Humans are a group species and much of what we do is shaped by how we imagine others in our lives will respond to our actions.
There are three basic social motivations that drive us in our lives, to different degrees in different people.
- Affiliation - the desire to be accepted, with the corresponding fear of being rejected.
- Achievement - the desire for status in recognition of our accomplishments, with the corresponding fear of failure.
- Power or Autonomy - the desire to control the actions of others to achieve one's goals (or sometimes, from the raw pleasure of calling the shots and dominating). The corresponding fear here, is loss of control.
Every team's performance depends on the particular mix of motivations in the leader and members of that team.
We know that managers who need to be liked more than they enjoy power, tend to be less effective managers. If you are the boss, you have to take tough decisions sometimes, and if you are too stressed because you need to be liked more than you take satisfaction from calling the shots for a good reason, then your decision making is likely to be negatively affected. Teams generally feel insecure with bosses they perceive to be weak.
Highly dominant, power-driven bosses, on the other hand - even if they see their dominance as benign and generous - also often corrode team performance.
This is because the intelligence - i.e. problem-solving ability - of a team is only weakly related to the intelligence or capacities of the individual members of a team. Smart teams that solve problems well have the following characteristics, research shows:
- In discussing how to solve problems, there is roughly equal time speaking among all the members of the team, including the leader.
- The individual team members are all skilled at reading other team member's emotional facial expressions.
- There is a good balance of the sexes in the team [1].
Why is this? - First, problems are solved best when there are diverse perspectives - even the smartest person can become stuck in a particular mindset when faced with a challenge. Equal time speaking for members of the team means that several brains can be networked together and so produce a greater range of options and lead to smarter solutions.
A highly dominant boss - even one who is much liked and generous - will tend to inhibit the contributions of other team members and so the team loses a huge chunk of computational power in its brain network. Men fall into this trap more often than women, but there are plenty females who sap their team intelligence in this way also.
Being able to read other peoples' emotions through their faces is also crucial to networking brains together. You have to notice that the young intern is bursting to say something but is anxious about doing so, in order to elicit what might be a crucial idea from her. You have to be able to see that someone is irritated or bored to not lose their engagement and hence their brain's computational power.
The male-female ratio is entirely explained by the fact that women on average are better at reading other peoples' emotional facial expressions than men are. Men can learn to become better at this - nothing in the human brain is predestined because of neuroplasticity - if they choose to. And there are plenty women, particularly in more powerful positions, whose ability to read the expressions, particularly of junior people, become progressively degraded as their seniority rises.
Most teams need a healthy balance of motivations in their members. Generally they work best with a gentle pyramid - where there is a clear leader who has the appetite to take the tough decisions where necessary, but who is seen to share the values of the wider team.
Many teams also have someone who enjoys a more dominant position in the team but who is not comfortable with the number one position - there are many highly effective number two's in the world, some of whom are best left in this position rather than being forced into promotion and into a role they might find too stressful because their appetite for power is not high enough.
And there of course are the foot-soldiers, who are happy to be led, to contribute, but don't want necessarily to climb up the ranks.
So, how do you build a stronger team?
- Make sure team members feel safe to speak out and give their ideas about day-to-day issues or exceptional problems. If someone seldom says anything in a meeting, consider what dominance relationships in the group may be inhibiting him/her.
- Select for social intelligence as well as intellectual ability.
- Try to build diversity into your teams and take the time to make every member feel included and part of a group.
- Work out what the key motivations of individual team members are. Try them out in more responsible positions - this will be a much more reliable test of their latent appetite for seniority than how they behave in a less responsible role.
- Live your values and build a team around them. Nothing binds human groups together more than shared values.
Professor Ian Robertson is an Academic Partner at The Leadership High, a Neuroscientist and author of the book How Confidence Works.
[1] Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups
A. W. Woolley, C. F. Chabris, A. Pentland, N. Hashmi and T. W. Malone Science 2010 Vol. 330 Issue 6004 Pages 686-688.
