Turning Knowledge Workers into a Team
Nancy L. Parenteau, biotech veteran, entrepreneur, and advisor highlights the value of cross-education in a knowledge environment.
When you’re responsible for managing research and development in a field that requires multidisciplinary input, what becomes clear fast is that you may be facing problems beyond your scope of expertise. How will you make the right decisions? Michael Bungay Stanier cautions that, as leaders, we shouldn’t attempt to manage a knowledge worker team by pretending to be an expert in all aspects of the project. Instead, we need to listen and learn from the team. Cross-education helps the team to trust one another, value each other’s contributions, and expose weaknesses.
I once went to a prestigious scientific meeting and listened to an investigator presenting a project that was at the interface of engineering and biology. As a biologist, I thought the biological data were weak but that the engineering was probably done well. Later, I met up with an engineer friend and he thought the exact opposite about the presentation! I knew right then and there that my team and I could never be in that investigator’s position. We couldn’t tolerate being naïve in any aspect of our program if we were to succeed.
You’ll hear from your expert knowledge workers what is doable and what is not, but is it the best anyone could accomplish or just your team? Could your group be weak in an area that makes you dangerously naïve? As Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” So, one way to test our understanding is to try to explain it to others outside that area of expertise. It can expose where the team might need training or additional help.
Luckily, in industry, we have the opportunity to build a strong cross-functional team of high-achieving experts. However, turning a group of highly educated knowledge workers into a real team can be a challenge. Here are some tips to help ensure success:
The kind of highly trained people we want on our teams have careers. They are not merely there to be employed. We want team members that are genuinely interested in what they do, love what they do, and want to accomplish something tangible. The leader must respect that motivation and communicate early and often the professional opportunity inherent in the project to balance their personal goals with the company goals.
A danger in having team members focused on their area of expertise is that they may delve too deeply into the weeds or misdirect their research efforts. Peter Drucker, the late great father of modern management, taught that knowledge workers are more prone to believe they are accomplishing something when they’re not by unwittingly focusing on the wrong thing. As the team’s leader, although not an expert in the area, you know the project’s objectives, what questions need answering, and why you have these people on the team in the first place! Use that as your guide to help keep your knowledge workers on a productive path.
Cross-education does not end with educating you. The knowledge worker may wear blinders when it comes to other aspects of the project and, worse, have little appreciation of different tasks at hand. There may be a mentality that all that matters is me doing my job well and completing my assignment–it’s the leader’s responsibility to manage the rest. It can result in reporting of data in a way that is hard for others to grasp and query, forcing them to “blindly” accept the researcher’s conclusions. A persistent lack of understanding is detrimental to team dynamics, which is why it’s essential that everyone explains their work in a way that the whole team can understand and appreciate.. This will foster respect, acceptance, and trust amongst team members while leading to better decisions.
The leader can unite their team’s cross-functional education by continuing to focus on how the collective work is answering the big questions and overcoming hurdles. It becomes the team glue. In the end it will result in better chances of project success through the well-combined contributions of a high-achieving, multi-disciplinary team of experts, each member with tangible accomplishments they can hang their hat on, not to mention a feather in your cap.
Nancy Parenteau is a cell and developmental biologist with a long-standing interest in the medical application of science. She received a B.A. in Zoology from the University of Vermont, and then went on to obtain her Ph.D. in anatomy, cell and developmental biology from Georgetown University Medical School and trained as a postdoc at the Harvard School of Public Health.
From serving as the Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Scientific Officer of the MIT start-up Organogenesis Inc. to co-founding Amaranth Bio, Inc. in 2002, Parenteau has learned a lot about working with people in different fields. In 2005, she started Parenteau BioConsultants, LLC a life science management consultancy based in Vermont specializing in the strategy and management of advanced biological products. She is a Springboard alumna and loves supporting women entrepreneurs and women-owned businesses!
