Jerry Cahn, PhD., JD., CEO & CLO of AgeBrilliantly.org, enables businesses to empower workers to lead productive, fulfilling lives.
Over a decade ago, General Stanley McChrystal introduced a new framework for organizations that want to thrive in a complex world. He called it a Team of Teams. As we envision how our businesses will adapt to the “future of work” in the 2030s, one approach is to recognize that future success will depend on our ability to build and maintain powerful, high-performing teams within our organizations.
Current demographic shifts indicate that companies in the 2030s and thereafter will have workforces with a greater proportion of older workers who want to work productively past “traditional retirement age” while fewer young people are entering the workplace. To be successful and competitive in a constantly changing world that relies on human and digital labor (i.e., AI and automation), companies need strong multi-cultural and multi-generational collaborative teams.
The time to start planning for that future is now. Experience with corporate and sports teams shows that assembling a roster of individual superstars does not guarantee winning. Time and again, collections of high-performing individuals are outperformed by less celebrated members of teams who combine their strengths through effective communication and coordination.
Great teams are built by forging high-performance, collective teams. This was demonstrated by Google’s Project Aristotle research project, and a study by Woolley, et al. which found that a collective intelligence factor was not strongly correlated with individual group members’ intelligence. In sports, this can be seen in the Florida Marlins’ victory over the star-studded New York Yankees in the 2003 World Series, despite the Marlins’ much smaller payroll.
Operationalizing ‘Collaboration’
Dr. Jamie Shapiro notes that “collaboration is the cooperative process in which two or more people work together toward a shared goal, sharing their collective expertise, resources and efforts.” It isn’t just working in the same group. It involves interdependence to achieve high-level outcomes that could not be accomplished individually. It takes focus, intention and effort at both team and organizational levels.
His conclusion is based on the Harvard Business Review study “Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams,” by Lynda Gratton and Tamara J. Erickson. It examined cross-department collaboration of 55 large teams within 15 multinational companies to understand how teams can overcome natural barriers to collaboration. They found that when teams concentrate on three key elements—team support, accountability and excellence—they foster “shared knowledge, continuous learning, increased agility, greater innovation and more effective achievement of complex business goals.”
Team support refers to the willingness and consistency of people to go beyond their roles to aid their colleagues with information sharing, social support and task support to help one another succeed. Most useful is understanding other people’s strengths, since that empowers you to lean on one another.
Accountability means holding each other responsible for expected performance in a fair and consistent manner. It builds on ownership, taking responsibility, continuous learning for improvement and interpersonal relationships. It is forward-looking. In contrast, blame is backward-facing, focusing on fault and tends to shut down learning.
Excellence sets a standard that drives high-performance; it rejects mediocrity and stimulates learning. Teams can create cultures with rituals, norms and behaviors that encourage excellence in processes and results. The key is to empower people to not seek perfection but strive for excellence, which is achieved by learning from success and failure, according to Amy Edmonson’s study on psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Together, they form a more powerful teacher that can unleash greater effort and produce higher performance. As O.C. Tanner’s research on organizations with integrated recognition program demonstrated, these programs are a major performance multiplier.
A Systems Challenge
Today’s workplace is being reshaped by countless factors—from AI and automation to demographic shifts, changing employee expectations, new business models, hybrid work and accelerating technological change.
Nearly every future-of-work challenge—from leadership development and employee engagement to knowledge transfer, organizational design and workforce planning—can be traced back to these forces.
Most organizations respond by treating each trend as a separate initiative. HR develops a talent strategy; IT launches AI tools; Operations redesigns processes; and Learning creates new training programs. Each department works hard within its own domain. The problem is that these initiatives are often optimized independently rather than designed to work together.
Research consistently shows that optimizing individual parts rarely optimize the whole. Just as a sports team filled with superstars can lose to a team of well-coordinated players, organizations don’t become future-ready by creating high-performing departments. They become future-ready by creating high-performing organizations in which every function works toward the same strategic objectives.
McKinsey’s research on AI illustrates this principle well. Organizations that deploy AI through isolated departmental initiatives often struggle to produce meaningful enterprise value. The greatest returns come when AI is implemented as part of an enterprise-wide transformation—with leadership, governance, redesigned workflows and a strategy that aligns the entire organization.
Harnessing The Holistic Power Of Workers
AI has two sides. Machines are the automation-side of AI; call it MAI. While MAI performs automation, research and related tasks “faster and better,” workers can focus on improving their unique human capabilities, especially the capacity to engage in high-performance teams. Call this side of the AI-coin Augmentative Intelligence (HAI). These human skills include curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration.
If we invest as much energy and time in advancing HAI as we now do with MAI, we can expect both sides of AI to compound and usher in a new era for us all.
We’ve learned that fragmented organizational adoption of MAI is less effective than strategic enterprise-wide adoption of MAI when it comes to speed and quality of impact. By analogy, we should expect that holistic adoption of HAI by workers will create higher-performance teams producing superior outcomes.
For leaders who want their companies to thrive in the 2030s and beyond, now is the time to start planning multi-year transformations that can unleash both sides of the AI coin. Reimagine your work future. Think “synergistic alignment” to maximize time and energy. Develop the MAI support systems that Operations, Sales, Marketing, etc., needed for efficient and effective services for customers and investors. Simultaneously, develop the HAI support systems that unleash the worker and leadership capabilities, so you have powerful, empowered high-performance teams.
You hold the two-sided coin. Invest in people and systems and reap the rewards. Are you up to the challenge?