How you distract your team from priorities

How to deal with uncertainty? How do teams behave and perform when dealing with factors that are not under their control? Research shows it is not the uncertainty, but our approach towards it that makes an impact on team performance.

Data from study of 30 executive during a team based problem solving activity from www.inoteam.io showed that team performance was not affected whether a team had or did not have access to information about the available time to finish a task and the exact amount of reward or penalty for completing a problem solving task. Sounds surprising? It gets even more interesting!

When the teams were given a choice to pay a premium but gain access to the information about the allowed time to complete the task and the amount of rewards and penalities in case of success or failure in solving problems, their performance was significantly decreased!

Team performance is not an outcome of fixing a dealine and annoucing rewards

As shown in this chart from inoteam.io, most teams performed very similarly whether they had FULL information OR had NO information about time and expected rewards or penalties for doing their task. You can see this by comparing the red and blue parts of the chart for each team. What does it mean?

In simple words, performance of team is not highly influenced by how much certainty they have about the external factors that can impact the outcomes. Put differently, the capability of a team to work together doest not increase or diminish based on how much control and information they have about the available time to complete the job and the reward for the results.

Too much emphasis on deadline and rewards might negatively impact your team performance

When team members had a choice to pay a premium to get access to this extra information about time and rewards or penalties, overall performance of team decreased!

You can see the decrease in team performance in the lavender part of the chart for each team. As shown, three out of five teams got into the negative outcomes zone. Indeed, the two teams that remained in the positive outcomes zone were the ones who chose to pay the minimum premium and get the minimum amount of certainty versus the other three teams who paid high premium to secure maximum certainty. The teams who focused too much on “creating more certainty” still suffered more from inability to get the problems solved.

There are also other studies in the leadership and management literature that emphasis on the importance of focusing on the task and psychological needs of team members, not deadlines and rewards, to create a thriving organisational culture and achieve high performance in teams.

How to help teams achieve high performance? Help them focus on the key priorities

If you are leading a team, one of your roles as the leader is to make sure you help your team be at their best, both individually and together. You might be tempted to go for extrinsic motivation sources, such as deadlines and payments to improve performance. To have a deadline or a clear expectation about rewards of success is not bad, but if the focus and attention of the team shifts from enjoying to work together and solving the challenges they face to fixing deadlines and negotiating the expected outcomes, you cannot expect to acheive high performance.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? If you focus on fixing deadlines and discussing consequences, you get a great result in fixing those deadlines! But you are already distracting the team from the main task in hand.

Leading high performance hybrid teams in remote working

If you help your team stay focused on the priorities, address their challenges, nurture psychological safety, and build a healthy and inclusive collaboration culture, you are leading your team energy and efforts to address the real issues and can expect high performance, too.

This is very important for teams and organisations that work in remote or hybrid settings. When a team is bonded around purpose and projects, not a physical space, leaders must strengthen their focus on connecting people together around a shared purpose to achieve high performance as a team. Setting deadlines and using rewards could be useful as hygiene factors, but the main leadership role is to ensure the team focus is not diverted from priorities into meticulous discussions around timing and rewards.

What you need to deal with uncertainty is just a compass and a dedicated team, not a detailed map and a timeline!