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Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

by Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson

Included with this full-text

Harvard Business Review

article:

The Idea in Brief—the core idea

The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work

Article Summary

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further

exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

Further Reading

Even the largest and most

complex teams can work

together effectively if the right

conditions are in place.

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wks-9-thru-16-(03/07/2022-05/01/2022)-PT4 at Laureate Education - Walden University, 2022.

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Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

page 1

The Idea in Brief The Idea in Practice

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To execute major initiatives in your organization—integrating a newly ac- quired firm, overhauling an IT system— you need complex teams. Such teams’ defining characteristics—large, virtual, diverse, and specialized—are crucial for handling daunting projects. Yet these very characteristics can also destroy team members’ ability to work together, say Gratton and Erickson. For instance, as team size grows, collaboration diminishes.

To maximize your complex teams’ effec- tiveness, construct a basis for collabora- tion in your company. Eight practices hinging on relationship building and cul- tural change can help. For example, create a strong sense of community by sponsor- ing events and activities that bring people together and help them get to know one another. And use informal mentoring and coaching to encourage employees to view interaction with leaders and col- leagues as valuable.

When executives, HR professionals, and team leaders all pitch in to apply these practices, complex teams hit the ground running—the day they’re formed.

The authors recommend these practices for encouraging collaboration in complex teams:

W HAT EXECUTIVES CAN DO

•

Invest in building and maintaining social re- lationships throughout your organization.

Example:

Royal Bank of Scotland’s CEO commis- sioned new headquarters built around an indoor atrium and featuring a “Main Street” with shops, picnic spaces, and a leisure club. The design encourages employees to rub shoulders daily, which fuels collabora- tion in RBS’s complex teams.

• Model collaborative behavior.

Example:

At Standard Chartered Bank, top executives frequently fill in for one another, whether leading regional celebrations, representing SCB at key external events, or initiating in- ternal dialogues with employees. They make their collaborative behavior visible through extensive travel and photos of leaders from varied sites working together.

• Use coaching to reinforce a collaborative culture.

Example:

At Nokia, each new hire’s manager lists ev- eryone in the organization the newcomer should meet, suggests topics he or she should discuss with each person on the list, and explains why establishing each of these relationships is important.

W HAT HR CAN DO

•

Train employees in the specific skills re- quired for collaboration: appreciating others, engaging in purposeful conversa- tion, productively and creatively resolving conflicts, and managing programs.

• Support a sense of community by sponsor- ing events and activities such as network- ing groups, cooking weekends, or tennis

coaching. Spontaneous, unannounced ac- tivities can further foster community spirit.

Example:

Marriott has recognized the anniversary of the company’s first hotel opening by rolling back the cafeteria to the 1950s and spon- soring a team twist dance contest.

W HAT TEAM LEADERS CAN DO

•

Ensure that at least 20%–40% of a new team’s members already know one another.

Example:

When Nokia needs to transfer skills across business functions or units, it moves entire small teams intact instead of reshuffling individual people into new positions.

• Change your leadership style as your team develops. At early stages in the project, be task-oriented: articulate the team’s goal and accountabilities. As inevitable conflicts start emerging, switch to relationship building.

• Assign distinct roles so team members can do their work independently. They’ll spend less time negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. But leave thepath to achiev- ing the team’s goal somewhat ambiguous. Lacking well-defined tasks, members are more likely to invest time and energy collaborating.

This document is authorized for use only by Tylecia Westbrook in WMBA-6633-2/MGMT-6621-2/MHRM-6510-2/MMSL-6660-2/COMM-6506-2-Mentoring & Coaching-2022-Spring-SEM-Term- wks-9-thru-16-(03/07/2022-05/01/2022)-PT4 at Laureate Education - Walden University, 2022.

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

by Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson

harvard business review • november 2007 page 2

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Even the largest and most complex teams can work together effectively

if the right conditions are in place.

When tackling a major initiative like an acquisition or an overhaul of IT systems, companies rely on large, diverse teams of highly educated specialists to get the job done. These teams often are convened quickly to meet an urgent need and work together virtually, collaborating online and sometimes over long distances.

