearing to the other end of the table would be a logistical problem with 15 people. Yet at work we do that all the time. Right. Like we come in, we have 15, 20, 25 people and we're saying we're going to have one conversation. But the research is pretty clear on when humans feel like we're in a right sized group where it's Neither too big nor too small. This research showed that our perception of too big and too small cross at about 4.5 people. I'm trying to get everybody to call this Hackman's number after Richard Hackman, who was my mentor and also conducted this study that shows this effect of 4.5. And so that means, you know, obviously we may have to sacrifice a few limbs when we're going into meetings at work, something like that. But that's not too much for the right size group now. But that really, if you have these groups that are kind of in this range of three to seven people, depending on what kind of work you're doing, we can have one conversation, everybody can be heard from, we can actually, you know, get real tasks done. But when we have these bigger groups and we want to do work, we want to make decisions, we want to come up with ideas, we want to have these kinds of discussions. Like I was referring to that. It's, you're really putting yourself at a disadvantage by trying to get 10, 15, 20 people in the room. And so you need to start to say like, how do I break up these larger units into task performing, decision making, idea generating, sized groups?
- [41:57]
A
Amazing. And so as we are thinking about that, so we've got our groups, they're going to be three to seven people, so we don't have to, you know, cut any limbs off. As we said there did our 4.5. So but how then do we decide what work is done in the group and what is maybe done outside of the group? Because there's got to be some independent stuff. Is there categories of type of job or work that's better done in the group and better done on your own?
- [42:26]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think the way I think about this is like when you really know how to do something well, often we can kind of define the interdependencies between the parts. So like in product development there's this big distinction between integrated products like iPhones and Apple computers used to be, where it's like the same company makes all the different parts and they're designed to work together and not to work with anything else. Whereas Android phones are modular. They're, you know, the operating system designed by a different company then designs the hardware and that, you know, the interfaces though have to be really well defined when we break up work in that modular way. And usually the trade off is modular work is a little bit faster, the coordination costs are lower, but we get the sort of best quality we can get from it is a little bit worse. Than if we discuss everything together. So what that means for sort of breaking up work within your team is that when. When we don't know how to do something at all, and we don't know what those interdependencies, what those sort of points of modularity are, we have to figure those out before we break up the work. Because that's where teams have coordination problems when they try and break up work that they don't understand how they're going to put it back together. That's the first question is, do we actually know how that works? If it's something your organization does all the time, you may well know how to break it up and put it back together. But if it's the first time your organization's done something, or the first time you've done something, that's going to be harder to just say, hey, let's all do. Let's do those parts as individuals. And then the more it requires, you know, this kind of multiple perspective, multiple expertise, and that usually is the same thing as being really complicated. And the more complex the work is, the more likely it is that we have to do a lot of that in groups until we get to the part that's like, oh, well, those little details are easy. And I understand how we're going to put those back in at the end. Whether, you know, it's like we're to the point we're making PowerPoint slides or whatever we're doing at the end, where it's like, well, yeah, I know we know how to do that. We know somebody can go off and do that, but we don't know how to, like, make the idea that's going to be the sort of guiding idea for this client. That's something we're going to have to discuss in the group. So I think that's usually the basic rule of thumb, I would say, is, do you know, have you done it before? Do you know how to do it? Is it complicated? And if I should have phrased those, so the answer was either yes or no to all of them. But if they mix up in the right way that we should do it as a group where we don't know how to do it, it requires some creativity, um, and it's complicated, then let's do that together.
- [45:31]
A
Okay, awesome. Well, as we go to close out, knowing that I can tell you and I could talk for hours on all of the nuance of these things. I'm a big fan of nuance, and it depends. But if we get some rapid fire, like Quick sort of like gut answers, knowing that, you know, nobody's going to hold them against you as far as we move forward. But if we say like easy kind of answers for those who are listening, what I think people, people might be wondering about, is it best to set up teams that are going to like live on in Legacy forever or try to have like short term, like adjustment of like teams that are for a specific function and then they dismantle and start a new group.
- [46:09]
B
On average, teams that stay together do better than shuffling people up and mixing them up. Mixing them up all the time. But that one, it really does depend on your structure.
- [46:20]
A
I know, I know. True, like for listener disclosure here, like answers. It depends all of these. And if we go like gut instinct on some things, we can get these.
