21st Century Teams

What Hur sWhat W rks

2 Nugg Solutions Corp.

Executive Summary

Teams are critical to performance. All of us, individuals and organizations, need to get

better at how we work in teams. We also need to look at how we can make teams better

at achieving their goals. With these in mind, Nugg conducted a series of surveys and

interviews in spring 2014 on what works and what does not on 21st century teams.

The initial survey received more than 500 responses from a wide range of industries, job

roles, and levels of seniority, with many of the responses coming from the technology

industry. A follow-up survey with 50 responses, explored what tools and techniques

were (and were not) effective for teams.The surveys were complemented by in-depth

interviews with people who create, lead, or participate on teams in the consulting,

information technology, and finance industries.

Critical pains on teams are:

• Tracking the outcomes of decisions

• Connecting decisions to key performance indicators or objectives

• Making decisions quickly enough

• Achieving clarity on goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Asking the questions that impact performance

And the keys to team success are:

• Having clear goals

• Having people with the required skills on the team

• Having a team that is energized and engaged

What Hurts What Works 3

The survey also probed the challenges of working across multiple teams. The data

revealed that most people can manage being on as many as five teams, but that stress

goes up quickly with more than five teams (about 20% of the people responding to the

survey).

For people on multiple teams the key challenges are:

• Knowing which team members are engaged

• Deciding which team to focus attention on at any one time

Teams need to develop the following behaviours to be successful:

• Clear and open communication with all members including

conversation on roles and goals

• The habit of regularly asking and answering questions

• The ability to discuss and make decisions

• Tracking the implementation and outcome of decisions

• Connecting activities and decisions back to goals

Nugg is using insights from this survey to build applications that will enhance team

performance. You can try out Nugg by clicking here.

21st Century Teams

What Hur sWhat W rks

Table of Contents

Executive Summary 2Why Teams? 5What Hurts 6What Works 8Goal & Role Clarity 10Teams and Decisions 12Asking Questions 13Working on Multiple Teams 14Recommendations 15About Nugg 16Appendices 18

What Hurts What Works 5

Why Teams?

We are living in a teams-of-teams world. Work is moving out of hierarchical and matrix

organizations to complex hybrid teams. Some teams endure for a long period of time

and handle many challenges during that time (e.g. boards and management teams).

Other teams are more ad-hoc and responsive, like a cross-functional team called

together to address a specific business challenge. At any given time, and over the

course of our careers, most of us work on both types of teams (and myriad intermediate

forms) and we all need to excel at building, leading, and participating in a wide range

of types of teams. To add to this challenge, many people now work on multiple teams

in parallel (according to our survey, about 20% of people work on six or more teams at

once, and the more senior you are the more teams you are likely to be on). So, given the

importance of teams to today’s work, Nugg asked people: What Hurts and What Works

On Your Teams?

To set the stage for the survey, and survey questions, we conducted roughly a dozen

informal interviews of people across a range of industries and functions. These

interviews framed the survey questions and the survey was released spring 2014. In

total, more than 500 people responded to the initial survey, and 50 people responded

to a follow-up survey. We conducted phone interviews to probe additional topics that

emerged from the two surveys. (See Appendix for more details on the survey.)

From the results of the original survery, follow up survey, and phone interviews we

learned the key challenges to working on teams and some simple steps we can take to

make things better.

We found that teams need to:

• Get alignment on goals—and understand that there are organizational, team, and individual goals—and that all of these different goals need to be taken into account.

• Make sure there is clarity on decisions – which includes connecting decisions back to goals.

• Go back to reflect on processes and outcomes – to ensure that teams have a performance improvement loop.

Our results are in line with other recent surveys like the Human Capital Institute’s (HCI)

2014 report “The New Organizational Currency: Designing Effective Teams.”

6 Nugg Solutions Corp.

What Hurts

Through our survey we wanted to understand the challenges of working within and

across teams. The challenges between these two modes of teamwork turned out to be

closely related, but we begin with the simpler case—working on/within a single team.

“ The failure I see in many small companies is connecting those data points to real measurable actions in the enterprise”

What are the biggest challenges to working on a team?

