This week’s assignment allowed me to reflect on previous sports teams I have been on throughout my career. I was able to look at the characteristics of successful teams and non-successful t

Artwork Andy Gilmore, Chromatic, 2010 Digital drawingSpotlight

60  Harvard Business Review April 2012

SpotliGht on tHe secRets of gReat teams

Alex “Sandy” Pentland is a professor at MIT, the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, and the chairman of Sociometric Solutions.

The New Science of Building Great Teams

The chemistry of high-performing groups is no longer a mystery. by Alex “Sandy” Pentland

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SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

It seems almost absurd that how we communicate could be so much more important to success than what we communicate.

IF YOU WERE looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor- mance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center e� ciency). And the list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble � guring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seem- ingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.

The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them.

Looking for the “It Factor” When we set out to document the behavior of teams that “click,” we noticed we could sense a buzz in a team even if we didn’t understand what the mem-

bers were talking about. That suggested that the key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was communicating. Yet little of the research on team building had focused on communication. Suspect- ing it might be crucial, we decided to examine it more deeply.

For our studies, we looked across a diverse set of industries to find workplaces that had simi- lar teams with varying performance. Ultimately, our research included innovation teams, post-op wards in hospitals, customer-facing teams in banks, backroom operations teams, and call center teams, among others.

We equipped all the members of those teams with electronic badges that collected data on their individual communication behavior—tone of voice, body language, whom they talked to and how much, and more. With remarkable consistency, the data con� rmed that communication indeed plays a criti- cal role in building successful teams. In fact, we’ve found patterns of communication to be the most important predictor of a team’s success. Not only that, but they are as signi� cant as all the other fac- tors—individual intelligence, personality, skill, and the substance of discussions—combined.

Patterns of communication, for example, ex- plained why performance varied so widely among the seemingly identical teams in that bank’s call center. Several teams there wore our badges for six weeks. When my fellow researchers (my colleagues at Sociometric Solutions—Taemie Kim, Daniel Olguin, and Ben Waber) and I analyzed the data collected, we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meet- ings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.

Drawing on that insight, we advised the cen- ter’s manager to revise the employees’ co� ee break schedule so that everyone on a team took a break at the same time. That would allow people more time to socialize with their teammates, away from their workstations. Though the suggestion � ew in the face of standard efficiency practices, the manager was ba� ed and desperate, so he tried it. And it worked: AHT fell by more than 20% among lower-performing teams and decreased by 8% overall at the call center. Now the manager is changing the break schedule at all 10 of the bank’s call centers (which employ a total of 25,000 people) and is forecasting $15 million a year in productivity increases. He has also seen employee

Why Do Patterns of Communication Matter So Much? Yet if we look at our evolutionary history, we can see that language is a relatively recent develop- ment and was most likely layered upon older sig- nals that communicated dominance, interest, and emotions among humans. Today these ancient pat- terns of communication still shape how we make decisions and coordinate work among ourselves.

Consider how early man may have approached problem solving. One can imagine humans sitting around a campfi re (as a team) making suggestions, relating observations, and indicating interest or approval with head nods, gestures, or vocal signals. If some people failed to contribute or to signal their level of interest or approval, then the group mem- bers had less information and weaker judgment, and so were more likely to go hungry.

I IF YOU WERE I IF YOU WERE call center would be a good place to start. The skills Icall center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and Irequired for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy Ihire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor-Ito monitor. Just about every aspect of team perfor- mance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, Imance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, Icustomer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center e� ciency). And Ithe golden standard of call center e� ciency). And the list goes on.Ithe list goes on.

Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call IWhy, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble � guring out why some of Icenter have such trouble � guring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seem-Ihis teams got excellent results, while other, seem- ingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the Iingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the Imetrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his Iperformance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a Iassumption that team building was an art, not a science. Iscience.

