Looping: How It Can Increase Team Performance
Recently I was reading the book Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. The book delves into how human potential develops and how people learn. In one section the book discusses how students who have the same teacher through multiple years during primary school perform better than students who change teacher every year. The concept of having a teacher stay with the same class year-on-year is called looping.
My Experience with Team Building
This got me thinking about how this could be applied to project teams. Coming up through the ranks it seemed like every project I was with a completely different group of people. As I progressed into management, I noticed that we consciously mixed up the teams every project. The logic was that we needed to spread the talent around and get people used to collaborating with different people.
On reflection I think that this approach to team building is counterproductive. Over the course of a project, teams go through the team development stages of forming, storming, norming and confirming. By the end of this process, teams trust each other, understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and know their roles in the teams.
The Performance Benefit of Keeping Teams Together
Interesting research by Gallup finds that team performance peaks at around the 3-year mark. With many projects taking between 12-18months this means a project team really needs 2-3 projects together to really hit their straps.
Naturally, we will see people promoted at the end of every project. With some people moving up and out of the team. This is positive as it provides opportunity for promotion within the team project to project. With vacancies in entry level jobs filled by new graduates. The aim is to keep the core of the team together across multi-years to achieve peak performance and engagement. This supported by more research from Gallup which found a team retention rate of between 75-99% better than 100% for performance.
How does Looping Improve Performance?
There are several benefits of this approach which are:
- Respect and Friendship – Team members know each other well. This means that managers do not need to spend time getting know everyone in the team on each project. This allows the team to get straight to work on a new project.
- Trust – Having achieved success together in the past, the team trust each other’s ability to deliver. The team understands the strengths of each other, and the workload gets delegated. There is less effort required in handing-off tasks to other people within the team.
- Mutual Benefit in Developing the Team – Often development and career progression conversations take a back seat to project tasks. When developing team members will yield long term multi-project benefits to both manager and team member there is greater incentive to prioritise staff development.
- Productivity – Greater trust and understanding of roles and responsibilities leads to increased autonomy of each team member. With greater autonomy comes greater engagement and productivity.
Looping Can Transform a Good Team into a Great Team
This concept is just one more tool in the kit for developing high-performing teams. It can transform a team performing well into an exceptional team. But it can’t make a bad team perform better. If a particular team member or a whole team is unhappy, disengaged and not performing then it would not be right to keep that team together for several years. In these instances, it would be better to break up that team for the next project.
Closing Thoughts on Looping
This approach to team development looks promising to me. Productivity is falling, and the workforce is not engaged with the work they do. I’ve experienced the dissatisfaction of grinding through a project unhappy several times. It doesn’t serve anyone. So, anything we can do as project leaders to improve employee engagement and performance should thoughtfully considered.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on looping, and whether you think it has promise for construction projects.
