Teamwork and creativity

"we stay in our companies because we love working in a team" Professor Lynda Gratton

The In Business program on BBC Radio 4 this week talked about building good teams. Creativity, it seems, can be something built into the structure of corporations, thanks to the types of teams that they employ.

Mark Squires, director of Social Communications, Nokia, told how he had been set free to meet everyone in the whole company in his first two weeks of employment there, before settling in whichever department he felt most comfortable in. This extraordinary personality driven system of employment has some distinct advantages.

Although in the first two weeks he felt a bit lost, subsequently communication was made a lot easier for Squires as he would communicate to people he had got to know personally, throughout the corporation. And he didn't need to pluck up courage to speak to head management because from the start they were on first name terms. After the two weeks he had decided to make his home in one department because he found he fitted in well there.

Fitting in well isn't always the best strategy for creativity. Think tanks are best inpersonal affairs. You might be asked whether socialising over tea and buscuits prior to deliberations is best. But the answer would be no - people will have started making character judgements of each other and this clouds rational problemsolving and genuinely independent thought, as people may start siding with one person or siding against another. Obviously with corporations you are dealing with a different time span and such strategy to avoid people developing preconceptions and couldn't possibly work in a team over any great length of time.

The next interesting fact came from Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practise at the London Business School. Apparently research has shown that mixed sex teams are more creative and productive than single sex teams, though I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Gratton has studied Goldman Sacks and Google to see how they get the best out of team work. All strong corporate teams, she found, had three things in common amongst members. Firstly all members were willing to cooperate together, all had differing ideas, and all shared a common mission - a problem that all members were excited to solve. Google alow their employees 20% of their time outside of their own teams, working on other projects inside the company that spark their interest. This way they get some extra-motivated team members coming along 1 day a week to add some fresh ideas that may have been born in completly different parts of the company.

Cooperative mode!

Gratton says; "people are naturally co-operative, and what's happened in organisations is we've put an overlay of competition that completely destroys the humanness of being in a team and the pleasure of working...  We stay in our companies because we love working in a team, and we leave them because we hate working in that team."

Talking about Nokia's success in the massive Chinese market, Gratton says that they employed an international team of passionate users, rather than a chinese team because they would bring the greatest diversity of ideas and mind sets ideas to the table, which encouraged the most creative thinking and creative thinking creates the best product.

Innovation doesn't come from the experts, says Gratton. It is when you have a clash of ideas.  When someone from another part of the company comes along and has a completely different way of thinking about a problem and can suggest a different solution.  In this light, one can see that the way Mark Squire was introduced to the company makes a huge amount of sense.