Supply Chain Brain - September 2010

ableness, emotional stability and extroversion. The first, conscientiousness, really comes into play when participating as a team member. A person who is conscientious will be a highly contributing team member. They have the ability to sense when another task is needed, and they’ll shift. What’s really important to them isn’t their own success or satisfaction, it’s the success of the larger organization. So if you’re going to build a team, it’s important to determine whether you have enough of those people within your organization.

automatically going to know how to perform as team members, because they placed a high school sport or something like that. You have to take them through these things—educate them in things like the normal stages of formation that a team will go through. An industrial psychologist named Bruce Tuckman, in 1965, published his model of team formation, and it has stood the test of time. It explains to us that all teams will go through five stages. The first stage is “forming.” This is the stage of tension—no one knows each

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times are past us, and now we’ve started to come together as a team. You know this phase is ending when rituals have developed. Songs may have become important; we laugh about shared jokes.

After that, a team is able to go on to “ performing.” When the members perform, they have come to trust each other, routines have been built, and they’re able to quickly move into action. The final phase is one that comes into play with temporary teams—it might be cross-functional or consultancy teams—and that’s “adjourning.” There’s a natural point where teams break up, and members go their separate ways and on to their next mission in life. If people don’t understand that, it can be kind of frustrating, because every team every has to go through each of those stages in order to get to “performing.” You can’t rush it. It gets faster if people have worked together before, or if the company has very clearly defined objectives and roles. But you have be aware of that.

The second trait that’s important as you go to build a team is openness to experience. To be a good team member, you really have to want to hear what someone else says, and you have to be willing to look at things in a different way. The trait of agreeableness or disagreeableness is one to really be careful of. One highly disagreeable person will destroy a team. They just can’t function that way; they’re probably more effective in a work environment where they’re more isolated. As for the other two—emotional stability and extroversion—while they’re extremely important in the field of leadership, they don’t necessarily correlate either way to team membership.

Q: What are some of the most important
elements that should be considered when
building a team?
Robinson: First of all, you have to
train these people. It’s unfair just to throw
a group of them together and think they’re
other, you don’t know what the rules are,
you don’t know if you’re going to like
each other, you don’t really know why
you’re there. When the team members
have accepted that they’re part of a group,
the forming has ended.

Q: Any other points to consider? Robinson: There are a couple of other key things to keep in mind. One is the optimal size of a team. Science now tells us that the magic number is seven. It has statistically been proven over and over that teams with fewer than five people don’t have the diversity of thought and experience to accomplish their objectives, and that teams with more than nine people start to encounter some other problems. If you get much larger than 10, everyone won’t speak equally. People will begin to dominate conversations and the team won’t really represent all of its members. If the size of a team is more than nine, you might want to consider breaking it into two smaller teams. When you get above 10, there’s a problem called social loafing. That’s where people can hide a little bit. It has actually been tested a lot—if you think about tug-of-war, a person who’s pulling on a rope by himself will pull with a certain amount of force. Industrial psychologists have proven time and time again that with each person that gets added, the [degree of] individual exertion starts to decrease.