Appointing such a team is frequently the only way to assemble the knowledge and breadth required to pull off many of the com- plex tasks businesses face today. When the BBC covers the World Cup or the Olympics, for instance, it gathers a large team of re- searchers, writers, producers, cameramen, and technicians, many of whom have not met before the project. These specialists work together under the high pressure of a “no retake” environment, with just one chance to record the action. Similarly, when the central IT team at Marriott sets out to develop sophis- ticated systems to enhance guest experiences, it has to collaborate closely with independent hotel owners, customer-experience experts,

global brand managers, and regional heads, each with his or her own agenda and needs.

Our recent research into team behavior at 15 multinational companies, however, reveals an interesting paradox: Although teams that are large, virtual, diverse, and composed of highly educated specialists are increasingly crucial with challenging projects, those same four characteristics make it hard for teams to get anything done. To put it another way, the qualities required for success are the same qualities that undermine success. Members of complex teams are less likely—absent other influences—to share knowledge freely, to learn from one another, to shift workloads flexibly to break up unexpected bottlenecks, to help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and to share resources—in other words, to col- laborate. They are less likely to say that they “sink or swim” together, want one another to succeed, or view their goals as compatible.

Consider the issue of size. Teams have grown considerably over the past ten years. New technologies help companies extend

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 3

participation on a project to an ever greater number of people, allowing firms to tap into a wide body of knowledge and expertise. A decade or so ago, the common view was that true teams rarely had more than 20 members. Today, according to our research, many com- plex tasks involve teams of 100 or more. How- ever, as the size of a team increases beyond 20 members, the tendency to collaborate naturally decreases, we have found. Under the right conditions, large teams can achieve high levels of cooperation, but creating those conditions requires thoughtful, and some- times significant, investments in the capacity for collaboration across the organization.

Working together virtually has a similar impact on teams. The majority of those we studied had members spread among multiple locations—in several cases, in as many as 13 sites around the globe. But as teams became more virtual, we saw, cooperation also de- clined, unless the company had taken mea- sures to establish a collaborative culture.

As for diversity, the challenging tasks facing businesses today almost always re- quire the input and expertise of people with disparate views and backgrounds to create cross-fertilization that sparks insight and innovation. But diversity also creates prob- lems. Our research shows that team members collaborate more easily and naturally if they perceive themselves as being alike. The differ- ences that inhibit collaboration include not only nationality but also age, educational level, and even tenure. Greater diversity also often means that team members are working with people that they know only superficially or have never met before—colleagues drawn from other divisions of the company, perhaps, or even from outside it. We have found that the higher the proportion of strangers on the team and the greater the diversity of back- ground and experience, the less likely the team members are to share knowledge or exhibit other collaborative behaviors.

In the same way, the higher the educational level of the team members is, the more chal- lenging collaboration appears to be for them. We found that the greater the proportion of experts a team had, the more likely it was to disintegrate into nonproductive conflict or stalemate.

So how can executives strengthen an orga- nization’s ability to perform complex col-

laborative tasks—to maximize the effectiveness of large, diverse teams, while minimizing the disadvantages posed by their structure and composition?

To answer that question we looked carefully at 55 large teams and identified those that demonstrated high levels of collaborative be- havior despite their complexity. Put differently, they succeeded both because of and despite their composition. Using a range of statistical analyses, we considered how more than 100 factors, such as the design of the task and the company culture, might contribute to collabo- ration, manifested, for example, in a willing- ness to share knowledge and workloads. Out of the 100-plus factors, we were able to isolate eight practices that correlated with success— that is, that appeared to help teams overcome substantially the difficulties that were posed by size, long-distance communication, diversity, and specialization. We then interviewed the teams that were very strong in these practices, to find out how they did it. In this article we’ll walk through the practices. They fall into four general categories—executive support, HR practices, the strength of the team leader, and the structure of the team itself.