- [46:30]
B
Yeah. If you, if holding everything equal, keep, you know, keep your teams intact for as long as you can.
- [46:35]
A
Cool. Is it best to have competition within the group members like that intra team competition to get the best out of people or to be competing against kind of an outside force? And if, if it's the force, then I have a follow up question.
- [46:55]
B
So it's mostly the outside force. Although if that outside force could be like aliens instead of other humans, that's probably the ideal situation.
- [47:06]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's what I was gonna say is like, so if it's ideally to prevent that siloing we talked about, it's not like another team on the, in the company. Right. You don't want that. We still need some of that like circle of empathy of we're team company here. But if our team is fighting against, can it be like maybe it's a competitor brand, but it could also be like you're a race against time or against like the status quo of a launch something external that's not other people or.
- [47:40]
B
Yeah, yeah. I mean friend friendly rivalries work pretty well for, for motivating people. It's just that friendly rivalries, when they persist over time for a while have a tendency to turn not so friendly.
- [47:54]
A
Right.
- [47:55]
B
I mean the safest competition is to compete against your own past performance. That to say, hey, let's beat what we did last month and we have like really serious, you know, rewards or we, we take that, that idea really seriously. That's the safest competition and that doesn't, doesn't turn ugly nearly as often as any other kind.
- [48:17]
A
Perfect. All right. And last of my rapid fires here. So if we've got some superstars and some we'll just like, I know you social loafers or whatever. In the group. But we've got. Is it best to diversify our teams, or do we get, like, one stacked team and one that we can focus on that needs some help or, you know, what's kind of the approach to. To that aspect of team structure?
- [48:41]
B
So, I mean, there is research that suggests that having too many stars on your team can undermine team performance, But I find in practice, that's a very rare problem. And that the. I would. Rather than thinking about raw talent, I would think very much about the skills and perspectives you need for that. For that task. So what do we need? And often people get kind of blinded by stardom, and they're like, oh, you know, they're really. They're really famous. They're the best in this thing. But they don't think about, like, what do we need for this particular task right now? So if you stay focused on that, I wouldn't worry quite as hard about. About the rest of it. Unless you have so many stars in your organization that, like, there. That there. There's a lot of potential for this.
- [49:29]
A
Awesome. Well, hopefully, you know, good problem to have. We have too many high performers. Right. That's not so bad. So. Well, thank you so much, Colin, for joining me on the show for chatting about groups and all these amazing tips for leaders that are listening, watching. For everyone who's now so excited to get their copy of the Collective Edge and to follow you and learn more and all those things. We'll have links in the show notes, but what's their best path to do that?
- [49:57]
B
Yeah, so go to my website, colinmfisher.com and yeah, follow me on LinkedIn, substack and all those other great things.
- [50:06]
A
Amazing. We, like I said, we'll have the links there for people. And just again, thank you so much, Colin. It's been a really fun conversation with you today.
- [50:14]
B
Thanks so much, Melina.
- [50:16]
A
Thank you again to Dr. Colin Fisher for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I kept coming back to how quickly meetings and teams become permanent fixtures. Even when no one really remembers why they were created in the first place. We don't question them because they're familiar, and that's our brain's default. But when left unchecked, those team structures and calendars get stagnant. And when that happens, teams get stuck. That's why I love the idea of building in a regular cadence to re evaluate. Imagine if your organization had a standing practice, maybe annually, to ask, what are our goals and what's the best team structure to meet them moving forward, what meetings are truly necessary, who needs to be in the room and if you were to start from zero instead of the current status. So remove everything from the calendar, go from here. I do talk about this concept of a meeting clean out in my book, what your employees need and can't tell you. And it just aligns so nicely with the core message of the Collective Edge that great teams don't just just happen. They're thoughtfully designed and maintained over time. And sometimes that means some pruning takes place and you don't have to just assume because it's there, it has to stay there. I hope that this conversation inspired you to look at your own team's meetings with a fresh perspective. And if you're interested in a speaker or trainer on this topic for your organization, I'd love to talk. Email me melinathebrainybusiness.com or go to the brainy business.com contact to set up a time to talk. So what's one meeting you might cancel or one team you could refresh this quarter. Come share it on social media. You'll find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy as well as links for my top related past episodes and books, including the Collective Edge, Ways to get in touch, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 567. And thank you again to Dr. Colin Fisher for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember, remember to be thoughtful.
- [52:43]
B
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.