What makes genius teams tick?

Every now and then, we meet teams that are extraordinarily creative and productive. A recent article on Harvard Business Review’s Insider website presents an interesting perspective from psychologist Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg, at IMD business school in Switzerland. Two of the three differentiating factors she identifies are fairly predictable:

  • Every member “brings an outstanding capability that complements the capabilities of other team members”
  • The scale of what they aim to achieve

It’s the third item that is most noteworthy – “the almost constant generative tension that characterizes their interactions. The energy on the team is sparked by benevolent friction, conflict, impatience, and even well-intentioned intolerance… one team member likened their weekly meetings to a chemistry experiment – mixing potent ingredients and shaking hard to see what happens.”

Coping with this intensity and passion isn’t easy. Wedell-Wedellsborg notes some of the ways such teams maintain high quality of relationships. For example, high energy, passionate meetings are followed by brief check-ins with each other. She also notes that members of such teams are prone to burn out. These teams may deliver superb results, but potentially at a cost to members and their families.

An obvious – and wrong – conclusion from her analysis would be that organisations should focus on creating many more genius teams. The reality is that most people can’t or won’t immerse themselves that deeply in team task. And organisations, where people burn out, are liable to organisational fatigue.

A more constructive perspective is to regard these high-performing teams as relatively short-term developmental opportunities for talented employees to grow fast. The learning these individuals take will be of great value when they return to a more normal pace of working life. The team can be brought together for a specific, highly challenging project, or it can be a department that acts as a talent factory – attracting bright, committed people in, giving them enormous responsibility and appropriate support, and expecting them to move on after a period. (I first explored this phenomenon in a study more than 40 years ago.)

To make this a reality, organisations need to invest in creating a special kind of leader – one, who can move from challenging project to challenging project and build a genius team around them. They don’t have to be sucked into the high pressure, high stress environment themselves. Rather they become the container for team members to create that environment for themselves. I have over the years met several leaders, who exemplify this behaviour. All of them managed to be protective of their own well-being and that of their team members, while generating excitement for the creation and execution of big ideas.

In complex, adaptive systems theory, these leaders are “strange attractors” – they facilitate change by recreating the environment in ways that make desired outcomes much more likely.

A more complex world demands a lot more of these leaders, but standard talent development routes aren’t geared to fostering them. Standard approaches to culture change don’t help, because they focus on trying to force all teams to adapt to a single model, when what’s needed is a diversity of team cultures, in which genius teams play the role of a benevolent virus in the corporate biome.  

The concept of the corporate biome is one I plan to explore in more detail over the coming months.

©️David Clutterbuck, 2024

 

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