Executive Support

At the most basic level, a team’s success or failure at collaborating reflects the philosophy of top executives in the organization. Teams do well when executives invest in support- ing social relationships, demonstrate collabo- rative behavior themselves, and create what we call a “gift culture”—one in which employ- ees experience interactions with leaders and colleagues as something valuable and gener- ously offered, a gift.

Investing in signature relationship prac- tices. When we looked at complex collaborative teams that were performing in a productive and innovative manner, we found that in every case the company’s top executives had invested significantly in building and main- taining social relationships throughout the organization. However, the way they did that varied widely. The most collaborative compa- nies had what we call “signature” practices— practices that were memorable, difficult for others to replicate, and particularly well suited to their own business environment.

For example, when Royal Bank of Scotland’s CEO, Fred Goodwin, invested £350 million to

Lynda Gratton

([email protected]) is a professor of management practice at London Business School and a senior fellow at the Advanced Institute of Management. She is the author of Hot Spots: Why Some Teams, Work- places, and Organizations Buzz with Energy—and Others Don’t (Berrett- Koehler, 2007). Tamara J. Erickson ([email protected]) is the president of the Concours Institute, the research and education arm of BSG Alliance. She is based in Boston and is a coauthor of several articles for HBR, including the McKinsey Award winner “It’s Time to Retire Retirement” (March 2004).

mailto:[email protected]

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 4

open a new headquarters building outside Edinburgh in 2005, one of his goals was to foster productive collaboration among employ- ees. Built around an indoor atrium, the new structure allows more than 3,000 people from the firm to rub shoulders daily.

The headquarters is designed to improve communication, increase the exchange of ideas, and create a sense of community among em- ployees. Many of the offices have an open layout and look over the atrium—a vast trans- parent space. The campus is set up like a small town, with retail shops, restaurants, jogging tracks and cycling trails, spaces for picnics and barbecues—even a leisure club complete with swimming pool, gym, dance studios, tennis courts, and football pitches. The idea is that with a private “Main Street” running through the headquarters, employees will remain on the campus throughout the day—and be out of their offices mingling with colleagues for at least a portion of it.

To ensure that non-headquarters staff mem- bers feel they are a part of the action, Good-

win also commissioned an adjoining business school, where employees from other locations meet and learn. The visitors are encouraged to spend time on the headquarters campus and at forums designed to give employees opportuni- ties to build relationships.

Indeed, the RBS teams we studied had very strong social relationships, a solid basis for collaborative activity that allowed them to ac- complish tasks quickly. Take the Group Busi- ness Improvement (GBI) teams, which work on 30-, 60-, or 90-day projects ranging from back-office fixes to IT updates and are made up of people from across RBS’s many busi- nesses, including insurance, retail banking, and private banking in Europe and the United States. When RBS bought NatWest and mi- grated the new acquisition’s technology plat- form to RBS’s, the speed and success of the GBI teams confounded many market analysts.

BP has made another sort of signature in- vestment. Because its employees are located all over the world, with relatively few at head- quarters, the company aims to build social

The Research

Our work is based on a major research ini- tiative conducted jointly by the Concours Institute (a member of BSG Alliance) and the Cooperative Research Project of London Business School, with funding from the Advanced Institute for Management and 15 corporate sponsors. The initiative was created as a way to explore the practicalities of collaborative work in contemp orary organizations.

We sent surveys to 2,420 people, including members of 55 teams. A total of 1,543 people replied, a response rate of 64%. Separate sur- veys were administered to group members, to group leaders, to the executives who evalu- ated teams, and to HR leaders at the compa- nies involved. The tasks performed by the teams included new-product development, process reengineering, and identifying new solutions to business problems. The compa- nies involved included four telecommunica- tion companies, seven financial services or consulting firms, two media companies, a hospitality firm, and one oil company. The size of the teams ranged from four to 183 people, with an average of 44.

Our objective was to study the levers that executives could pull to improve team perfor- mance and innovation in collaborative tasks. We examined scores of possible factors, including the following:

The general culture of the company.

We designed a wide range of survey questions to measure the extent to which the firm had a cooperative culture and to uncover employ- ees’ attitudes toward knowledge sharing.

