Active Learning to Develop Teamwork
Personality in Teamwork, Leverage Team Learning, and Reflect in Debriefs
Combining three recent articles on teams, what did I learn?
First up is “Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills” by Dave Winsborough and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. Most people who study or do the work of facilitating high performing teams know that roles, rules and responsibilities are key to high performing teams. The authors of the HBR article encourage us to also factor in the personality of the teams members. An individual’s role in the team is partially determined by personality.
A useful way to think about teams with the right mix of skills and personalities is to consider the two roles every person plays in a working group: a functional role, based on their formal position and technical skill, and a psychological role, based on the kind of person they are.
I would encourage you to read the entire post. The article is summarized in this sketch note by Nina Karlsson
Second up is “How To Build A Better Team? New Meta-analysis Says Active Learning” by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). This is a summary of a recent meta-analysis. I must admit I have not read the source material but if you want to here it is: McEwan, D., Ruissen, G. R., Eys, M. A., Zumbo, B. D., & Beauchamp, M. R. (2017). The Effectiveness of Teamwork Training on Teamwork Behaviors and Team Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Controlled Interventions. PLoS ONE, 12(1). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0169604 . It is open access so anyone can read it!
The short version is that work on developing teams is helpful for performance. The more active the learning the more beneficial. It is nice to have science help inform what practitioners already discover. Most of already know lecturing at people is not the best way to develop high performing teams.
Here are the 4 broad categories researchers grouped interventions in:
- classroom-style lectures where a group listens to speakers on teamwork-related topics;
- hands-on workshops that might include interactive discussions of the team’s purposes and goals;
- simulation training, where teams practice various skills that they actually use (e.g., an airline flight simulator or a medical emergency dummy);
- and in-situ reviews where team members provide feedback on each other’s work in real time.
I saw some great retweets this last week on the topic such as:
I encourage you to read the summary article (and the source material).
Third up is Riding the Waves of Change: A Simple Model Helps Teams Adapt by Barbara Ruland. This article from Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP) highlights recent work to synthesize team theories by a crew at University of South Florida Industrial-Organizational Psychology department. They came up with “The 4 R’s of Team Adaptation.”
…the four steps include recognizing the change; reframing the team’s cognitive approach to a task based on the change; responding to the change by implementing the new approach; and reflecting on the change and how successfully the team adapted.
Of the four, (Recognize, Reframe, Respond, and Reflect) what struck me the most was the reflect phase in this cycle. The importance of reflection phase is often overlooked. The article emphasizes the debrief to focus on both task work as well as teamwork.
Frick said budgeting time for reflection and debriefing is a key step managers can take. “A really important part of it is allowing time in the project timeline to have that debrief, to reflect and to realize, ‘here’s what we did well, and here’s what maybe we need to improve upon to move forward.’”
I encourage you to check out this article and future research that comes out in this area.
Okay, get your teams aligned with personality and skillsets. Leverage learning opportunities via active learning sessions for your team (especially newer teams). Finally, ensure you build in time for reflection on team activities paying attention to budgeting in time and resources for debriefs.
