Whether to save your life or your business, a good team is essential. However, researchers exploring the trials and triumphs of teams in some high-profile crises showed that a failure to build teaming skills before they were needed made it impossible to pull together a highly-functioning team when circumstances demanded it.
The researchers studied team behaviour in three diverse situations – fire-fighting, space exploration and mountain-climbing. They looked at the Mann Gulch forest fire of 1949, when 12 U.S. smokejumpers died in a blaze in Mann Gulch, Montana; the Apollo 13 mission of 1970 – a moon-landing that turned threatening when one of the oxygen tanks in the service module exploded –; and the 1996 Mount Everest climb, when eight climbers died after a severe storm trapped them as they were descending from the summit.
In their paper, “One-Teaming: Gaining a Competitive Edge through Rapid Team Formation and Deployment,” Gerard Seijts, Associate Professor of Organizational Behaviour, and Jeffrey Gandz, Professor and Managing Director of Program Design in Executive Development, at the Richard Ivey School of Business, outline the values and behaviours that help teams to thrive.
Seijts and Gandz coined the term “one-teaming” to describe how successful teams are created, led and managed, and their paper explains how managers can develop a culture of “one-teaming” in their firms.
They reveal how one-teaming helped flight controllers bring the crew safely home during the Apollo 13 mission. They also point out how the absence of one-teaming contributed to the Mann Gulch and Mount Everest tragedies and potentially even the 2008 financial market crisis.
“One-teaming gives organizations the opportunity to meld high-performers from various functional or organizational backgrounds to form well-functioning teams when they are needed,” says Seijts. “The ability to create ‘instant’, highly effective teams that can take on a challenge is a source of competitive advantage.”
The researchers outline four qualities for one-teaming: team leadership, team composition, extensive practise as a coherent team and as a potential member of a team, and clear team norms around communication and process.
They also show how hiring practices, crisis simulations, debriefing exercises and a high-performance culture contribute to one-teaming in organizations.
“The saying, ‘People are our most important asset,’ has become a cliché that is rarely reflected in action. Leaders say one thing, but do another,” says Seijts. “Half-hearted approaches to organizational development are guaranteed to disappoint and fail. Organizational leaders need to build a high-performance cycle or culture that recognizes the value of one-teaming.”
The paper is published in the current edition of the journal Organizational Dynamics. The full paper can be viewed here.