Human resources practices and processes.

We studied the way staffing took place and the process by which people were promoted. We examined the extent and type of training, how reward systems were configured, and the extent to which mentoring and coaching took place.

Socialization and network-building prac-

tices.

We looked at how often people within the team participated in informal socializa- tion, and the type of interaction that was most common. We also asked numerous questions about the extent to which team members were active in informal communities.

The design of the task.

We asked team members and team leaders about the task

itself. Our interest here was in how they per- ceived the purpose of the task, how complex it was, the extent to which the task required members of the team to be interdependent, and the extent to which the task required them to engage in boundary-spanning activities with people outside the team.

The leadership of the team.

We studied the perceptions team members had of their leaders’ style and how the leaders described their own style. In particular, we were inter- ested in the extent to which the leaders prac- ticed relationship-oriented and task-oriented skills and set cooperative or competitive goals.

The behavior of the senior executives.

We asked team members and team leaders about their perceptions of the senior executives of their business unit. We focused in particular on whether team members described them as cooperative or competitive.

In total we considered more than 100 fac- tors. Using a range of statistical analyses, we were able to identify eight that correlated with the successful performance of teams handling complex collaborative tasks. (See the sidebar “Eight Factors That Lead to Success.”)

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 5

networks by moving employees across func- tions, businesses, and countries as part of their career development. When BP inte- grates an acquisition (it has grown by buying numerous smaller oil companies), the leader- ship development committee deliberately rotates employees from the acquired firm through positions across the corporation. Though the easier and cheaper call would be to leave the executives in their own units— where, after all, they know the business—BP instead trains them to take on new roles. As a consequence any senior team today is likely to be made up of people from multiple heri- tages. Changing roles frequently—it would not be uncommon for a senior leader at BP to have worked in four businesses and three geo- graphic locations over the past decade— forces executives to become very good at meeting new people and building relation- ships with them.

Modeling collaborative behavior. In com- panies with many thousands of employees, relatively few have the opportunity to observe the behavior of the senior team on a day-to- day basis. Nonetheless, we found that the perceived behavior of senior executives plays a significant role in determining how coopera- tive teams are prepared to be.

Executives at Standard Chartered Bank are exceptionally good role models when it comes to cooperation, a strength that many attribute to the firm’s global trading heritage. The Chartered Bank received its remit from Queen Victoria in 1853. The bank’s traditional business was in cotton from Bombay (now Mumbai), indigo and tea from Calcutta, rice from Burma, sugar from Java, tobacco from Sumatra, hemp from Manila, and silk from Yokohama. The Standard Bank was founded in the Cape Province of South Africa in 1863 and was prominent in financing the develop- ment of the diamond fields and later gold mines. Standard Chartered was formed in 1969 through a merger of the two banks, and today the firm has 57 operating groups in 57 countries, with no home market.

It’s widely accepted at Standard Chartered that members of the general management committee will frequently serve as substitutes for one another. The executives all know and understand the entire business and can fill in for each other easily on almost any task, whether it’s leading a regional celebration, representing the company at a key external event, or kicking off an internal dialogue with employees.

While the behavior of the executive team is crucial to supporting a culture of collabo- ration, the challenge is to make executives’ behavior visible. At Standard Chartered the senior team travels extensively; the norm is to travel even for relatively brief meetings. This investment in face-to-face interaction creates many opportunities for people across the company to see the top executives in action. Internal communication is frequent and open, and, maybe most telling, every site around the world is filled with photos of groups of executives—country and functional leaders—working together.

The senior team’s collaborative nature trickles down throughout the organization. Employees quickly learn that the best way to get things done is through informal networks.

Collaboration Conundrums

Four traits that are crucial to teams—

but also undermine them

Large Size

Whereas a decade ago, teams rarely had more than 20 members, our findings show that their size has increased signif- icantly, no doubt because of new tech- nologies. Large teams are often formed to ensure the involvement of a wide stakeholder group, the coordination of a diverse set of activities, and the har- nessing of multiple skills. As a conse- quence, many inevitably involve 100 people or more. However, our research shows that as the size of the team in- creases beyond 20 members, the level of natural cooperation among members of the team decreases.

