Team Effectiveness Study Pilot Results

What makes team members team players?

Collaborative Coaching and Resonance Strategies combine their experience in organizational/team effectiveness and in employee research to explore this question.

While team-based work has become the predominant form of collaboration, few teams truly know how to collaborate. Many just go through the motions.

The “problem” is that collaboration cannot be mandated. It’s a decision people make and this decision is as much emotional as it is rational. And that’s why we ask for both – rational and emotional drivers for team collaboration. Resonance® provides a unique and powerful survey methodology that helps us explore behaviors and motivations of team players.

Resonance survey methodology emulates the brain’s natural processes by asking for spontaneous emotions and then combining rational thinking. The combination of qualitative and quantitative, rational and emotional feedback allows powerful conclusions about structural and emotional enablers for a collaborative team culture. We are using a brand new metric – net passion that explores the gap between the ideal and the actual experience of collaboration team members have on their teams.

We had a number of interesting insights during our first pilot study focusing on team collaboration in cross-generational teams:

• More than half of our sample of 100 respondents yearned for more cross-generational diversity on their teams.
• Those who desire more cross-generational teams feel actually also less engaged.
• On teams where ages differ more widely spanning several generations, team members more often find that workload is not shared effectively – leading to a sense of “under-accomplishing”, i.e. falling short of their own expectations in terms of results.

Let’s look at that last point: Making progress in a given day is the single most important contributor to people ending their workday with positive feelings.

Moving ahead occured on 76% of people’s best-mood days. By contrast, setbacks occurred on only 13% of those days. On bad days, these numbers are literally flipped. (Source: HBR May 2011, The power of small wins)

In other words, you can’t cultivate a collaborative team culture without enabling small wins for team members. But will individual progress support team collaboration? What supports your experience of ideal team collaboration?