Our initial survey (N=509) identified the following as the most important challenges:

• Tracking the outcomes of decisions

• Connecting decisions to key performance indicators or objectives

• Making decisions quickly enough

• Achieving clarity on goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Asking the questions that impact performance

Least important were

• People are not sure if we are on track to meet our objectives

• People are not aware of which decisions need to be made

Comparing our results to the Human Capital Institute’s 2014 report “The New

Organizational Currency: Designing Effective Teams” (N=255) we find the following.

Challenges

HCI Nugg

Lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities

Effective decision making

Ineffective communication Clarity on goals

Inefficient leadership Asking questions

We believe the two surveys reinforce each other. “Effective decision making” and “asking

questions” are related to communication and “decision making” to “leadership.” The

major difference between the two surveys is the importance attributed to clearly defined

roles and responsibilities in the HCI survey. This difference may be explained by, the

What Hurts What Works 7

industries and roles surveyed; HCI’s survey skewed towards people in HR while the Nugg

survey had more people from executive and operating functions. The Nugg survey also

had a relatively higher representation from high technology companies while the HCI

survey was stronger in services and government.

We feel the differences between the surveys are merely different lenses on the same

issues: teams need clear communication, clear goals, and structured decision making.

Below is a tag cloud from all of the comments made on questions regarding pain within

teams. A tag cloud represents word frequency by size, so that the larger the word in

the tag cloud the more often it came up in the comments. The tag cloud illustrates the

topics and ideas most often mentioned by respondents in open-ended comments and

questions.

activities

effective

leader

organization

times

etc everyone focus gets harder important

person priorities

settingrolesresponsibilitiesremotequestions

view

aligned area attention case certain challenges change

company

lack leadership

objectives performance

meet

prioritize

small

engagement

understanding

problem

differentissues

membersgoals hard

clear

communication

management

decisions

peopleprojects

work

“ I think the biggest issues confronting teams today is how to cascade the information so that it captures the attention and focus of the whole workforce.”

Working across teams, the data were less clear. For people who work on five or fewer

teams (roughly 80% of the sample) the pain working across teams was the same as

that for working within teams. Only people on six or more teams, (which was closely

correlated with seniority,) revealed pain points showed up for working across teams. For

people in 6 or more teams the key pains were “team alignment to goals” and “staying up

to date across teams.” These seem issues/pain points tend to be more “management”

goals than goals for “regular” team members.

8 Nugg Solutions Corp.

What Works

We had to dig a bit deeper to uncover what works on teams. In our detailed follow-up

survey (N=50), people called out the following as being critical to successful teams:

• Having clear goals

• Having people with the required skills on the team

• Having a team that is energized and engaged

Less important issues according to this group were:

• Having a team where people go outside the team to explore and bring back new relationships and ideas

• Communicating only critical information and decisions

Let’s compare our results with the HCI survey:

Keys to Success

HCI Nugg

Identifying a common goal Clear goals

Supporting open communication Having the right people

Clarification of roles Energy and engagement

Again, the two surveys agree on the importance of goals and communication (assuming

that “energy and engagement” is another way of saying “communication”), but while

HR is more concerned with role clarity, people in operational roles worry more about

getting the right people on their teams.

“ In reality, the issue is that the organization does not have an operating model, so it is clear as to who makes what decisions how, (decision types) what meetings people are to attend and why, and a general link between the operating model and the vision set for the organization.”

It is interesting to compare these data with a very different approach to understanding

team performance via the research undertaken by Alex “Sandy” Pentland at the

MIT Human Dynamics Lab. Pentland and his group recorded detailed data on

What Hurts What Works 9

communication patterns to look for the data

signature of high-performance teams. They

identified three components to the data

signature of high-performning teams: they

have a good balance of Energy, Engagement,

and Exploration. We tried to probe for these,

and although “energy and engagement”

did resonate with the survey respondents,

“exploration” did not. This does not mean

that “exploration” is unimportant. Perhaps

our current task-focused teams do not even

realize its importance! (See “The New Science

of Building Great Teams” by Alex Pentland

on the Harvard Business Review blog, April

2012)

Energy – how much communication

is going on and the quality of the

interaction

Engagement – who is communicating

well with each other and who isn’t

(equal and high energy between all

team members=high engagement and

high performance; partially engaged

teams don’t perform as well)

Exploration –communication with

outsiders (outside team, outside

company, outside industry, etc.)

