New data from McKinsey supports the insights from "Hidden Talents"
Happily, the three "myths" busted by data all relate to our recent articles
Last month, McKinsey & Co. published an article on team effectiveness, based on its “Team Effectiveness Index,” a measure it developed and tested over the last two years with more than a hundred teams across the world. In the article, they described the commonalities among top-performing teams and addressed three commonly believed myths that are contradicted by the data.
In a slight surprise to us, each of these three myths are directly addressed in our “Hidden Talents, Winning Teams” series on team success. We will mention these myths and how they relate to our previous newsletter posts, but first let’s briefly recount the other insights from the data.
According to McKinsey’s research, the most important performance differences among teams relate to (a) the efficiency with which they meet their deadlines, (b) the quality of their results, and (c) the level of innovation they exhibit.
We can note that these are each performance metrics, not measures of employee satisfaction—as we frequently emphasize, the common thinking that people and team investments are about “being nice to employees” is belied by the data—these are the elements that drive outsized financial performance.
According to McKinsey’s data, four health drivers come up as the most important across all three performance areas: Trust, Communication, Innovative thinking, and decision-making. Feedback and role definition are also near the top of all four lists.
This is interesting information, but it likely will surprise few to learn that trust and communication are important for effective team performance. That is why the “myths” are perhaps the most interesting part of the piece.
And what are these myths? We found it interesting to see that each of them relates to an article we published on this feed in the previous few weeks:
Myth 1: Teams should ideally be stacked with top talent in every role to achieve maximum effectiveness.
Reality: Effective teams focus on the individual and collective skills and behaviors that matter most, and every role needs fit-for-purpose talent, not necessarily “top” talent.
Given that this is the single deepest recurring idea of the “Hidden Talents, Winning Teams” series, it is great to see it borne out by the data. The first two parts of series focused on PJ Tucker and Roberto Firmino, professional athletes who played in roles generally considered to require “top talent,” but succeeded in adding tremendous consistent value to their teams despite lacking that talent, due to their particularly strong “fit for purpose.”
Myth 2: Teams already know what they need to work on.
Reality: Teams are often unaware of their most important gaps and can have shared blind spots, leading them to prioritize the wrong things.
Every team thinks they know what the most important things to work on are, but they are often wrong. Part 6 of the Hidden Talents, Winning Teams deals specifically with team building, and discusses a few of the ways in which leaders miss opportunities, particularly with regard to potential “Reverse Peter Principle” candidates.
These blind spots represent only a small fraction of the blind spots many teams have, and we will delve into others in future posts.
Myth 3: There is a best-practice playbook for team effectiveness that every team should adopt.
Reality: There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Part 3 of our Hidden Talents series focuses on the Boston Celtics, and how they built an exceptional team very differently than most other teams: by defining a few key skills that every member of the team must have, thereby avoiding “weak links” and ensuring that everyone can operate at peak performance without having to cover for anyone else. Notably, these “must haves” are not generic and common to every organization (e.g. “behave with integrity,”), but are hard skills specific to the way this organization wants to operate (e.g. “make >40% of your three point shots”).
As noted, this is not the only way to build an effective team. Plenty of successful teams have included players who could not do all the things the Celtics players can do. There is no one-size-fits all solution.
We hope you found this data as interesting as we did, and that you will be able to apply this knowledge to your own organization.
Thanks,
The Impactful Executive Team
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