Are Great Teams Less Productive?

April 23, 2007 from Harvard Business School – “Learning promotes performance—is there any argument? Without learning, organizations, teams, and managers are stuck in yesterday's world.

In fact, says Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, there are built-in tensions between learning and performance, which smart organizations must learn to recognize and deal with. For example, an organization that has just completed a learning initiative may see a drop in productivity, at least in the short term…”

180 View – From our vantage point, this Harvard Business School article is ‘right on the money’.

Like Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, Lawrence Young has often observed employees that are ‘…thoughtful, caring individuals that were stymied in their genuine desires to make a difference at work-that is, their desires to help make their organizations more effective and responsive’.

This is most disturbing, given that today’s workplaces are for the most part understaffed, and need to shrink further in order to remain competitive in today’s ever-changing world.

So what’s driving this unfortunate phenomenon? A simple question without as simple an answer!

The first reality is that study after study has shown that for the most part, North American business leaders do not embrace organizational change as readily as, say, their counterparts in Asia. This can largely be explained by the fact that organizational change is often painful-it’s disruptive, rarely goes according to plan, and costs are incurred upfront while benefits typically accrue well into the future. This creates significant tension when business leaders feel constant pressure from stakeholders to produce better and better short-term results.

The second reality, as the author’s research showed, is that changing from ‘what is’ to ‘what needs to be’ involves learning-‘…learning occurs in reaction to changes in the world that require brand new responses’. Furthermore, ‘…there is a natural relationship between learning and performance in a changing world. That is, performance cannot be sustained over time without learning, because yesterday’s performance is inadequate in today’s world. So, to maintain or improve performance, learning is required’.

So, if we accept the fact that learning is a fundamental component of change for the better, then we also must accept the fact that ‘even if we are learning the right things, there is a transition to get through’. And during the transition, we will inevitable have to deal with failure!

As the author states-‘…learning processes by their nature involve facing failures-problems, mistakes-head on. The presence of problems or mistakes doesn’t signal high performance to most people who might be watching’. As well, ‘in well-led teams, a climate of openness could make it easier to report and discuss errors-compared to teams with poor relationships or with punitive leaders’.

And thus the third reality which we must acknowledge is that most business leaders have a very low tolerance for failure. This is quite paradoxical, since these same leaders were often praised when they ‘failed’ as a student i.e. getting an ‘A’ in a course when you get a score of 80 % means that you ‘failed’ to answer 20 % correctly. Therefore, we are conditioned to believe that a certain degree of failure is acceptable when we are students, but much less so when we enter the typical workplace. But as the author states, ‘…if learning is about identifying error, in the short term, performance will appear to be weak (error ridden) while learning is occurring. At the very least, if learning involves trial and error, the error part does not resemble most people’s idea of good performance. So, they’re at odds’.

So, what does this all mean? In short, business leaders must accept the fact that while continual learning is necessary for an organization to remain successful in today’s quickly changing world, productivity will likely drop in the short term. In other words, there will assuredly be some “short-term pain for long-term gain”. In other words, there will likely be incremental costs incurred in the short-term with no corresponding benefit until the mid to long-term.

According to Lawrence, the key challenge that managers face during a change activity such as learning is to better understand what will occur during the transition, and set realistic expectations for all participants, including corporate leaders. “After all” says Lawrence, “inconvenience is temporary, but progress is permanent-just ask any bodybuilder who feels pain as his muscle is being strengthened!”