Executive Summaries JUNE2016
SPOTLIGHT ON MANAGING TEAMS
More and more work gets done in a teamsetting—yet the context in which teamwork takes place is ever more challenging.This package updates the fundamentals, gets real about inherited teams,describes cross-industry teamwork, and tackles conflict management.
Managing Organizations
Wicked-Problem Solvers
Amy C. Edmondson | page 060
Companies today increasingly rely on teamsthat span many industries for radical innovation, especially to solve “wickedproblems.” So leaders have to understand how to promote collaboration whenroles are uncertain, goals are shifting, expertise and organizational culturesare varied, and participants have clashing or even antagonistic perspectives.
HBS professor Amy Edmondson has studiedmore than a dozen cross-industry innovation projects, among them the creationof a new city, a mango supply-chain transformation, and the design andconstruction of leading-edge buildings. She has identified the leadershippractices that make successful cross-industry teams work: fostering an adaptablevision, promoting psychological safety, enabling knowledge sharing, andencouraging collaborative innovation.
Though these practices are broadlyfamiliar, their application within cross-industry teams calls for uniqueleadership approaches that combine flexibility, open-mindedness, humility, andfierce resolve.
HBR Reprint R1606C
Transitions
Leading the Team You Inherit
Michael D. Watkins | page 068
Most leaders don’t have the luxury ofbuilding their teams from scratch. Instead they’re put in charge of an existinggroup, and they need guidance on the best way to take over and improveperformance. Watkins, an expert on transitions, suggests a three-step approach:
Assess. Act quickly to size up thepersonnel you’ve inherited, systematically gathering data from one-on-onechats, team meetings, and other sources. Reflect, too, on the businesschallenges you face, the kinds of people you want in various roles, and thedegree to which they need to collaborate.
Reshape. Adjust the makeup of the team by movingpeople to new positions, shifting their responsibilities, or replacing them.Make sure that everyone is aligned on goals and how to achieve them—you mayneed to change the team’s stated direction. Consider also making changes in theway the team operates (reducing the frequency of meetings, for example, orcreating new subteams). Then establish ground rules and processes to sustaindesired behaviors, and revisit those periodically.
Accelerate team development. Set yourpeople up for some early wins. Initial successes will boost everyone’sconfidence and reinforce the value of your new operating model, thus paving theway for ongoing growth.
HBR Reprint R1606D
Managing People
The Secrets of Great Teamwork
Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen | page 076
Over the years, as teams have grown morediverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic, collaboration has become morecomplex. But though teams face new challenges, their success still depends on acore set of fundamentals. As J. Richard Hackman, who began researching teams inthe 1970s, discovered, what matters most isn’t the personalities or behavior ofthe team members; it’s whether a team has a compelling direction, a strongstructure, and a supportive context. In their own research, Haas and Mortensenhave found that teams need those three “enabling conditions” now more thanever. But their work also revealed that today’s teams are especially prone totwo corrosive problems: “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information.Overcoming those pitfalls requires a new enabling condition: a shared mindset.
This article details what team leadersshould do to establish the four foundations for success. For instance, topromote a shared mindset, leaders should foster a common identity and commonunderstanding among team members, with techniques such as “structuredunstructured time.” The authors also describe how to evaluate a team’seffectiveness, providing an assessment leaders can take to see what’s workingand where there’s room for improvement.
HBR Reprint R1606E
Conflict
How to Preempt Team Conflict
Ginka Toegel and Jean-Louis Barsoux | page084
Team conflict can add value or destroy it.Good conflict fosters respectful debate and yields mutually agreed-uponsolutions that are often far superior to those first offered. Bad conflictoccurs when team members simply can’t get past their differences, killingproductivity and stifling innovation. Destructive conflict typically stems notfrom differences of opinion but from a perceived incompatibility between the waycertain team members think and act.
The conventional approach to workingthrough such conflict is to respond to clashes as they arise. But this approachroutinely fails because it allows frustrations to build for too long, making itdifficult to reset negative impressions and restore trust.
