Superteams: When Technology Becomes A Teammate

Preparing for the inevitable

A recent white paper from the consultancy Deloitte titled Global Human Capital Trends discusses the advent of Superteams: when technology goes beyond mere enabling and becomes a working member of the team. Superteams will see humans and machines “leveraging their complementary capabilities to pursue outcomes at a speed and scale not otherwise possible.” 
 

Superteam tech won’t be plug and play. To become the superteams of tomorrow, today’s typical teams must shed cherished notions and adopt new ones. It will be a while before superteams become commonplace, but they’ll be here sooner than most realize. We must be ready.

The Team Tech Trap

The pandemic provided insights into the issues of integrating teams and technology. Those lessons serve as a starting point to avoid similar traps when AI joins our teams.

Tech gurus peddled Slack, Teams, and other collaboration platforms promising they would take teamwork to new levels. The ability to collaborate from multiple locations was a boon during the Covid crisis. But attending meetings from our dining rooms while teammates watched us shoo our cats (or kids) away didn’t make for better teams. Third-rate teams before Covid-19 only became third-rate virtual teams. 

The same is bound to happen when AI becomes part of the team. Problems of low trust, botched hand-offs, and incomplete information sharing won’t disappear. All the flaws and glitches in how a team is established, led, and operated will transfer to the new AI-inclusive team. AI will start learning all the wrong lessons at warp speed. 

Before rushing into the next generation of teamwork tech, the underlying human components of the team must be working optimally. Unfortunately, there are bugs in how people think about teams. Until we correct those flawed bits of mental code, nothing we layer on top of them will run effectively.

Teams and Teaminess

Teamwork has become romanticized: posters extoling teamwork depict rowers silhouetted against a setting sun or skydivers holding hands as they plummet through the vast blue. 

Now consider typical team building events like rope courses and escape rooms where participants seek to recreate the magic framed in those 24x30 prints. Teams pursue the fleeting afterglow I call “teaminess,” when in their post-event exhilaration, they can picture themselves smiling out of one of those dramatic posters. 

We are told such team outings will lead to speedier decision making, improved problem solving, and stronger innovation. Unfortunately, there is not a ropes course or virtual scavenger hunt that can deliver on these claims. People may get along better for a week or two but there will be no sustained change in team effectiveness. 

Teams planning to adopt AI must let go of the feel-good fantasies that reinforce teaminess. Instead, they must understand and solve for the true obstacles to collaboration.

The Real Barrier to Teamwork

Conventional team building focuses on enhancing trust and respect but research I helped conduct at Mars, Inc. found those things aren’t really the problem. Paradoxically, we found that team members usually failed to collaborate because of how much they trusted and respected themselves as individuals. When we asked them to explain why they hadn’t asked colleagues for help, what we heard was, “No need. I got this!” 

The almost 500 people we interviewed reported plenty of respect and trust for their colleagues. They saw teammates as highly competent, capable of getting their work done. Behind the respect for self and others was a robust individual drive to achieve, and a deep satisfaction from taking personal responsibility and delivering on commitments.  

The challenge was getting results-focused, achievement-oriented team members to involve others. In the end, the solution was rather simple. My colleagues and I created a process for teams to structure their work so collaboration felt like another achievement. 

The results have been impressive with key indicators like net sales, profitability and engagement going up. This modest little piece of neural programming forms the basis of what I now call the team operating system or team OS. 

Teams as Human Tech

Think of collaboration as a human technology with multiple components interacting to produce outcomes. 
 

• Team members
• Strategy
• Plans
• Processes like meetings, decision making, etc.

Teams require an underlying set of instructions or decision guides for how these components will interact. The team OS achieves this in three steps, hacking into team members’ inherent drive to achieve. 
 

• Purpose: Teams create a compelling purpose – a statement of the potential value of their collaboration and why it matters. 
• Shared work: Teams identify specific work they must share to deliver on the value expressed in their purpose. 
• Contracting: Focusing on the collaborative work, team members contract with one another for what each of them will be accountable for within the collaboration. 

These initial instructions of the team OS move us away from teamwork as mindset or attitude and towards specific tasks to be achieved, held accountable, and recognized for. Once a team has these three steps down, they use them to streamline team processes like meetings and decision making. 

By adopting this concept of an OS, teams regardless of function can do team building that leads to improved operations and ultimately better outcomes. When AI joins their teams, its machine learning will operate in optimal circumstances, learning the right lessons and creating a QO-QO situation. Quality in, quality out. 

Preparing for the Inevitable

If AI were to join our teams tomorrow, we couldn’t expect immediate improvements. The use of collaboration platforms during the pandemic has proven that. Stale approaches to team building wouldn’t make the union of people and technology better. We must onboard virtual team members by providing clear information on what our team is all about, what’s important, how we operate, and why. Even if superteams aren’t in the near future, adopting the team OS now will improve how our teams work. And it will have the added benefit of preparing us for the day when advanced technology will have a seat at the table as a full, collaborating contributor.

Carlos Valdes-Dapena is a renowned speaker, bestselling author, and corporate leader with 30 years of experience in collaboration innovation at organizations including Mars, Inc. and IBM. As the Founder and Managing Principal of Corporate Collaboration Resources, Carlos uses his expertise in organizational development to guide businesses into implementing effective and lasting change. Carlos is an engaging speaker who helps audiences rethink team building and break new ground. divulging his research-based high-performance guidelines to deliver actionable results. Carlos is the author of Virtual Teams: Holding the Center When You Can’t Meet Face-to-Face, and his previous bestseller, Lessons From Mars: How Old Global Company Cracked the Code on High-Performance Collaboration. Connect Carlos Valdes-Dapena