The “It Factors”:
If You Are Having Teamwork Problems Maybe You’re Missing the “It Factors”?
Why do some teams click, but most don’t? Because the teams that click have what we call the “It Factors”. The ‘It Factors” consists of three psychological roles that strongly influence the performance of all exceptional teams. These psychological roles include informal captains (which I discussed in the last blog post), charismatic connectors, and team players which we discuss in this blog post. The team player is the “glue” that holds not only your team together but the broader organization.
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast triggered a massive tsunami. It crashed into the northern Pacific coast of Japan and destroyed seaside communities. To compound the tragedy, a 46-foot-high tsunami hit the nuclear power plant in Fukushima. With backup power generators disabled, the reactors overheated and exploded. Extensive radioactive contamination resulted. In terms of damage done, it was the largest tsunami in Japan’s history. In the immediate aftermath, the people who were key in emergency efforts are people called bonders. Bonders, in social capital theory, are people who hold teams and groups together. They are the glue. Instead of forming casual acquaintances, bonders form strong ties.
Researchers Kiyomi Kawamoto and Karl Kim studied what role bonders, bridgers and linkers played in waste management efforts after the 2011 tsunami crisis. Families, relatives, and neighbors were the bonders in their analysis. These bonders are what we call team players. Kawamoto and Kim found that the team players were the second most efficient of the three types at cleaning up waste within the first three to four days, what is known as the emergency period. Debris from collapsed buildings, damaged household goods and rubble all need to be removed. Team players were the first on the scene and leveraged their strong ties to organize how to immediately get things done. They worked with linkers, like people from governmental agencies, who were the most efficient during the emergency phase, to send the sorted waste out of their communities. It makes sense that team players in this scenario would be slightly less efficient at getting rid of tsunami waste because they aren’t trained to do so, like the linkers. However, despite their layperson skills, their power comes from strong relationships. Team players may not have the most talent, but they bring the essential element of togetherness.
Team players do not necessarily get along well with everyone. What they do cultivate amongst the team is cohesion, or a shared understanding of each other. MIT Sloan Management Review interviewed sports analytics expert Simon Strachan about his research on teamwork metrics. Strachan used publicly available sports team data to analyze how cohesion levels differed amongst teams and how that related to team performance. It’s the science behind the classic story of an underdog team that wins the championship. The reason those underdog teams can outperform star player teams, argues Strachan, is because each player has a stronger understanding of both their role on the team and how the team works together. While the top dog teams rely on talent and money, the underdog teams rely on deep, shared experience on the field. They know better than the other team how their fellow players will respond throughout each play.
Teamwork researchers Vera Hagemann and Annette Kluge explain that this type of understanding gives team members a Shared Mental Model (SMM). These SMMs are developed “based on the information matching process within the team, a common understanding of the problem [and] the goals and the current situation.” This shared mental map is key for teams who deal with time critical situations when talking is not a viable communication option. They’re still helpful even when team members can talk to each other:
“SMM helps complex problem-solving teams during high workload to adapt fast and efficiently to changing situations…They also enhance the teams’ performance and communication processes.”
Team players are people who prioritize this high level of understanding amongst the group. Hagemann and Kluge call them “highly collective oriented” people. These team players
“Work with others on a task-activity…in a goal-oriented manner, seek others’ input, contribute to team outcomes, enjoy team membership, and value cooperativeness more than power.” In their analysis of people working in a virtual firefighting simulation, they found that the quality of being a team player was even more important than levels of trust or cohesion. The researchers recognize that trust and cohesion develop over time and may still be important to team performance. However, strangers are put together in the simulation and immediately asked to solve complex problems. In this setting, those with more team player traits were able to work together to fight the virtual fires better than those with fewer team player traits.
Like informal captains, team players focus on what will bring the best outcome for the team. Remember, all organizations are just a collection of scaled up teams and groups. For instance, to be successful in your DEIA efforts stop thinking of your organization or agency as one entity and instead as a collection of teams and loosely connected groups connected through a web of strong and weak ties. Once you do this you quickly understand why team players are critical in keeping teams together, and informal captains provide the informal leadership to help team members achieve group goals. However, there is still a missing piece. A dyad of only informal captains and team players is not enough to create a high performing team. You need a personality who can look beyond the team to bring in innovative ideas that spark creativity and problem solving. In other words, they connect ideas and people through the power of their charisma. Enter the charismatic connector.
