Effective teams don’t just happen — you design them. Two of the most important elements of that design are a.) the degree to which team members are interdependent — where they need to rely on each other to accomplish the team task, and b.) how you’ll actually coordinate that interdependence. You can tell when a team doesn’t have a good fit between interdependence and coordination. If there is insufficient coordination, team members have difficulty getting information from each other, completing tasks, and making decisions. If there is more coordination than required, team members will spend unnecessary time and effort on tasks, which slows the team down. The fit between interdependence and coordination affects everything else in your team. Design the fit well — and ensure that the team agrees — and you will create a solid foundation on which the team can accomplish its tasks.
Effective teams don’t just happen — you design them. And two of the most important elements of that design are a.) the degree to which team members are interdependent — where they need to rely on each other to accomplish the team task, and b.) how you’ll actually coordinate that interdependence. This issue arose when I presented a leadership team with survey results showing that its team members had very different beliefs about how much they needed to actively coordinate their work to achieve the team’s goals. Several members believed they were like a gymnastics team: they could achieve team goals by simply combining each member’s independent work, much like a gymnastics team rolls up the scores of individuals’ events to achieve its team score. Others — especially the leader — believed the team should function more like a hockey team: they could achieve their goals only through complex and often spontaneous coordination. I pointed out that until the team reached agreement on this fundamental disconnect, they would continue to have a difficult time achieving their goals. You can tell when a team doesn’t have a good fit between interdependence and coordination. If there is insufficient coordination, team members have difficulty getting information from each other, completing tasks, and making decisions. If there is more coordination than required, team members will spend unnecessary time and effort on tasks, which slows the team down.
You can also tell when there isn’t agreement about how much interdependence or coordination is needed. If you design your team assuming that members need to be highly interdependent and need a high degree of coordination, members who believe they aren’t interdependent will complain that others are asking them to attend meetings, do work, and be part of decisions that aren’t a good use of their time. On the other hand, if you design your team with minimal coordination, assuming that members don’t need to be interdependent, then those who believe that they do need to be interdependent will be frustrated by colleagues who seem uncooperative. They’ll complain that they can’t get the help they need from others, and that the team doesn’t have adequate communication and problem solving processes in place. In short, poorly designed interdependence and coordination — or a lack of agreement about them — can diminish the team’s results, working relationships, and the well-being of individual team members. Because the type of coordination required depends on the type of interdependence, you need to design the interdependence first. The organizational theorist James Thompson identified three types of task interdependence that can be used to design your team: pooled, sequential, and reciprocal.
After you decide on the degree of interdependence needed for your team to achieve the goal at hand, you select the type of coordination that fits it. As you move from pooled to sequential to reciprocal interdependence, the team needs a more complex type of coordination:
The fit between interdependence and coordination affects everything else in your team. Design the fit well — and ensure that the team agrees — and you will create a solid foundation on which the team can accomplish its tasks.
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