10 Nugg Solutions Corp.

Goal & Role Clarity

Surprisingly, our survey did not reveal role clarity as a critical concern. Perhaps because

the population surveyed skewed towards early-stage, high technology companies where

roles are more fluid and concerns about roles are less important than communication

or goals. However, there is a great deal of evidence that giving people clarity on the role

they play on teams makes them feel more secure and helps them to focus on their work

(the results of the HCI survey highlight this).

While clarity on roles can be fluid on some types of teams, clarity on team goals is

essential. Teams need to have a destination if they are to set a course, and the goals

define the team’s destination. But there is a hidden trap here, we are really talking about

three sets of goals, which may or may not overlap:

• Organizational Goals: the higher-level goals of the organization (or organizations in the case of hybrid teams that cross organizational boundaries)

• Team Goals: the goals and key performance indicators for the team

• Individual Goals: the goals that drive the individual, both as a team member and

beyond the team/organization context

In an ideal world, all of these goals will line up, and the organization, team, and

individuals will all be working for the same thing (Figure 1: Conventional View). Most

organizations assume that individual goals will be subservient to the team and that the

team goals will be subservient to the organization, but, in reality, things are not so

simple. Teams are self-organizing systems, they will set their own goals, and will try to

preserve themselves. Even teams convened to address a specific, time-bounded

problem (plan an event, troubleshoot a crisis), will often find a reason and a way to carry

on long after their original purpose is gone.

Most people come into teams with well-established

personal goals. In our interviews with leaders in the

strategic consulting space (carried out as an adjunct

to this survey), several subjects identified one of the

keys to a successful project was ensuring that team

members were achieving their individual goals, as well

as the team and organizational goals. In interviews on

selecting people for teams, several people mentioned

that a key to team success is assigning people to

teams that will help them meet their individual

aspirations (Figure 2: Reality).

Conventional View

Organizational Goals

Team Goals

Individual Goals

Figure 1: Conventional View

What Hurts What Works 11

“ Team alignment is a problem – not everyone or every team seems to be aligned with overall corporate objectives.”

Figure 2: Reality

Reality

Tension

Tension

Te

ns

ion

Te

ns

ion

Individual Feels Between Team & Organization

Between Team & Organization

Tens

ion

Betw

een

Team

& In

divi

dual

Between O

rganization & Individual

OrganizationalGoals

Team Goals

Individual Goals

As today’s teams become more fluid, it will become more and more important to allow

teams to set, and work towards, their own goals while still supporting those of the

organization. Likewise, the most successful teams will also acknowledge and support

individual goals as well as those of the team and organization.

12 Nugg Solutions Corp.

Teams and Decisions

One of the lessons of lean manufacturing (which originated in the 1960s and 70s in the

Toyota Production System), is that performance improves when decisions are pushed

down to the team (see Ohno, 1988). Nugg refers to this as “pushing decisions out to the

edges.”

Knowledge work involves many decisions—big and small, conscious and unconscious—

and our results suggest that decision making is critical to team performance. It is not

just making decisions that is required for team performance, two other things are critical

to decisions and teams:

• Teams need to be able to link decisions back to goals (which requires clarity on goals)

• The outcomes of decisions need to be tracked and reviewed

“ Overall, there is a push to make decisions more quickly rather than gathering needed information and seeking necessary guidance from internal team members.”

From the survey, respondents noted that two keys to team performance are “making

decisions quickly” and “connecting decisions to key performance indicators and

objectives.” According to our follow-up interviews, it’s important for teams to go back

and review the outcomes of decisions as well. There is a tension between making

decisions quickly—the continuous pressure to push forward—and the best practice of

going back to review decisions and to refine processes. This tension often keeps teams

from making the changes that can improve their performance.

One area for future research is how teams make decisions and what approaches to

decision-making work best for different types of teams under which circumstances.

What Hurts What Works 13

Asking Questions

One of the themes that came out of both the surveys and the interviews, was the

importance of asking questions. Teams often get caught up in the pressures of the

moment—the need to check off tasks, meet deadlines, and make deliverables—that

sometimes the team loses focus on its purpose or becomes so inwardly focused it gets

blindsided by external events. This is why Pentland’s “Exploration” behavior is important

to team performance and success. The reason teams are so often blindside by events is

clear—teams not asking themselves the questions that help them see the road ahead or

when the bigger picture are at risk.