The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human IThe truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive IDynamics Laboratory, we have identi� ed the elusive group dynamics that characterize high-performing Igroup dynamics that characterize high-performing teams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, Iteams—those blessed with the energy, creativity, and shared commitment to far surpass other teams. Iand shared commitment to far surpass other teams. These dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and IThese dynamics are observable, quantifiable, and measurable. And, perhaps most important, teams Imeasurable. And, perhaps most important, teams can be taught how to strengthen them.Ican be taught how to strengthen them.

62  Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more than 10%.

Any company, no matter how large, has the po- tential to achieve this same kind of transformation. Firms now can obtain the tools and data they need to accurately dissect and engineer high performance. Building great teams has become a science. Here’s how it works.

Overcoming the Limits of Observation When we sense esprit de corps, that perception doesn’t come out of the blue; it’s the result of our in- nate ability to process the hundreds of complex com- munication cues that we constantly send and receive.

But until recently we had never been able to ob- jectively record such cues as data that we could then mine to understand why teams click. Mere observa- tion simply couldn’t capture every nuance of human behavior across an entire team. What we had, then, was only a strong sense of the things—good leader- ship and followership, palpable shared commit- ment, a terri� c brainstorming session—that made a team greater than the sum of its parts.

Recent advances in wireless and sensor technology, though, have helped us over- come those limitations, allowing us to mea- sure that ineffable “It factor.” The badges developed at my lab at MIT are in their seventh version. They generate more than 100 data points a minute and work unobtrusively enough that we’re con� dent we’re capturing natural behavior. (We’ve documented a period of adjustment to the badges: Early on, people appear to be aware of them and act unnaturally, but the e� ect dissipates, usually within an hour.) We’ve deployed them in 21 organizations over the past seven years, measuring the commu- nication patterns of about 2,500 people, sometimes for six weeks at a time.

With the data we’ve collected, we’ve mapped the communication behaviors of large numbers of peo-

ple as they go about their lives, at an unprecedented level of detail. The badges produce “sociometrics,” or measures of how people interact—such as what tone of voice they use; whether they face one an- other; how much they gesture; how much they talk, listen, and interrupt; and even their levels of extro- version and empathy. By comparing data gathered from all the individuals on a team with performance data, we can identify the communication patterns that make for successful teamwork.

Those patterns vary little, regardless of the type of team and its goal—be it a call center team striv- ing for e� ciency, an innovation team at a pharma- ceutical company looking for new product ideas, or a senior management team hoping to improve its leadership. Productive teams have certain data sig- natures, and they’re so consistent that we can pre- dict a team’s success simply by looking at the data— without ever meeting its members.

We’ve been able to foretell, for example, which teams will win a business plan contest, solely on the basis of data collected from team members wearing badges at a cocktail reception. (See “Defend Your Research: We Can Measure the Power of Charisma,” HBR January–February 2010.) We’ve predicted the financial results that teams making investments would achieve, just on the basis of data collected dur- ing their negotiations. We can see in the data when team members will report that they’ve had a “pro- ductive” or “creative” day.

Idea in Brief What managers sense as an ineff able buzz or esprit de corps in a good team is actually observable, measur- able, and learnable.

In data collected by wearable electronic sensors that capture people’s tone of voice and body language, we can see the highly consistent patterns of

communication that are as- sociated with productive teams, regardless of what kind of work they do. The data do not take into account the substance of communication, only the patterns, but they show that those patterns are what matter most—more than skill, intel- ligence, and all other factors that go into building a team combined.

Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the Just by looking at the sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been sociometric data, we’ve been able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will able to foretell which teams will win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.win a business plan contest.

WHAT DATA THE SOCIOMETRIC BADGES COLLECT

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WHEN PEOPLE ARE TALKING AND THEIR TONE OF VOICE, BUT NOT WORDS

BODY POSITION RELATIVE TO OTHERS— WHETHER PEOPLE FACE EACH OTHER AND HOW THEY STAND IN A GROUP

BODY LANGUAGE, INCLUDING ARM AND HAND MOVEMENTS AND NODS, BUT NOT FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

A

Mapping Teamwork CONCERNED ABOUT UNEVEN PERFORMANCE across its branches, a bank in Prague outfi tted customer-facing teams with electronic sensors for six weeks. The fi rst two maps below display data col- lected from one team of nine people over the course of diff er- ent days, and the third illustrates data collected on interactions between management and all the teams.