Virtual Participation

Today most complex collaborative teams have members who are working at a dis- tance from one another. Again, the logic is that the assigned tasks require the insights and knowledge of people from many locations. Team members may be working in offices in the same city or strung across the world. Only 40% of the

teams in our sample had members all in one place. Our research shows that as teams become more virtual, collabora- tion declines.

Diversity

Often the challenging tasks facing today’s businesses require the rapid assembly of people from multiple backgrounds and perspectives, many of whom have rarely, if ever, met. Their diverse knowl- edge and views can spark insight and innovation. However, our research shows that the higher the proportion of people who don’t know anyone else on the team and the greater the diversity, the less likely the team members are to share knowledge.

High Education Levels

Complex collaborative teams often gen- erate huge value by drawing on a vari- ety of deeply specialized skills and knowledge to devise new solutions. Again, however, our research shows that the greater the proportion of highly educated specialists on a team, the more likely the team is to disinte- grate into unproductive conflicts.

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 6

For example, when a major program was re- cently launched to introduce a new customer- facing technology, the team responsible had an almost uncanny ability to understand who the key stakeholders at each branch bank were and how best to approach them. The team members’ first-name acquaintance with people across the company brought a sense of dynamism to their interactions.

Creating a “gift culture.” A third important role for executives is to ensure that mentor- ing and coaching become embedded in their own routine behavior—and throughout the company. We looked at both formal mentor- ing processes, with clear roles and responsi- bilities, and less formal processes, where mentoring was integrated into everyday ac- tivities. It turned out that while both types were important, the latter was more likely to increase collaborative behavior. Daily coaching helps establish a cooperative “gift culture” in place of a more transactional “tit- for-tat culture.”

At Nokia informal mentoring begins as soon as someone steps into a new job. Typically, within a few days, the employee’s manager will sit down and list all the people in the organiza- tion, no matter in what location, it would be useful for the employee to meet. This is a deeply ingrained cultural norm, which proba- bly originated when Nokia was a smaller and simpler organization. The manager sits with the newcomer, just as her manager sat with her when she joined, and reviews what topics

the newcomer should discuss with each person on the list and why establishing a relationship with him or her is important. It is then stan- dard for the newcomer to actively set up meet- ings with the people on the list, even when it means traveling to other locations. The gift of time—in the form of hours spent on coaching and building networks—is seen as crucial to the collaborative culture at Nokia.

Focused HR Practices

So what about human resources? Is collabora- tion solely in the hands of the executive team? In our study we looked at the impact of a wide variety of HR practices, including selection, performance management, promotion, re- wards, and training, as well as formally spon- sored coaching and mentoring programs.

We found some surprises: for example, that the type of reward system—whether based on team or individual achievement, or tied explic- itly to collaborative behavior or not—had no discernible effect on complex teams’ produc- tivity and innovation. Although most formal HR programs appeared to have limited impact, we found that two practices did improve team performance: training in skills related to col- laborative behavior, and support for informal community building. Where collaboration was strong, the HR team had typically made a sig- nificant investment in one or both of those practices—often in ways that uniquely repre- sented the company’s culture and business strategy.

Eight Factors That Lead to Success

1. Investing in signature relationship

practices.

Executives can encourage col- laborative behavior by making highly vis- ible investments—in facilities with open floor plans to foster communication, for ex- ample—that demonstrate their commit- ment to collaboration.

2. Modeling collaborative behavior.

At companies where the senior executives demonstrate highly collaborative behavior themselves, teams collaborate well.

3. Creating a “gift culture.”

Mentoring and coaching—especially on an informal basis— help people build the networks they need to work across corporate boundaries.

4. Ensuring the requisite skills.

Human resources departments that teach employees how to build relationships, communicate well, and resolve conflicts creatively can have a major impact on team collaboration.

5. Supporting a strong sense of commu-

nity.