Questions can be used to tie activities and decisions back to goals. Asking “Why are we

doing this?”, “What goal does this support?”, or “Is this based on an assumption we can

test?” can give teams an opportunity to reflect on what they are doing, how it could be

done more effectively, and if it even needs to be done at all.

Sometimes it is not enough to link questions back to goals. Teams also need to ask

themselves:

• “Is this goal still relevant?”

• “What was the outcome of achieving this goal?”

• “Does this outcome matter to our mission?”

Google’s “snippets” model has become a popular way for teams to share their status.

Google snippets are the answers to three weekly questions:

• What did you do last week?

• What will you do this week?

• What is keeping you up at night?

Seemingly simple, but pooling the answers across teams (or the whole organization)

and looking for patterns is a powerful, and simple, alternative to task management. The

snippets approach can quickly highlight gaps between what teams are doing and what

they should be doing. The question “what’s keeping you up at night” can be a barometer

for the overall health of teams.

Each team member’s willingness to ask each other questions, and to answer them

honestly, is one proxy for Pentland’s Energy and Engagement measures. For many

teams, the routine of asking the important questions is the precursor to making—and

tracking—decisions.

14 Nugg Solutions Corp.

Working on Multiple Teams

Many people today work on multiple teams in parallel. How many? From the survey,

about 20% of people were working on one team and about 20% of people were working

on six or more teams (a few people, less than 1%, were on more than twenty teams!).

Forty-five percent of people were on three-to-five teams.

6 to 9 teams

3 to 5 teams

Surveyees belonged to...

10 plus teams

2 teams

One team

20%

15%

10%

45%

10%

“ Since you can’t get into each team’s workings and certainly don’t want to micro-manage, it’s hard to get them to loop you into decisions that they think are not key but impact other teams.”

The more senior one is in an organization, the more likely one is to work on multiple

teams. People in executive roles accounted for 37% of the total responders but 50%

of the people on ten or more teams. The two pain points identified by people on six or

more teams were:

• I do not know which team members are engaged

• I am not sure which team I need to focus my attention on at any one time

These are both management concerns and reflect that pain across teams is mainly felt

by people on six or more teams, who also are mainly in management roles.

People on five or fewer teams did not identify any particular challenges to working

across teams. We believe that if one is on five or fewer teams, it’s easier to keep

connected with all the teams and what’s most important to focus on at any given time.

What Hurts What Works 15

Recommendations

From the two surveys (initial and follow up) and one-on-one interviews, we believe that

teams need to establish and encourage the following behaviours to be successful:

• Clear and open communication including conversation on roles and goals

• The habit of regularly asking and answering questions

• The ability to discuss and make decisions

• Tracking the implementation and outcome of decisions over time

• Connecting activities and decisions back to goals

Presently many teams lack the ability to both stay on top of their projects and track

progress towards larger goals. It’s this gap between the day-to-day and the big picture

that is at the root of poor team performance. Goals and decisions and even roles are

dynamic and need to be part of the team’s culture, they cannot simply be imposed from

above, especially for self-organizing teams of knowledge workers.

People on teams must believe, and be supported in, achieving their individual goals.

A monolithic approach of enforcing organizational goals on teams and team goals on

individuals is not likely to bring out the patterns of energy, engagement and exploration

associated with high performing teams.

Nugg is building simple tools to help all team stakeholders (executives, management,

team leaders, and team members—plus the clients who interact with teams) become

more successful and achieve their goals. We do this by surfacing key questions,

decisions, and goals so that they can be discussed and then connected to outcomes.

Our goal is to help teams predict their performance so that they can improve it.

16 Nugg Solutions Corp.

About Nugg

Nugg Solutions Corp. is a mobile enterprise software company located

in Vancouver BC Canada. Nugg develops mobile applications that help

teams reach their goals and achieve extraordinary outcomes.

Authors Steven Forth & Tris Hussey

Steven Forth (author)

Steven is a dedicated team builder and team member, and has

learned to lead by following other people on his teams. At any

one time he is typically on 3-5 teams at Nugg, 2 boards and

and 2-3 additional teams. He falls into that group of executives

on six or more teams who are as concerned with managing

across teams as performing within a team. Steven has extensive

experience in consulting as at Rocket Builders and Monitor-

Deloitte and as a leader of early-stage software companies,

Recombo (Vancouver BC), LeveragePoint(Cambridge MA) and

Nugg (Vancouver BC).