By looking at the data, we unearthed a divide between teams at the “Soviet era” branches of the bank and teams at more modern facilities. Interestingly, at the Soviet-era branches, where poor

team communication was the rule, communication outside teams was much higher, suggesting that those teams were desperately reaching out for answers to their problems. Teams at the modern facilities showed high energy and less need to explore outside. After seeing initial data, the bank’s management published these dashboard displays for all the teams to see and also reorganized the teams so that they contained a mix of members from old and new branches. According to the bank, those measures helped improve the working culture within all the teams.

Exploration HOW TEAMS COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER

Energy HOW TEAM MEMBERS CONTRIBUTE TO A TEAM AS A WHOLE

Engagement HOW TEAM MEMBERS COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER

C

A

B

D

EF

G

H

I

Clearly, these data come from a team at a branch with poor customer service. We can see that A, C, and E give off more informal energy than the rest of the team does. A, B, and C contribute a lot to the team, while the others contribute noth- ing. The pattern illustrated here is often associated with hierarchical teams in which a boss (C) issues commands while his lieutenants (A and B) reinforce his directions. The three are a “team within a team,” and it’s likely that the others feel they have no input. Often leaders are shocked and embarrassed to see how much they dominate a team and imme- diately try to change the pattern. Sharing such a map with the team can make it easier for less energetic individuals to talk about their sense of the team’s dys- function, because data are objective and elevate the discussion beyond attacks or complaints.

This diagram shows that the same team’s engagement skews heavily to the same three people (A, B, and C). G is making an eff ort to reach the decision makers, but the team within the team is where the engagement is. Those three people may be higher up the ladder or simply more extroverted, but that doesn’t matter. This pattern is associated with lower performance because the team is not getting ideas or information from many of its members. Leaders can use this map both to assess “invisible” team members (How can they get them more involved? Are they the right people for the project?) and to play the role of a

“charismatic connector” by bringing to- gether members who ought to be talking to one another and then helping those members share their thinking with the entire group.

This map shows that management is doing a lot of exploring. Although its internal team energy is relatively low, that is OK. Energy and engagement can- not be high when exploration is, because when you’re exploring you have less time to engage with your own team. In a high- functioning organization, however, there would be more exploration among all the teams, and you’d see an arc between, say, Teams 3 and 4, or Teams 5 and 9. A time lapse view of all the teams’ explora- tion would show whether teams were os- cillating between communication within their own group (shown by the yellow dots) and exploration with other teams (shown by the green arcs). If they’re not, it could mean silo busting is needed to encourage proper exploration.

IDEAL TEAM

ENERGY

AMOUNT OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS

AMOUNT OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN TEAMS

INTERNAL TEAM ENERGY

M AN

AG EM

EN T

TE AM

2

TE AM

3

TE AM

4

TE AM

5

TE AM

6

TE AM

7

TE AM

8

TE AM

9

TE AM

1 0

TOTAL TEAM ENERGY (DOT’S POSITION REFLECTS WHO

CONTRIBUTES MOST)

TEAM MEMBER A AMOUNT OF INFORMAL ENERGY

AMOUNT OF ENERGY CONTRIBUTED TO TEAM

C

B

D

EF

G

H

I

COURTESY OF SOCIOMETRIC SOLUTIONS

64  Harvard Business Review April 2012

THE NEW SCIENCE OF BUILDING GREAT TEAMS

The data also reveal, at a higher level, that suc- cessful teams share several de� ning characteristics:

1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.

