If you ask hiring managers what they are looking for in a candidate they will often say, ‘ I want someone who will get on well with the team.’ They want someone who will fit in and reinforce the team spirit. Homogeneous teams that get on well together may be good for executing clear plans but the evidence shows that they are less creative than diverse teams that have some internal tensions.
In his best-selling book, Imagine; How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer tells of the research done by Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who studied teamwork in the creation of Broadway musicals. Each new musical is the creation of a team including a composer, lyricist, choreographer, producer, director and several others. Uzzi analysed the teams that created some 2250 musicals between 1877 and 1990. Uzzi created a metric, the Q factor, to measure the closeness of connection of each team. So teams that knew each other well and had worked on musicals before would get a high Q score. A team of strangers would get a very low Q score. He then measured the correlation between the success of the musical and the Q score of its creative team.
He found a strong correlation. When the Q score was low the musical was more likely to fail. However, when the Q score was high the work also suffered. If the team was too close then their innovation was diminished. During the 1920s most of the musicals developed by great names like Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein were flops. The problem according to Uzzi was that these artists got into the habit of collaborating only with friends. The repeat relationships stifled creativity. The most successful teams had an intermediate level of social intimacy – some old friends and some newcomers. ‘They were comfortable with each other but not too comfortable.’
We have a tendency to want to work with friends but it turns out that this inhibits creativity. We need new people in the team as well.
It is unlikely that a team that has worked together for a long time will come up with something really original. So add some diversity. If you want your team to be agile and innovative then do not recruit new players who will ‘fit in’; choose people who will challenge the group’s thinking.
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This post was previously published on destination-innovation.com.
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