Why Do Smart Teams Underperform?

You’ve built your team with smart, capable people, a strong manager, and a workable budget. And it still underperforms! Meetings go quiet, the same two or three voices fill the air each time you meet, and you can feel good ideas dying unspoken. 

Before you begin blaming each other and singling out culprits, consider that the problem isn’t who’s on the team. Two of the most rigorous studies ever done on team performance found that talent is rarely the bottleneck, and the real lever for change is something you can put in play within a short week for free.

In 2012, Google set out to ask what it thought was a tidy, data-driven question. What makes a team effective?The effort you may have heard of, codenamed Project Aristotle, studied 180 internal teams over two years by examining 250 different sales and engineering group attributes. Going in, the researchers were pretty sure of the recipe. They assumed high performers, an experienced manager, and plenty of resources would be the de facto finding. They turned out to be wrong.

What’s striking is everything the data ruled out. A surprising number of intuitively important factors turned out not to be meaningful. Whether teammates sat together, whether decisions were made by consensus, how extroverted members were, individual performance, seniority, team size, and tenure...these were not relevant. Some evidence even suggested that stacking a team with “rock stars” could actually hurt performance.

Who was on the team mattered far less than how the team behaved together.

The researchers landed on four factors that did matter: dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact. But something was still missing. Teams that scored well on all four still varied wildly.

The gap closed when they encountered Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety. This is something we discussed in our last newsletter, and the highest-performing teams were consistently the ones where members felt safe to ask questions, raise concerns, and admit mistakes without fear of embarrassment.

Going deeper, it became clear that two behaviors reinforced that safety. First, high-performing teams showed “equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” Over a project, everyone spoke roughly the same amount. As long as everyone got a turn, the team did well; when one person or a small group dominated, collective intelligence declined. Second, they had high “social sensitivity,” meaning that members could decipher how others genuinely felt from tone, expression, and other nonverbal cues that verify psychological safety.

Next, if Google showed that team climate matters, Sandy Pentland’s lab at MIT showed you could measure it on people’s bodies. Researchers fitted roughly 2,500 people across many industries with wearable sensors that tracked their social behavior with tone, gestures, and who talked to whom. For weeks at a time!

The finding mirrored Google’s. Communication patterns turned out to be the single biggest predictor of a team’s success. These factors were as significant as intelligence, personality, and talent combined. The data was so strong the researchers could predict which teams would outperform just by reading the interaction patterns, without ever meeting the people. As Pentland put it, the best way to build a great team isn’t to select individuals for their smarts. It’s to shape how they communicate.

Those patterns resolve into three observable things.

1) Energy (the number and quality of exchanges).

2) Engagement (how evenly that energy is shared, which is strong when everyone has roughly equal contact, weak when one cluster dominates while others go silent).

3) Exploration (contact with the outside world).

Pentland’s “engagement” is the same shape as Google’s turn-taking, noting that balance beats dominance or conformity.

Plus, one finding belongs above every remote-work debate, which was that face-to-face (in-person most, Zoom less so) was by far the most valuable form of communication, with email and texting the least.

The most memorable proof came from a bank’s call center, where a manager couldn’t understand why some teams thrived and others struggled despite looking identical on paper. Several teams wore the badges (sensors) for six weeks. The best predictors of productivity turned out to be energy and engagement outside formal meetings, together explaining a third of the variation in dollar productivity between groups.

The fix was almost comically low-tech. They organized the coffee-break schedule so everyone on a team broke at the same time, and socialized together instead of in staggered shifts. Productivity rose.

The thing standing between those teams and better performance wasn’t skill, effort, or tooling. It was when they got together in an egalitarian, completely unstructured way, because that small change manufactured more of the informal, face-to-face contact the sensors had flagged as the hidden ingredient.

I’ve spent enough time in meetings across cultures to know that balanced turn-taking isn’t a unIversal default. it’s a behavior an environment either invites or suppresses. In formal Japanese meetings, hierarchy still tends to prevail, and people comment when called upon rather than jumping in. The conversation moves through the room by rank. That is changing, however. The old style is on its way out, but it’s still common enough to recognize. 

On the other hand, Japanese work culture has always compensated for this through an abundance of fun, unstructured opportunities to simply “hang out.” It isn’t construed as wasting time. Far from wasting time, sitting around talking while drinking green tea, beer, or sake has been the foundation for an enormously productive culture where all team members are included and heard in the transfer of ideas and information.

What interests me is the mechanism underneath the silence. When a manager calls on people round-robin, it looks like inclusion, as everyone gets a turn. But it distributes airtime while killing interaction. Each person reports to the manager, then goes quiet, and no one builds on anyone else’s observations or experiences. The turns are equal, but the team never talks to itself. High energy, mutual engagement, and social sensitivity all depend on people responding to each other, not taking polite turns addressing the chair.

So, the real question isn’t how to make people speak. It’s what makes open interaction the path of least resistance. Part of that is psychological safety, which is the sense that an unpolished thought won’t be held against you. Part is structural, whether the manager is the hub every comment routes through, or whether people are invited to react to one another. And silence is rarely about having nothing to say. It’s insight that demands curiosity.

What’s persuasive is that two completely different methods (a software giant mining 250 variables, and electronic badges worn across many industries) arrived at the same place. Talent is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the quality and balance of human interaction: whether energy is shared rather than hoarded, whether everyone gets a turn, whether people feel safe enough to speak up.

Here’s why it matters. You can spend another half a year hunting for better people or shuffling people around. Or you can change how the people you already have talk to each other. See results faster, for free. 

Pick one thing this week. Sync the team’s breaks so they actually overlap. Count who hasn’t spoken and meaningfully make room for them before the meeting ends. Be the first to say “I’m not sure” or “I’m curious about...” and watch how fast that permission spreads. None of this may show up on a graph or chart right away. But all of it shows up in what your team can do and how they will wholeheartedly reward you with their inspired efforts.

Deborah Grant is an Erickson Coaching International trained coach and Principal of Grant Global Coaching & Consulting LLC. Born in Tokyo, Japan and bilingual in Japanese, she has spent forty years working across cultures as a business and communications consultant, content strategist, coach, and multimedia producer. Contact deborah@grantglobalcoaching.com or reserve a session at www.grantglobalcoaching.com.

Sources:

• Duhigg, C. (2016, February 25). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

• Pentland, A. (2012, April). The new science of building great teams. Harvard Business Review, 90(4), 60–70. https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

• Pentland, A. (2014). Social physics: How good ideas spread — the lessons from a new science. Penguin Press.