This a duplicated article from the Harvard Business Journal from April 2012. It is written by Alex “Sandy” Pentland and it is still relevant today.
The
ideal team player.
We can also measure individuals against an
ideal. In both productivity-focused and creativity-focused teams, we have
discovered the data signature of what we consider the best type of team member.
Some might call these individuals “natural leaders.” We call them “charismatic
connectors.” Badge data show that these people circulate actively, engaging
people in short, high-energy conversations. They are democratic with their
time—communicating with everyone equally and making sure all team members get a
chance to contribute. They’re not necessarily extroverts, although they feel
comfortable approaching other people. They listen as much as or more than they
talk and are usually very engaged with whomever they’re listening to. We call
it “energized but focused listening.”
The best team players also connect their
teammates with one another and spread ideas around. And they are appropriately
exploratory, seeking ideas from outside the group but not at the expense of
group engagement. In a study of executives attending an intensive one-week
executive education class at MIT, we found that the more of these charismatic
connectors a team had, the more successful it was. Team building is indeed a science, but it’s
young and evolving. Now that we’ve established patterns of communication as the
single most important thing to measure when gauging the effectiveness of a
group, we can begin to refine the data and processes to create
more-sophisticated measurements, dig deeper into the analysis, and develop new
tools that sharpen our view of team member types and team types.
The sensors that enable this science are
evolving as well. As they enter their seventh generation, they’re becoming as
small and unobtrusive as traditional ID badges, while the amount and types of
data they can collect are increasing. We’ve begun to experiment with apps that
present teams and their leaders with real-time feedback on group
communications. And the applications for the sensors are expanding beyond the
team to include an ever-broader set of situations.
We imagine a company’s entire staff wearing badges over an extended period of time, creating “big data” in which we’d find the patterns for everything from team building to leadership to negotiations to performance reviews. We imagine changing the nature of the space we work in, and maybe even the tools we use to communicate, on the basis of the data. We believe we can vastly improve long-distance work and cross-cultural teams, which are so crucial in a global economy, by learning their patterns and adjusting them. We are beginning to create what I call the “God’s-eye view” of the organization. But spiritual as that may sound, this view is rooted in evidence and data. It is an amazing view, and it will change how organizations work.