When people feel a sense of community, they are more comfortable reaching out to others and more likely to share knowledge.

6. Assigning team leaders that are both

task- and relationship-oriented.

The debate has traditionally focused on whether a task or a relationship orientation creates better leadership, but in fact both are key to suc- cessfully leading a team. Typically, leaning

more heavily on a task orientation at the outset of a project and shifting toward a re- lationship orientation once the work is in full swing works best.

7. Building on heritage relationships.

When too many team members are strang- ers, people may be reluctant to share knowl- edge. The best practice is to put at least a few people who know one another on the team.

8. Understanding role clarity and task

ambiguity.

Cooperation increases when the roles of individual team members are sharply defined yet the team is given latitude on how to achieve the task.

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 7

Ensuring the requisite skills.

Many of the factors that support collaboration relate to what we call the “container” of collaboration— the underlying culture and habits of the com- pany or team. However, we found that some teams had a collaborative culture but were not skilled in the practice of collaboration it- self. They were encouraged to cooperate, they wanted to cooperate, but they didn’t know how to work together very well in teams.

Our study showed that a number of skills were crucial: appreciating others, being able to engage in purposeful conversations, produc- tively and creatively resolving conflicts, and program management. By training employees in those areas, a company’s human resources or corporate learning department can make an important difference in team performance.

In the research, PricewaterhouseCoopers emerged as having one of the strongest capa- bilities in productive collaboration. With re- sponsibility for developing 140,000 employees in nearly 150 countries, PwC’s training includes modules that address teamwork, emotional intelligence, networking, holding difficult conversations, coaching, corporate social re- sponsibility, and communicating the firm’s strategy and shared values. PwC also teaches employees how to influence others effectively and build healthy partnerships.

A number of other successful teams in our sample came from organizations that had a commitment to teaching employees relation- ship skills. Lehman Brothers’ flagship program

for its client-facing staff, for instance, is its training in selling and relationship manage- ment. The program is not about sales tech- niques but, rather, focuses on how Lehman values its clients and makes sure that every client has access to all the resources the firm has to offer. It is essentially a course on strate- gies for building collaborative partnerships with customers, emphasizing the impor- tance of trust-based personal relationships.

Supporting a sense of community. While a communal spirit can develop spontane- ously, we discovered that HR can also play a critical role in cultivating it, by sponsoring group events and activities such as women’s networks, cooking weekends, and tennis coaching, or creating policies and practices that encourage them.

At ABN Amro we studied effective change- management teams within the company’s enterprise services function. These informal groups were responsible for projects associ- ated with the implementation of new tech- nology throughout the bank; one team, for instance, was charged with expanding online banking services. To succeed, the teams needed the involvement and expertise of different parts of the organization.

The ABN Amro teams rated the company’s support for informal communities very positively. The firm makes the technology needed for long-distance collaboration readily available to groups of individuals with shared interests—for instance, in specific technolo- gies or markets—who hold frequent web con- ferences and communicate actively online. The company also encourages employees that travel to a new location to arrange meetings with as many people as possible. As projects are completed, working groups disband but employees maintain networks of connections. These practices serve to build a strong com- munity over time—one that sets the stage for success with future projects.

Committed investment in informal net- works is also a central plank of the HR strat- egy at Marriott. Despite its size and global reach, Marriott remains a family business, and the chairman, Bill Marriott, makes a point of communicating that idea regularly to employees. He still tells stories of counting sticky nickels at night as a child—proceeds from the root-beer stand founded in downtown Washington, DC, by his mother and father.

How Complex Is the Collaborative Task?

Not all highly collaborative tasks are complex. In assembling and managing a team, consider the project you need to assign and whether the following state- ments apply:

__ The task is unlikely to be accom- plished successfully using only the skills within the team.

__ The task must be addressed by a new group formed specifically for this purpose.

__ The task requires collective input from highly specialized individuals.

__ The task requires collective input and agreement from more than 20 people.

__ The members of the team working on the task are in more than two loca- tions.

__ The success of the task is highly dependent on understanding prefer- ences or needs of individuals outside the group.

__ The outcome of the task will be in- fluenced by events that are highly uncer- tain and difficult to predict.

__ The task must be completed under extreme time pressure.

If more than two of these statements

are true, the task requires complex

collaboration.

