The Trouble with Team Projects

Team Cohesion Improves Team Performance

I used to dread “group-work” in high school. I’m sure you all know what I’m referring to – our teachers would force us to “team-up” with 3 other students to collaborate on a small group project. It was expected that this quartet of misfits would bond through shared experience, put their heads together, share the work-load equally, and come up with a product that was greater than the sum of the parts. In theory, this sounds like a fantastic team building experience – in reality, this process was doomed to failure.  Here’s what usually happened:

• awkward silence, as the group stares blankly at people they rarely associate with, let alone work with.
• everyone sits around and acts too cool to do the work, knowing that this group project is worth 30% of their final grade.
• one of us takes a stab at the work, while the others sit around and scratch their heads.
• being completely mismatched and given no instruction on how to work together effectively, the group begins to panic as the deadline approaches.
• finally, in desperation, ‘the smart one’ in the group decides to just do the work on their own.
• the rest of the group takes credit for the end result.

Ironically, I now work with small groups who are often put together with very little thought to how well they fit, and are expected to share the workload equally. Having the benefit of successfully implemented many teambuilding sessions, I now know what was missing back in high school.  Many teachers, while well-meaning with their intentions, simply lacked the pre-requisite knowledge of team dynamics to effectively implement a “group project.”

Here is what I have learned, and many of them were missing:

• groups that are thrown together without some sort of formal team building exercise are generally less inclined to become a cohesive team.
• students are usually in competition with one another for grades and class ranking (think of the “bell curve” of grading), and do not generally transition easily from competition to cooperation.  Thus, the group project is an anomoly in the classroom.
• trusting the members of the group is one of the fundamentals of effective teamwork.  If you know you can count on others, you are more likely to risk your ideas, and listen to someone else.
• trust is easier to gain initially than it is to regain once it has been broken.  It is, therefore, important for a leader (in this case, the teacher) to provide opportunities for that trust to be built.
• even a simple name game or other “deinhibitizing” activity can get things rolling with team cohesion.

The similarities between group projects in high school and project management teams in an adult organizational work setting are sometimes uncanny.  A fair number of teams go through the same painful process of inneffective communication and poor performance, lacking the same pre-requisite skillset as their high school counterparts.

We’ll explore simple techniques for developing team cohesion and preparing for more effective team performance in our next blog entry.  Stay tuned!