A Team Who Meshes Together

Business Week has an interesting article titled Why Firing Doesn’t Always Help. A group of researchers from the Harvard Business School was researching a new heart surgery technique. What was particularly interesting is what they found when looking at the performance of the different teams.

In looking for what might explain the differences in performance they hit on a surprising fact: The head of the best performing surgical team made sure to pick people he thought would work well together, and he kept the same team together for 15 surgeries. The lead surgeon of the worst performing team allowed members to be assigned to his team at random, and had at least one different team member each time for the first seven surgeries. The difference in performance levels was striking: The best performing team on average completed surgery more than twice as fast as the worst performing team.

This reminds me of the US men’s soccer team. On an individual basis, we probably have one of the most talented assembly of players. However, Brazil, France, and Italy gel better as a team than we do, which is why I think they are more successful.

The same model applies to business. You can assemble a team of the most highly skilled individuals, but if they don’t perform well together, then your business and customers suffer.

This has been particularly important for us lately at Messagefirst, because we’re growing. One of the key factors in hiring a new individual to our team is how (s)he can answer the question “Will they play well with the other kids?” It’s very important to us that we hire people we enjoy spending time with - it’s kind of a family of sorts. That’s as important a skill set to us as the ability to perform tacticle things like wireframes (behavior design specs), sitemaps, ethnography, and usability testing.