Teams are more than just a collection of the best talent

A common pushback to efforts to increase diversity in the workplace is that people should not be selected based on gender or race but based on merit and skill. Hence, diversity efforts are counterproductive to workplace performance. I completely agree that we should not select people based predominantly on their gender, race, or other diversity criteria and that skills, education, and experience should be the most important driver of a hiring decision. But I want to push back on the notion that all one needs to do is hire the best people and one will get a high-performing team.

In my view the watershed moment came with the landmark research by Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone about ‘collective intelligence’. Their 2010 article in Science has become one of the most-cited and most influential research of all time in the field of team performance. Unfortunately, that paper is behind an expensive paywall, so if you are interested in their research, read this interview with them in the Harvard Business Review from 2011.

What they did was recruit 699 people and team them up in groups of two to five. Then they asked those teams to perform different tasks ranging from solving visual puzzles, brainstorming exercises, and negotiations over limited resources. The teams were also asked to play a game of checkers against a computer or design a house, pool, or garage with a series of architectural building blocks.

The researchers then tried to identify what factors drove team performance. First, here is what doesn’t correlate with team performance: The average intelligence of the team members or the intelligence of the smartest team members. There was zero evidence that a collection of smart people creates a successful team.

What drove team performance is what the researchers have called ‘collective intelligence’, i.e. the ability to work productively as a team. That sounds like a circular argument: teams perform better if they have higher collective intelligence and collective intelligence is higher if the teams perform better. But in essence, collective intelligence is just a label, and the real question is what drives collective intelligence.

The original study from 2010 found three drivers that were statistically significant:

1. The emotional intelligence of the team members. People who were better at social cues and reading other people’s emotions created an atmosphere where individual team members could collaborate more productively and openly.

2. The speaking behaviour of the team. Teams where members spoke more equally among themselves and different people took turns to speak were more collectively intelligent than teams where speaking was dominated by a single individual or where speaking was more unequally distributed among team members.

3. The share of women in teams. Women tend to have higher emotional intelligence than men (on average) and teams with more women tend to have more equal speaking patterns (again, on average) hence, teams with a more even gender balance tend to outperform male-only or male-dominated teams.

Team performance and share of women

Source: Harvard Business Review

Ironically, as the authors mention in the HBR interview linked above, we know from sports teams that a simple collection of the most skilled individuals does not make an effective team. You need people who work together in a constructive way. Yet, in business, there too often is still a culture of ‘we hire the best people everywhere and put them together to deliver the best results’. Or there is a culture of letting smart and high-performing individuals get away with unacceptable behaviour in the workplace. Yet, the work of Anita Woolley shows that getting rid of these high-performing individuals with low emotional intelligence increases performance overall.

In the end, executives need to be aware that hardly any business is driven by individual performance. Especially in knowledge industries like tech or finance, the tasks at hand can only be solved by teams, not by individuals. Changing hiring practices (and compensation practices) to reward team players and penalise asocial employees could go a long way toward increasing productivity and profitability.