Strengthfinder Strengths: Strategic, Achievement, Ideation, Input,

Learning

Top Belbin Team Roles: Plant, Resource Investigator, Co-ordinator

Tris Hussey (author)

Tris was Canada’s first professional blogger and is thought leader

in social media for business. Tris is a freelance writer, best-selling

author, technologist, and lecturer. He has written several best-

selling books on social media and technology including Create

Your Own Blog (1st and 2nd editions), Using WordPress, Sam’s

Teach Yourself Foursquare in 10 Minutes, WordPress Essentials

(video), and The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to WordPress (2014).

He had been on the leadership teams of Qumana (Vancouver,

BC), b5Media (Toronto, ON), and other technology startups. At

Nugg Tris serves as the Director of Customer Success leading

@StevenForth

Steven Forth

@TrisHussey

Tris Hussey

What Hurts What Works 17

Nugg’s marketing, support, and community efforts to help teams be more effective.

Strengthfinder Strengths: Input, Learner, Intellection, Context, Individualization

Top Belbin Team Roles: Plant, Specialist, Resource Investigator

N-Q Chang (designer)

N-Q is the lead designer at Nugg. She also plays an important

role on the marketing team, reaching out and engaging with our

users, and on the development team, where she leads quality

assurance (small company = multiple roles). N-Q uses Nugg in her

personal life a place to guide and mentor young immigrants to

Canada. She is a choral singer, creative chef and a core menber

of Nugg Cycling.

Top Belbin Team Roles: Team Worker, Monitor Evaluator, Resource

Investigator

Next survey link https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/buildingbetterteams

Copyright © 2014 by Nugg Solutions Corp.

http://betterteams.nugg.co/ https://twitter.com/NuggSocial https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4860415

Nugg Solutions Corp.℅ VentureLabs320-887 Great Northern WayVancouver BC V5T 4T5Canada

@nuggNQ

N-Q Chang

18 Nugg Solutions Corp.

Appendices

Appendix A: References

Ohno, Taiichi Workplace Management, Productivity Press, 1988.

Pentland, Alex “The New Science of Building Great Teams,” Harvard Business Review, April,

2012.

Wiete, Aubrey, K. “The New Organizational Currency: Designing Effective Teams,” Human

Capital Institute, 2014.

Appendix B: Survey Demographics

The initial survey was carried out between March and April, 2014 and had 509 responses. A

follow-up survey was carried out between April and May 2014 and had 50 responses. Initial

interviews used to frame the survey were carried out in February and March of 2014 with

follow-up interviews conducted in May and June of 2014.

The HCI survey was conducted between August and September of 2013.

Nugg did not collect information on Age, Geographic Region (but inspection suggests that

more than 90% of respondents are from North America), Revenue, Number of Employees or

Tenure.

The figures below are percentages. Because of rounding totals may not equal 100.

Functional Area

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 %

%0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

DesignProject Management

ConsultantProfessional (Doctor, Lawyer, Accountant)

Research & DevelopmentFinance & Accounting

ITMarketing & Sales

OperationsOther

Executive ManagementHR/Recruiting/KM/Learning 63 3

14 27

13 14

4 3

3 21

2 8

1 / 0

1 / 0

2

13

4

5

What Hurts What Works 19

Level of Seniority

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80

%

%

EVP/SVP

Other

Analyst

C-Level

Team Member

Vice President

Director

Manager/Team Leader 35 28

25 0

11 0

11 35

7 37

5

4 0

2 0

0

Industry

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

%

%

Travel

Travel/Leisure

Media & Entertainment

Transportation/Warehousing

Food & Beverages/Consumer Goods

Higher Education

Construction

Bio/Pharma/Life Sciences

Aerospace & Defense

IT Hardware/IT Software

Education

Telecommunications

Retail

Chemical/Energy/Utilities

Auto/Industrial/Manufacturing

Non Pro�t

Healthcare

Government

Other

Financial Services/Real Estate/Insurance

Business/Professional Services 14 20

12 5

12 1

9 1

8 5

7 3

6 2

6 4

4 0

4 3

3 0

3 36

2 2

2 2

2 0

2 6

2 2

2

1 8

1 0

20 Nugg Solutions Corp.

Number of Teams

6 to 9 teams

3 to 5 teams

Surveyees belonged to...

10 plus teams

2 teams

One team

20%

15%

10%

45%

10%