When you bake, you know that the right combination of fresh ingredients is critical. The wrong ingredients can turn out a soggy, inedible mess no matter how long you spend in the kitchen.
So what does baking have to do with high-performing work teams? The same thing it has to do with cake: starting out with the right ingredients matters more than anything you do afterward.
Most organizations spend significant time and money trying to improve the interactions between team members through development exercises, off-sites, and coaching. Those interventions can help. But focusing on getting the right people in the right combination from the start can have a much bigger effect — and at a fraction of the cost.
Managing teams to success, not repairing them after#
Instead of waiting and trying to repair teams through development work, you can actively manage teams to be more successful from day one. The well-known levers are still real:
- Enrich the work itself by giving teams autonomy over how they reach an outcome.
- Provide external support by aligning team goals with the broader organizational reward system.
But there is a third lever most organizations underuse: strategically staff teams with the right number and mix of members.
Evidence-based strategic staffing#
Researchers in team science have rigorously examined what the "right" mix looks like. Their finding is consistent and somewhat humbling for those of us who came up in talent functions: while technical expertise is necessary, other team-member characteristics are more critical than skills for predicting whether the team will be high-performing.
Two examples will give you the flavor.
One bad apple really does spoil the bunch. Research has found that a single disagreeable team member can explain as much as 14% of the variability in team performance. One person, double-digit performance impact, across the whole team.
Concern for others is a startlingly strong predictor. The "concern" facet of psychological collectivism captures whether someone tends to be self-interested or to genuinely care about the well-being of the team. The odds of being a top-performing team are dramatically higher — one widely cited finding puts it at 57x — when team members score high on this dimension.
For highly interdependent teams, these team-related individual differences matter more than most organizations realize. Are you harnessing this research to fill your organization with high-performing teams, or are you still hiring almost entirely on credentials and interviews?
What you can actually do#
Four practical steps, in order.
1. Create the shopping list
Determine the degree to which a role you are hiring for is genuinely team-based. Team task analysis can be collected alongside a standard job analysis to map how interdependent the role is — there is a real difference between a position that ships through a team and a position that ships through an individual who happens to sit near a team.
2. Start with the right ingredients
For roles that are team-based, collect information during selection that taps into how well a candidate will function as part of the team. Make sure they have what it takes to work effectively in a team environment, and that their work styles will be compatible with the existing team. Zeswa is designed for exactly this — it uses current team-composition research to generate compatibility scores and specific insights, so hiring teams can make the team-fit decision with evidence rather than vibes.
3. Give them time to warm up
Once a new hire joins, orient them to the job and to the team. Have team members share their areas of expertise, work-style preferences, and what motivates them. Without an explicit orientation to the team, new members make assumptions about other people's responsibilities and roles. Those assumptions are usually wrong, and they lead to a rocky start and a worse early-tenure performance curve than the new hire would otherwise have.
4. Check in
Take regular measurements of team performance so members understand what they are doing well and what could be improved. In the absence of feedback there is no learning. Teams need to know how they are doing, and they need encouragement to align their own goals with the organization's.
The compounding effect#
Well-formed teams are higher-performing. High-performing teams have more satisfied members. Satisfied members stay longer. Longer tenure compounds institutional knowledge, which raises team performance further.
This is the actual mechanism behind "we hire great people and good things happen." It is not magic. It is just team composition done well, early, with evidence — so your organization can have its cake and eat it too.