Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan argues that it is social cohesion – built during every coffee break and every time one team member asks another for help – that leads over time to great results. It’s a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out, “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”
So what is it that makes some groups more successful and more productive than others? A team at MIT researched that very question by bringing in hundreds of volunteers, putting them into groups, and giving them very hard problems to solve. What happened was exactly what you’d expect – some groups were more successful than others. But what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those that had one or two people with a spectacularly high I.Q. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q.
Instead, the high-achieving groups had three characteristics:
- They showed high degrees of social sensitivity to one another.
- They gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated.
- They had more women in them.
The striking thing about this experiment is that the key to a group’s success lies in their social connectedness to each other. What do you think about this research? Do you believe that your team has the social connectedness it needs to succeed? What can you do to help create a culture of helpfulness in your organization?