In their research on team dynamics andexperience working with executive teams, Toegel and Barsoux have found aproactive approach to be much more effective. In this article, they introduce amethodology that focuses on how people look, act, speak, think, and feel. Teamleaders facilitate five conversations—one focused on each category—before theteam gets under way, to build a shared understanding of the process, ratherthan the content, of work and lay the foundation for effective collaboration.
HBR Reprint R1606F
The Big Idea
Mergers & Acquisitions
M&A: The One Thing You Need to Get Right
Roger L. Martin | page 040
The financial world set a record in 2015for mergers and acquisitions. It’s too soon to have data on how those dealswill work out, but the signs are not promising. Last year Microsoft wrote off96% of the value of the handset business it had acquired from Nokia in 2014 for$7.9 billion. The rule, confirmed by nearly all studies, remains true: M&Ais a mug’s game, in which some 70% to 90% of acquisitions are abysmal failures.The author has an explanation for this persistent failure and offers a wayforward. Acquirers, he notes, tend to look at acquisitions as a way ofobtaining value for themselves—access to a new market or capability.
The trouble is, if you spot a valuableasset or capability in a company, others will too, and the value will be lostin a bidding war. But if you have something that will make the acquisition morecompetitive, the picture changes. As long as the acquired company is incapableof making that enhancement on its own or (ideally) with any other company, thebuyer, rather than the seller, will earn the rewards. Martin describes fourways to enhance the competitiveness of a target:
• Bea smarter provider of growth capital.
• Provide better managerial oversight.
• Transfer valuable skills to the acquisition.
• Share valuable capabilities with the acquisition.
HBR Reprint R1606B
Features
Organizational Culture
Managing the High-Intensity Workplace
Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan | page 098
If employees feel free to draw linesbetween their professional and personal lives, the organizations they work forwill benefit.
People today are under intense pressure tobe “ideal workers”—totally committed to their jobs and always on call. Butafter interviewing hundreds of professionals in many fields, the authors haveconcluded that selfless dedication to work is often unnecessary and harmful. Ithas dysfunctional consequences not only for individuals but also for theirorganizations.
The authors discuss three typicalstrategies
for coping with demanding workplaces, and
the risks associated with each:
Accepting involves prioritizing the jobabove all else and remaining available 24/7. Because accepters fail tocultivate outside interests, they’re often slow to recover from professionalsetbacks. And they may be too focused on
their own responsibilities to mentorothers—
a drawback for their organizations.
Passing involves portraying oneself as anideal worker while quietly pursuing a life beyond the office. But passers mayfeel isolated from their colleagues because they are hiding parts ofthemselves, and their perpetuation of the ideal-worker myth keeps the pressureon everyone.
Revealing involves openly embracing nonworkcommitments. Revealers may unwittingly put their careers at risk, however, andbosses who penalize them may drive away talent.
So how can organizations build ahealthier—and more productive—culture? Managers can act as role models byleading multifaceted lives themselves. They can reward employees for thequality and results of their work rather than the time put into it. And theycan enforce reasonable work hours, require vacations, and take other steps toprotect employees’ personal lives.
HBR Reprint R1606G
Managing Yourself
Next-Gen Retirement
Heather C. Vough, Christine D. Bataille,Leisa Sargent, and Mary Dean Lee | page 127
With longevity increasing and thousands ofBaby Boomers turning 65 every day, the face of retirement is changing.Interviews with executives and managers conducted by the authors show that veryfew people now follow the tradition of ditching the job and embracing a life ofleisure in their midsixties. This article describes the different paths beingtaken and offers four principles that will help you navigate your late-careerjourney:
1. Prepare to go off-script. Careers end inmany ways—often unpredictably. Most of us will have little control over ourexit, so we must be ready to adapt.
2. Find your metaphor. Do you seeretirement as liberation from the grind, the loss of your professionalidentity, or a chance for transformation? The language that resonates most withyou can signal your best way forward.
3. Create a new deal. Many are steppingback gradually or staying on at their firms with redesigned schedules andresponsibilities or as contractors. Explore the possibilities.
4. Make a difference. Shelving yourexpertise at retirement no longer makes sense. The new model is to apply yourtalents to improve your community and the world.
HBR Reprint R1606J