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 8

Many of the firm’s HR investments rein- force a friendly, family-like culture. Almost every communication reflects an element of staff appreciation. A range of “pop-up” events—spontaneous activities—create a sense of fun and community. For example, the cafe- teria might roll back to the 1950s, hold a twist dance contest, and in doing so, recognize the anniversary of the company’s first hotel open- ing. Bill Marriott’s birthday might be cele- brated with parties throughout the company, serving as an occasion to emphasize the firm’s culture and values. The chairman recently began his own blog, which is popular with employees, in which he discusses everything from Marriott’s efforts to become greener, to his favorite family vacation spots—themes intended to reinforce the idea that the com- pany is a community.

The Right Team Leaders

In the groups that had high levels of collabora- tive behavior, the team leaders clearly made a significant difference. The question in our minds was how they actually achieved this. The answer, we saw, lay in their flexibility as managers.

Assigning leaders who are both task- and relationship-oriented. There has been much debate among both academics and senior managers about the most appropriate style for leading teams. Some people have suggested that relationship-oriented leadership is most appropriate in complex teams, since people are more likely to share knowledge in an envi- ronment of trust and goodwill. Others have argued that a task orientation—the ability to make objectives clear, to create a shared awareness of the dimensions of the task, and to provide monitoring and feedback—is most important.

In the 55 teams we studied, we found that the truth lay somewhere in between. The most productive, innovative teams were typi- cally led by people who were both task- and relationship-oriented. What’s more, these leaders changed their style during the project. Specifically, at the early stages they exhibited task-oriented leadership: They made the goal clear, engaged in debates about commit- ments, and clarified the responsibilities of individual team members. However, at a cer- tain point in the development of the project they switched to a relationship orientation.

This shift often took place once team mem- bers had nailed down the goals and their accountabilities and when the initial tensions around sharing knowledge had begun to emerge. An emphasis throughout a project on one style at the expense of the other inevita- bly hindered the long-term performance of the team, we found.

Producing ambidextrous team leaders— those with both relationship and task skills— is a core goal of team-leadership development at Marriott. The company’s performance- review process emphasizes growth in both kinds of skills. As evidence of their relation- ship skills, managers are asked to describe their peer network and cite examples of spe- cific ways that network helped them succeed. They also must provide examples of how they’ve used relationship building to get things done. The development plans that follow these conversations explicitly map out how the managers can improve specific elements of their social relationships and networks. Such a plan might include, for instance, having lunch regularly with people from a particular community of interest.

To improve their task leadership, many people in the teams at Marriott participated in project-management certification programs, taking refresher courses to maintain their skills over time. Evidence of both kinds of capabilities becomes a significant criterion on which people are selected for key leadership roles at the company.

Team Formation and Structure

The final set of lessons for developing and managing complex teams has to do with the makeup and structure of the teams them- selves.

Building on heritage relationships. Given how important trust is to successful collabora- tion, forming teams that capitalize on preex- isting, or “heritage,” relationships, increases the chances of a project’s success. Our research shows that new teams, particularly those with a high proportion of members who were strangers at the time of formation, find it more difficult to collaborate than those with established relationships.

Newly formed teams are forced to invest significant time and effort in building trusting relationships. However, when some team members already know and trust one an-

The most productive,

innovative teams were

led by people who were

both task- and

relationship-oriented.

What’s more, these

leaders changed their

style during the project.

Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams

harvard business review • november 2007 page 9

other, they can become nodes, which over time evolve into networks. Looking closely at our data, we discovered that when 20% to 40% of the team members were already well connected to one another, the team had strong collaboration right from the start.

It helps, of course, if the company leader- ship has taken other measures to cultivate networks that cross boundaries. The orienta- tion process at Nokia ensures that a large number of people on any team know one another, increasing the odds that even in a company of more than 100,000 people, some- one on a companywide team knows someone else and can make introductions.

