By Tom Atkinson, Director, Customer Research
What’s the best way to achieve high-quality results when you’re under pressure to deliver quickly? A recent Forum initiative provides some clues. Forum’s leadership team took an innovative approach to identifying new business opportunities in today’s demanding economic environment: It created five cross-functional teams and assigned each team the task of building a business case for a potential new learning offering.
Each team had five members (representing marketing, sales, consulting, project management, and R&D), as well as a sponsor from the executive leadership team. Team members were distributed globally, and they had to accomplish their work without traveling. The teams’ job was to research their topic, design their solution, create a plan, and prepare to present it to the leadership team in 3 weeks.
After the cross-functional teams completed their work and made their presentations, we surveyed the members about their experience and, in particular, the factors that affected the quality of their work. All of the teams’ members thought they had done a good job overall: their ratings ranged from 4.0 to 4.8 on a 5-point scale. In order to understand what distinguished the top-quality teams from the others, we created two groups of respondents: team members who rated their team’s quality 5 (7 people) and those who rated it less than 5 (12 people). We labeled these two groups “higher quality” and “lower quality.”
The higher- and lower-quality groups differed significantly (p<.05) on how they rated their team’s climate on these 12 dimensions (listed in descending order of strength):
· Courage and persistence demonstrated in addressing organizational challenges and roadblocks.
· Team members connected to the work emotionally and intellectually (that is, they were engaged).
· Specific team performance goals were clearly established.
· Standards of excellence for individual performance were defined.
· Team members were encouraged to challenge assumptions, confront brutal facts, and speak with frankness and honesty.
· The initiative’s goals and the organization’s strategy were clearly linked.
· Team members rewarded innovation and calculated risk-taking.
· Team members were free to identify and correct their own errors in their own way.
· Team members took ownership for their performance, individually and as a team.
· Team members were encouraged to use their own judgment in solving problems.
· A bias for action was prevalent.
· There was a high degree of trust among team members.
What actions can a team leader take to achieve the best results in the shortest time? These findings suggest that the three most important things for leaders to pay attention to are:
1. Communicating the team’s mission in such a way that everyone understands and buys into it, and knows how he or she contributes
2. Creating a climate that fosters lively and frank debate, open-minded thinking, and experimentation
3. Appealing to people’s hearts and minds, not just getting the work out
Interestingly enough, formal rewards, and even recognition and praise, didn’t make the top-12 list for achieving top quality. Apparently, if team members are fully engaged and committed to working together, the work has enough intrinsic value; members don’t need special attention or financial bonuses to encourage them to do a superior job.
This is only one small experiment; we wonder how broadly the findings might apply. What do you think drives speed and quality most in your company?
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