Leading Teams Note

Jeffrey T. Polzer

Module Note | September 2009

Leading Teams Note

Abstract

This note, which describes the architecture and processes that characterize effective teams, begins by detailing the steps involved in designing a team, from diagnosing the complexity, interdependence, and objectives of the task to harnessing the key resources teams need from their environment. It describes the qualities to search for when selecting team members, including finding the right number of people, individual skills along both technical and interpersonal dimensions, and a mix of skills appropriate for the task. Once the team is designed, team leaders and members need to shape and monitor team processes, starting with the team launch. Describes how to diagnose emergent team processes such as information exchange, collaboration, decision making, impression formation, and underlying identity dynamics. Includes steps managers can take to improve dysfunctional team processes such as restructuring and shaping the social forces within the team. Ends with a discussion of bridging differences in teams across both geographic and cultural divides.

Keywords: Interpersonal Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Choices and Conditions; Knowledge Sharing; Leadership; Business Processes; Groups and Teams;

Format: Print

9 pages

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Citation:

Polzer, Jeffrey T. "Leading Teams Note." Harvard Business School Module Note 410-051, September 2009.

We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to pre-pandemic levels, increases in the number of meetings per person (+12.9 percent) and the number of attendees per meeting (+13.5 percent), but decreases in the average length of meetings (-20.1 percent). Collectively, the net effect is that people spent less time in meetings per day (-11.5 percent) in the post-lockdown period. We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2 percent, or +48.5 minutes), along with short-term increases in email activity. These findings provide insight from a novel dataset into how the nature of work has changed for a large sample of knowledge workers. We discuss these changes in light of the ongoing challenges faced by organizations and workers struggling to adapt and perform in the face of a global pandemic.

Ment.io was a software platform that used proprietary data analytics technology to help organizations make informed and transparent decisions based on team input. Ment was born out of founder Joab Rosenberg’s frustration that, while organizations collected ever increasing amounts of data, the information gathering process did not capture human insights, which he viewed as critical to the use of the data. In early 2020, Rosenberg felt that the company he had started five years ago was taking off, but he wondered how to manage the team’s limited engineering resources to help Ment stand out in a crowded software market. Should the company improve Ment’s user interface, develop new features, or focus on its innovative algorithm?

This is a supplement to the “People Analytics at Teach For America (A)” case. In this supplement, Managing Director Michael Metzger must decide how to extend his team’s predictive analytics work.

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