Collaboration and teams

Chris Paul has been in the NBA for two decades and has had a storied individual career. But one stat sets him apart: Four times he has joined a new team, and each time that team has posted, within two years, its best record ever. No other player has had that kind of impact. It’s now known as the Chris Paul effect.

Paul might be unique in NBA history, but most of us have encountered people like him: teammates who make everyone around them better, combining each member’s unique strengths into a sort of cognitive superorganism that accomplishes what no one could do alone. Let’s call these people super-facilitators.

In recent years, a new wave of research has revolutionized our understanding of group success, and it showcases facilitators as much more than just talented team members. If the supercommunicators described by the best-selling author Charles Duhigg help people understand one another optimally, super-facilitators are architects of group performance who bring people together optimally. Super-facilitators integrate diverse expertise, promote equitable contributions, and cultivate trust. In doing so they generate collective intelligence, or a group’s ability to reason, innovate, and solve problems. They are often team leaders but can also be teammates—like Paul—who bring out the best in their peers.

One of the most important findings of the author’s work is that super-facilitating is a skill, not just a trait. That’s good news, because it means not only that people who are already natural super-facilitators can be identified and empowered but also that anybody can be trained to become one.

The Team as Superorganism.  You might assume that brilliant teams are made up of brilliant individuals. The data says otherwise. In Woolley’s research, supergroups did not consist of especially talented individuals but rather of those with a “meta-talent” for organizing themselves based on each person’s skills and trust in one another. Super-facilitators optimize these synthetic strengths.  This new insight differs from the “wisdom of crowds”—the idea that the average of people’s answers to a given question will tend to be correct. Collective intelligence doesn’t average people’s differences. It integrates them like the organs and limbs of a superorganism, each with its own specialty. Rather than duplicating effort, intelligent teams form transactive systems, in which each member holds on to the information they know best, pays attention to dimensions of a problem they understand deeply, and brainstorms solutions based on their own expertise.  But here’s the key: To generate collective intelligence and harness its power, team members have to understand and believe in one another.

Facilitator Superpowers.  If collective intelligence harnesses the brainpower of a team, super-facilitators serve as the team’s frontal lobe, orchestrating roles, enabling smooth interactions, and building trust.  How do they do it? Researchers have identified three main ways:  Attunement.  Communication.  Distribution.  

Empowering Teams for the Long Term.  In “founder mode,” leaders use the people on their teams to realize their own vision. Super-facilitators, on the other hand, empower the people on their teams to imagine and create a shared vision.  In a study directive leaders had the edge at first. Their teams moved fast and hit benchmarks. But over time the empowered teams pulled ahead. They solved harder problems and generated more-original ideas.

If a leader knows exactly what needs to happen, and needs it done yesterday, a command-and-control approach can work. But when it comes to long-term vision, problem-solving, or innovation, one person seldom has all the answers. Great leaders create the conditions for everyone to contribute—and then they spark collective intelligence by letting everybody work on big problems together. They create spaces for collaboration and creativity.  

Any organization can amplify the brilliance of their own teams. Here are three tactics that can help you get started.  Learn and play to each person’s strengths.  Communicate your beliefs in others.  And keep the ball moving.

show less