x
Getting team
composition right is
critical to a team’s
success.
Setting up small, agile, high-performing virtual teams has enormous potential for companies to increase sales, penetrate new markets, improve business processes, and come up with the next generation of disruptive innovations.
But putting together a great team is tricky. OnPoint Consulting’s 2008 study found that more than 25 percent of teams were not performing up to par within many companies with significant investments in technology for virtual teamsi .
A KPMG study of outsourced IT found that 86 percent of companies lost more than 25 percent of IT benefits because of virtual team projects that had to be shelved or sharply downsizedii.
And a study of 120 virtual teams by Richard Hackman of Harvard found that fewer than 10% of team members could even agree on who was on each team.
Part of the problem is that teams – both the virtual and collocated types – are often thrown together without much thought or planning.
Booting an earnings boost
At a large, multinational manufacturing company with which Ferrazzi Greenlight recently worked, a team was formed to deal with some the company’s complex, interdependent businesses.
The goal was to optimize decision-making all along the value chain. The executive leadership realized that bringing such a team together had the potential to boost earnings by tens of millions of dollars.
But when we looked under the covers at the hastily assembled team, it was clear that not enough thought had gone into selecting the members.
The team was huge – more than 30 people – with a mixture of business, manufacturing, and commercial leaders, some of whom reported to each other.
While some members had deep knowledge of certain parts of the business vital for optimization decisions, others were included on an honorary basis.
By the time we were asked to help get the team on track, members openly acknowledged that the team was in disarray and that the optimization decisions it had made had fallen short of increased earnings projections.
As the manufacturer discovered, getting team composition right is critical to a team’s success. That’s especially true for virtual teams, which are more autonomous than collocated teams. Leaders of virtual teams must work harder to develop trust and rapport because such teams don’t always avail themselves of the benefit of frequent informal exchanges and seeing visual and body language cues – vital feedback mechanisms that help keep team members’ efforts aligned.
The manufacturing company is not alone.
I rarely see virtual teams that were formed with sufficient forethought.
In many companies, teams just seem to happen – coming together out of nowhere, grabbing any available resource, completely unplanned.
Months or even years later, senior executives have to face the unpalatable truth: the virtual team that was put together to slash costs is not only dysfunctional, it was a drain on the bottom line.
That same OnPoint Consulting survey of 48 virtual teams across a wide range of industries to understand what makes a high-performing team successful found that decisions about team composition – the size and structure of the team as well as the skills members bring to the team, including interpersonal skills – are among the most important predictors of virtual team success.
