Mastering Modern Teamwork: New Rules from McKinsey

Music. Welcome to the Manager Lab, where we delve into the increasingly dynamic world of talent management.

In each episode, we will unravel key insights, break down the most relevant books and articles, and provide actionable tips to optimize your approach in developing and retaining top talent. Stay tuned for a deep dive into the art, science, and strategy of unlocking your team's full potential. Let's enter the Manager Lab. Music.

Today, companies of all types are called on to demonstrate integrated, cross-functional, project-based teamwork in all their operations. Easier said than done, right? This article is from the September-October print edition of Harvard Business Review 2024. It's called The New Rules for Teamwork. It's by Angus Dawson of McKinsey and Katie George, former chief people officer of McKinsey.

All right. Well, team members may be working together, not only from different offices today, but actually on different continents in different countries. I know I recently, I'm kind of wrapping up a huge project for a division. And it has members from different states and, indeed, a different country up in Canada. Traditional thinking around how to innovate teamwork has often been based on intuition and observation and a little pinch of psychology.

But increasingly, we face an environment of constant change and disruption, and new ideas about how to create well-functioning teams are starting to emerge. This article from McKinsey really is from their devoting themselves to developing a new science of teamwork for their organization. They've got essentially about 4,000 clients in this database.

It relies on testing, learning, analysis, adaptation, improvement, all the things that you would expect from McKinsey to enable continuous learning, and it includes metrics that link practices to outcomes. In this article, they present three key principles of their approach that can help teams in any organization perform at their best. And then they describe, through examples and a set of action plans, how to put them into practice. Principle number one, develop an operating system.

So the article uses the term operating system to mean the building blocks for the way team members collaborate, create change, and support one another along the journey.

What they all have in common is that they set out a view of how teams create value, what teams are supposed to achieve, the technical skills that each member is expected to bring to the table and to contribute, the processes by which the work will be managed, and the cultural norms and mindsets of constructive collaboration that will guide behavior. The best operating systems are the ones that embed this ethos of continuous improvement.

They're structured enough to provide consistent guidance, but loose enough to accommodate changing conditions, priorities, data, and needs. Probably the most famous operating system that the article references is the Toyota Production System, or TPS. Developed in the 50s and made famous in the 70s and 80s through a number of books that outlined the operating system, the TPS, Toyota Production System.

And then, you know, it goes all the way up to the article kind of goes into what happened in the 90s, 2000s, and now we are in this world of agility or agile, the agile movement. Today's foremost team operating systems are running Agile, maintaining a complex operation ranging from chip manufacturing to software development.

Now, McKinsey is developing a new process. So this process is called WWW. And no, it doesn't sound for what you think it is. It stands for the way we work. The way we work. And they describe right off the bat here an example from a Latin American bank that they worked with that decided to use the WWW, the way we work, operating system. Here's what they did. At first, they held a structured kickoff where they involved all team members, including outside consultants, which set a work cadence.

It established team norms and expectations. Then team leaders committed to conducting regular one-on-one feedback sessions and twice a month or bimonthly retrospective reviews with the entire team. So they had one-on-ones with the team members and the people who were kind of running the project, and then they had all hands on deck, full retrospectives of the project every two weeks. And then it was all tracked by a digital tool that could be updated on the fly.

Enabled to make or to allow the team to make adjustments as they needed. And then they called in experts to provide coaching along the way as they needed it. And by the end of the nine-month project, the bank had successfully launched the digital products that they had wanted to. So what was the specific action plan items for number one, developing an operating system? Number one, hold kickoff meetings. Make sure everyone is on the same page.

Conduct one-on-ones with team members and the folks that are responsible for the project, the sponsors, if you will, and then take stock of progress using these bi-monthly or every two weeks, these retrospectives or kind of, okay, where are we, where are the progress reviews, right? Where are we now, if you will? And then the last thing is having a protocol written to accomplish comprehensive handovers for McKinsey.

And so for most companies, this would just mean what is a protocol to make sure that what has been done so far is kind of. Permanently put in place, you know, so that we can build from this product and move forward.

Okay, number two, invest in active real-time measurement. So to make teamwork scientific, organizations need to be able to measure the outcomes of their actions and determine how changes in the inputs affect results. So one tool that the article recommends to use to measure and monitor people outcomes is a weekly or biweekly survey. This survey would ask things like, how are you feeling?

And people would then respond by clicking on one of, you know, maybe five emojis that says, I feel great or I feel terrible. The whole point is from these surveys, and they send them to different, you know, colleague groups. They send them to senior leaders, new hires, data scientists, editors, whatever the groups are that make up this particular project team.

And if there's a specific group then that's starting to slump, and again, they know that by looking at these survey emojis, they can start targeting programming, offering more support, offering additional learning classes or more coaching, whatever it might be. And they call these engagement team surveys or ETSs. They do those every one to two weeks. So the action plan here is to define what constitutes success, number one.

This could be any number of things, any metric that you want to measure, increased revenue. Improved employee experience, capability building. The recent project that I worked on, we're looking at decrease in one-year turnover for new hires. It's an onboarding program, whatever it might be. Then build digital systems to track those metrics with as little disruption as possible to the team's day-to-day work.

So sending out a survey at the end of every week that has someone put, you know, one little click on an emoji is not very difficult, right? Takes 30 seconds or less. And then finally, use those systems to learn what combinations of inputs lead to better outcomes.

Number three, and finally, create a system for continuous improvement and innovation. Now, continuous improvement, this idea is not novel, but what McKinsey has done is pretty interesting. Now, I'm not saying that every company could do this by any means, but what they've done is interesting. To facilitate continuous learning at McKinsey, they've created a WayWeWork Center of Excellence.

It's a centralized group of 14 full-time employees who are responsible for driving the WWW or the WayWeWork operating system. They also experiment with innovative practices, and they monitor the relevant flows of data to improve the ways that the teams work at McKinsey. And the center can then step in if a team is struggling. So, the action plan there, you know, might be, might look like this.

Identify the metrics that matter most, hypothesize which actions could improve performance in those areas, and then embed technologies in the operating systems to enable continuous improvement. It's important, too, to remember that teams need to be able to make their own improvements, something that requires a lot of transparency and trust between leaders and managers. It also requires an operating system that's flexible enough for team members to easily adapt in real time.

Continuous improvement can occur only when all perspectives are considered and all teams have access to a centralized knowledge repository. And finally, the article says it may be useful to set up a center of excellence staffed with full-time employees with experience in analytics and operating system design. Of course, that might be a stretch for a lot of companies, but there's at least a team of people who own this process. I think that's the main point.

Organizations that embrace the three principles that they've laid out here in this article will find that a feedback loop develops in which everything from learning to employees to clients to performance is all connected. And admittedly, this approach to teamwork requires some resources, time, and accountability from senior leaders, but the investment can yield substantial rewards.

Our research has shown that executives are five times as productive when working in high-performing teams as they are in average ones. And experience has shown that the most expensive team is the one that is struggling. Hopefully you found some good ideas, maybe sparked some interest here in trying to figure out a better way to have your teams collaborate. And until we meet next time in the Manager Lab, do good work. Thank you.