Caption. Ivan Krylov’s Fable of the Swan, Pike, and Crawfish; a dysfunctional team.**
It’s an eternal question , why some teams do well and others fail. Is it luck or circumstance, personality, leadership, or urgency, nature or nurture?
All of these, none of these?
Some of my work teams would take off and soar far above others. I try to explain this phenomenon in my classes by exploring the team theory espoused by Katzenbach and Smith, by discussing Tuckman’s “form, storm, norm, perform” and by introducing the students to Kurt Lewin’s studies on democratic leadership of groups.
And, I interweave the notion of leaderless teams, the idea that shared leadership can help a team realize its potential.
Still, it seems that teams fail much more easily than succeed.
I’ve put together teams with good quality staff but the team functions poorly, rarely challenging the status quo or coming up with creative solutions.
Why is that?
What’s missing?
There’s research that claims to have found the lodestone for what makes a good team, something called “Factor C” or “collective intelligence”. “Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others explains the new theory.
“C” is a predictor of group failure or success and includes three elements:
participant emotional or social IQ;
the number of engaged participants; and, interestingly, the number of women on the team.
Here’s an explanatory quote:
“(T)he smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.
First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.
Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states ….
Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. … This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at ‘mindreading’ than men.”
Now, keep in mind, C or collective intelligence is a predictor of team success on group tasks performed in a laboratory setting. Six hundred and ninety seven participants (N=697) were randomly assigned into teams of 2 to 5 people. The tasks to be “solved” included brainstorming on the uses of a brick; answering Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices questions; dealing with the complexity of a disciplinary cases study, and planning a group shopping expedition, along with a couple other tasks.
Statistically, the groups with the highest collective intelligence – the highest C score – performed best of all.
A big plus for this research, at least in my book, is that these teams had to achieve quantifiable results – the research was more about achieving goals than it was about how happy team members were with each other.
I emphasize this because sometimes we think that a happy team is a productive team. That is rarely the case. I recall an organization that was convinced its teams were the best because team members felt good about each other – no productivity figures were kept. It was as if expecting improved results – faster, better, more innovation and higher production – were repulsive concepts. For me, an effective team has to improve on what it does – group feelings may be important but not as important as group productivity.
As expected, some believe C is “mumbo-jumbo” and has little to do with real world teams, teams that have to do real work.
One business consultant says all that good teams need is “checking-in”, a quick process to clear the decks of hidden agenda, bad vibes, etc. Each member’s revealing what’s “eating his lunch”, results in increased honesty and respect among participants; from there good work can be done.
Then there are the die-hard Myers–Briggs Type Indicator test proponents. Apparently, this vastly popular personality test is used by organization to assemble teams, supposedly well-balanced and diverse teams which anecdotally are better than teams selected on participant IQ or other criteria. There’s no evidence that stocking your teams with certain personality types gets better results than randomly assigning someone to a team.
So far, the research on C appears to offer us some useful insights into teamwork, why some team get the job done while others spin their wheels.
* An earlier version of this essay, entitled Good Teams: What’s the Secret? appeared on my blog in 2015. With this reposting, I am doing more testing of the new platform for Leading from the Middle. So far, it’s been a struggle. Few if any of the recommended “plug ins” can be installed; there’s always an error message, AND, always a nudge that I should subscribe to the “premium” version of the plug in.
**Here is what I had to say in 2016 about the pike, swan and crawfish dysfunction:
“No doubt, there’s an easy solution: a kick-ass leader to bring this transfixed trio in line! Yes, a muleteer’s whip would get the job done, but why do not the swan, pike and crab cooperate? Do they (and us) always need to be told what to do?
Had they cooperated, the metaphoric cart would have moved on. Probably Krylov’s point is that some people are never going to cooperate, “without accord”; hence “the load is there unto this very day.”
While we all offer different talents in a group effort, it makes good sense to establish Role and Purpose, two quintessential rules for group development. When work groups were at odds, I saw our organization’s cart bog down. Neither collaboration compromise nor consensus was possible, leaving outcomes purely to chance. Who to cut the Gordian knot?
I just heard about a not too distant international city with 5 boroughs, each with its own public library system. None cooperate; they all stand alone. The unnamed country has a literacy rate approaching 99.9% so these five libraries would see increased use (a desirable) were they to cooperate, pool resources, and create a single library card for readers.
Predictably, these library systems will be forced to consolidate and the readers and the libraries will be the worse for it. It’s like the s-shaped curve. When you are on the rise (daffodils a-bloom and skies are blue), that’s when you should be looking for the next upward curve, the next big improvement. When you are on the declining slope, it’s too late; you’ll have settle for whatever someone on the outside hands you and that’s only if they want to.”
—————
And for my book of fables (cover above) tied to leadership and the workplace, a 25% discount to celebrate the blog’s move to a new platform: Link HERE to BUY
And, my book (cover above) on democratic workplaces and what leaders can do with limited resources and unlimited imagination, Leading from the Middle, is available at Amazon.</a>
N.B. For other essays on this and numerous other topics go to my Nucleus archive from 2010-early 2025.
Copyright all text John Lubans 2023 and 2025
© John Lubans 2015 & 2025