Feel like your company or team is ‘broken’?

Any of the following resonate with you, or your situation?

• People struggle to communicate and work in siloes

• Strategies mysteriously fail to deliver expected outcomes, often resulting in lots of meetings and conversation across senior and middle management with little to demonstrate

• Metrics stubbornly refuse to move up and to the right, no matter how much we bring focus to them

If you have managed teams for any amount of time you will definitely have been in this situation - this post is based on my experiences as a consultant working with multiple organisations over my career, as well as conversations with other leaders.

So what’s next? We need to step back, take a breath and dig in. And we need to stop doing the things that aren’t working.

Let’s take a look at some simple models of culture and co-operation, and see what we can learn by applying them to the situation you are in right now. 

One of the key mechanisms that enable and sustain co-operation is called ‘Group Selection’. We are going to focus on the role of group selection in digital product and engineering organisations.

Group selection is a mechanism for co-operation that relies on competition and selection between sub-groups.

Examples always help me understand this stuff, so let’s work through one.

Imagine a large organisation responsible for a complex web application, split into subgroups - maybe one group focussed on Shopping Cart, another on the Stock, another on the Checkout and so on. Each group may have multiple teams within it. 

As the organisation grows, teams  that co-operate both as individuals and within the wider organisation will have success. Success will result in more responsibility and resources being  given to groups doing well. Practices and culture of strong performing teams will also be replicated, resulting in a better organisation.

• Compensation based primarily on individual performance (as oppose to rewarding successful teams and collaboration)

• Goal setting is based purely on identifying individual initiatives with no benefit to others

• Promotion based on primarily doing work *outside* of your primary job role

Take a moment to review those incentives. What do you think the result is going to be?

In a group an individual can choose be a:

1. Co-operator: someone who chooses to work for the benefit of the group, at some personal cost 

2. Defector: someone who chooses to go against the norms of the group in the hope that it will lead to better individual outcomes

Given the presence of the incentives above, which do you think individual staff members would choose? Defector, right? Because how many of those incentives require co-operation? How many of them would actually be harder if you chose to co-operate?

And if a group contains multiple defectors, as rational as their individual choices might be, the outcome for the group will be negative in terms of results and performance. We’ll see how this impacts Group Selection after a quick detour into…

Aside from individual incentives, organisations may have informal cultural incentives in place that again will reduce co-operation:

• Individuals are rewarded for pointing out where things are broken and who is responsible, as oppose to being rewarded for working together with others fixing things. The incentive to not co-operate with others is therefore rewarded.

• Failure is not tolerated in practice and the result of failure so negative that individuals in failing teams will defect early to avoid being held responsible (‘it was them! not me!’), with the result that teams perceived as failing will have a very low chance of returning to a co-operative culture.

I am sure you can think of other examples.

So what happens now?

Positive outcomes from group selection rely on competition and selection between groups to improve co-operation. You can enable it by putting the right mechanisms in place:

Group selection models show us that cooperation between teams is increased if:

• The benefits of cooperation to the individuals and the group are connected and high.

• The size of teams is small relative to the number of teams.

By changing incentives you can enable group selection to take place:

• Splitting employees into small teams that compete against one another.

• Allocating bonuses and opportunities based on team performance creates the possibility for inducing cooperative behaviour. 

• Rewarding high performing teams with resources meaning individuals have incentives to work well within those teams, to co-operate, and are more likely to be copied by others.

• Rewarding high-performing teams for supporting teams that are not performing as well.

• Rewarding low-performing teams with extra coaching and support. Don’t punish, listen and understand.

• Use data and outcomes to measure teams. Don’t play favourites, or encourage back channels. Publish team performance and ensure it has context from the team (i.e ‘we have had a tough quarter in delivery optimisation, having to upgrade multiple legacy systems means we didn’t meet out initial objectives - here’s what we plan next’).

To shift towards using group selection as a mechanism to improve your overall outcomes start by:

1. Review and correct the formal incentives you have put in place at an individual and team level

2. Understand and correct the informal cultural incentives that are in place stopping co-operation taking place

3. Put in effective mechanisms to encourage emulation of high-performing teams

If you want to read more about why individual motivations and their impact on groups, and see the studies and science backing up the above, start with “Model Thinking” by Scott E Page, or read about ‘The Prisoner’s Dilemma’ to understand more about a simple model of individual motivation.