The Self-Expanding Team

I greatly enjoy watching high-performing teams, in all walks of life. Watching a team function at such a level is like watching a choreographed dance. I recently watched the local hockey team playing at home, and they were a great example of this seemingly effortless efficiency. The team functioned so well that you might be tempted to assume the whole game was a carefully rehearsed act. There were certainly conflicts (it was hockey, after all), but the individuals on the team seemed to function as a single unit in pursuit of its goal.

It takes a lot of practice to get to the point where people can work together efficiently. Unfortunately, high-performing teams seem to be all too uncommon, and teams that can sustain their high performance over a long period are almost non-existent. So how does a team achieve a high-level of performance and sustain it for the long term?

A New York Times article⁽¹⁾ that I recently re-read a few days ago on sustaining human relationships -- in particular, marriages -- caused me to revisit this idea.

The article reminded me of a high-performing team I had the good fortune to work with years ago.  The team had been incredibly successful for a long time, and members seemed to be almost selfless in their support of each other. The sports analogy would be a team with a high number of assists, fairly evenly distributed amongst the team members. The article suggests that the success I saw might be explained by the self-expansion model⁽²⁾ of psychology, which says:

• People are motivated to increase their physical resources, social resources, knowledge, perspectives, and identities.
• People achieve this motivation by forming close relationships in which their partner's physical resources, social resources, knowledge, perspectives, and identities are treated to some extent as their own.

What this says is that people are self-interested beings, but that self-interest is partially satisfied by the knowledge and resources of his or her partner - or in the case of a member of the team, their teammates. If individuals on teams can begin to identify the skills of their team as their own, they see themselves as more valuable and capable as part of a team than individually.

Once team members can identify the skills of their team as their own, those individuals can support their own development by supporting the development of their team members. The more self-expansion a team member experiences, the more committed to and satisfied with his team he becomes. And it isn't unreasonable to expect that the team with these dedicated, high-performing, and satisfied individuals would be higher performing as a result.

So how do you support self-expansion on your team? Some things I have seen that seem to work include:
- Recognizing capabilities of the team, rather than of individuals.
- Supporting collaboration.
- Helping individuals establish personal goals to improve themselves, and help the team support the individual in achieving those goals.
- For software teams, minimizing technical debt so the team can work on more new and exciting things, as opposed to bugs and maintenance tasks.
- And finally, ensuring your teams have established methods for dealing with stress and conflict to prevent motivational erosion that comes after a team has been together for a long time.

The above might help you develop teams that support each member's desire for self-expansion to help create meaningful, satisfying and sustainable jobs, for committed team members, on sustainable high-performing teams. Teams that you would actually enjoy watching work.

What ideas do you have for nurturing self-expansion on your teams?

References
1. Sustainable Love: The Happy Marriage Is the ‘Me’ Marriage, NY Times, Dec 31, 2010
2. Aron, A., Norman, C.C., Aron, E.N., Lewandowski, G. (2002). Shared participation in self-expanding activities: Positive effects on experienced marital quality. In J.A. Feeney and P. Noller (Eds.), Understanding Marriage: Developments in the Study of Couple Interaction (pp. 177-194). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.