2. Members face one another, and their conversa- tions and gestures are energetic.

3. Members connect directly with one another— not just with the team leader.

4. Members carry on back-channel or side conver- sations within the team.

5. Members periodically break, go exploring out- side the team, and bring information back.

The data also establish another surprising fact: Individual reasoning and talent contribute far less to team success than one might expect. The best way to build a great team is not to select individu- als for their smarts or accomplishments but to learn how they communicate and to shape and guide the team so that it follows successful communication patterns.

The Key Elements of Communication In our research we identi� ed three aspects of com- munication that a� ect team performance. The � rst is energy, which we measure by the number and the nature of exchanges among team mem- bers. A single exchange is de� ned as a com- ment and some acknowledgment—for example, a “yes” or a nod of the head. Normal conversations are often made up of many of these exchanges, and in a team setting more than one exchange may be go- ing on at a time.

The most valuable form of communication is face-to-face. The next most valuable is by phone or videoconference, but with a caveat: Those technolo- gies become less e� ective as more people participate in the call or conference. The least valuable forms of communication are e-mail and texting. (We col- lect data on those kinds of communication without using the badges. Still, the number of face-to-face exchanges alone provides a good rough measure of energy.) The number of exchanges engaged in, weighted for their value by type of communication, gives each team member an energy score, which is averaged with other members’ results to create a team score.

Energy levels within a team are not static. For in- stance, in my research group at MIT, we sometimes have meetings at which I update people on upcom-

ing events, rule changes, and other administrative details. These meetings are invariably low energy. But when someone announces a new discovery in the same group, excitement and energy skyrocket as all the members start talking to one another at once.

The second important dimension of communi- cation is engagement, which re� ects the distribution of energy among team members. In a simple three- person team, engagement is a function of the av- erage amount of energy between A and B, A and C, and B and C. If all members of a team have rela- tively equal and reasonably high energy with all other members, engagement is extremely strong. Teams that have clusters of members who engage in high-energy communication while other members do not participate don’t perform as well. When we observed teams making investment decisions, for instance, the partially engaged teams made worse (less profitable) decisions than the fully engaged teams. This e� ect was particularly common in far- � ung teams that talked mostly by telephone.

The third critical dimension, exploration, in- volves communication that members engage in out- side their team. Exploration essentially is the energy between a team and the other teams it interacts with.

Higher-performing teams seek more outside con- nections, we’ve found. We’ve also seen that scoring well on exploration is most important for creative teams, such as those responsible for innovation, which need fresh perspectives.

To measure exploration, we have to deploy badges more widely in an organization. We’ve done so in many settings, including the MIT Media Lab and a multinational company’s marketing depart- ment, which comprised several teams dedicated to di� erent functions.

Our data also show that exploration and engage- ment, while both good, don’t easily coexist, because they require that the energy of team members be put to two di� erent uses. Energy is a � nite resource. The more that people devote to their own team (engage-

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April 2012 Harvard Business Review 65

SPOTLIGHT ON THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMS

MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT SALES SUPPORT CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGEMENT SUPPORTSALES CUSTOMER

SERVICE

ment), the less they have to use outside their team (exploration), and vice versa.

But they must do both. Successful teams, espe- cially successful creative teams, oscillate between exploration for discovery and engagement for inte- gration of the ideas gathered from outside sources. At the MIT Media Lab, this pattern accounted for almost half of the di� erences in creative output of research groups. And in one industrial research lab we studied, it distinguished teams with high creativ- ity from those with low creativity with almost 90% accuracy.

Beyond Conventional Wisdom A skeptic would argue that the points about energy, engagement, and exploration are blindingly obvious. But the data from our research improve on conven- tional wisdom. They add an unprecedented level of precision to our observations, quantify the key dy- namics, and make them measurable to an extraordi- nary degree.

For example, we now know that 35% of the varia- tion in a team’s performance can be accounted for simply by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. We know as well that the

“right” number of exchanges in a team is as many as dozens per working hour, but that going beyond that ideal number decreases performance. We can also state with certainty that in a typical high- performance team, members are listening or speak- ing to the whole group only about half the time, and when addressing the whole group, each team mem- ber speaks for

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