Nokia has also developed an organizational architecture designed to make good use of heritage relationships. When it needs to trans- fer skills across business functions or units, Nokia moves entire small teams intact in- stead of reshuffling individual people into new positions. If, for example, the company needs to bring together a group of market and technology experts to address a new cus- tomer need, the group formed would be com- posed of small pods of colleagues from each area. This ensures that key heritage relation- ships continue to strengthen over time, even as the organization redirects its resources to meet market needs. Because the entire com- pany has one common platform for logistics, HR, finance, and other transactions, teams can switch in and out of businesses and geographies without learning new systems.

One important caveat about heritage re- lationships: If not skillfully managed, too many of them can actually disrupt collabora- tion. When a significant number of people within the team know one another, they tend to form strong subgroups—whether by func- tion, geography, or anything else they have in common. When that happens, the proba- bility of conflict among the subgroups, which we call fault lines, increases.

Understanding role clarity and task ambi- guity. Which is more important to promoting collaboration: a clearly defined approach to- ward achieving the goal, or clearly specified roles for individual team members? The com- mon assumption is that carefully spelling out the approach is essential, but leaving the roles of individuals within the team vague will en- courage people to share ideas and contribute in multiple dimensions.

Our research shows that the opposite is true: Collaboration improves when the roles of indi- vidual team members are clearly defined and well understood—when individuals feel that they can do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste too much energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focus on the task. In addition, team mem- bers are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team’s goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest time and energy in collaboration.

At the BBC we studied the teams responsi- ble for the radio and television broadcasts of the 2006 Proms (a two-month-long musical celebration), the team that televised the 2006 World Cup, and a team responsible for day- time television news. These teams were large—133 people worked on the Proms, 66 on the World Cup, and 72 on the news—and included members with a wide range of skills and from many disciplines. One would imag- ine, therefore, that there was a strong possi- bility of confusion among team members.

To the contrary, we found that the BBC’s teams scored among the highest in our sample with regard to the clarity with which members viewed their own roles and the roles of others. Every team was composed of specialists who had deep expertise in their given function, and each person had a clearly defined role. There was little overlap between the responsi- bilities of the sound technician and the camera operator, and so on. Yet the tasks the BBC teams tackle are, by their very nature, uncer- tain, particularly when they involve breaking news. The trick the BBC has pulled off has been to clarify team members’ individual roles with so much precision that it keeps friction to a minimum.

The successful teams we studied at Reuters worked out of far-flung locations, and often the team members didn’t speak a common lan- guage. (The primary languages were Russian, Chinese, Thai, and English.) These teams, largely composed of software programmers, were responsible for the rapid development of highly complex technical software and net- work products. Many of the programmers sat at their desks for 12 hours straight developing

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harvard business review • november 2007 page 10

code, speaking with no one. Ironically, these teams judged cooperative behavior to be high among their members. That may be because each individual was given autonomy over one discrete piece of the project. The rapid pace and demanding project timelines encouraged individual members to work independently to get the job done, but each person’s work had to be shaped with an eye toward the overall team goal.

• • •

Strengthening your organization’s capacity for collaboration requires a combination of long- term investments—in building relationships and trust, in developing a culture in which se- nior leaders are role models of cooperation— and smart near-term decisions about the ways teams are formed, roles are defined, and chal- lenges and tasks are articulated. Practices and structures that may have worked well with simple teams of people who were all in one lo-

cation and knew one another are likely to lead to failure when teams grow more complex.

Most of the factors that impede collabora- tion today would have impeded collaboration at any time in history. Yesterday’s teams, how- ever, didn’t require the same amount of mem- bers, diversity, long-distance cooperation, or expertise that teams now need to solve global business challenges. So the models for teams need to be realigned with the demands of the current business environment. Through care- ful attention to the factors we’ve described in this article, companies can assemble the breadth of expertise needed to solve complex business problems—without inducing the destructive behaviors that can accompany it.

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