delegation, development, and autonomy vs collaboration

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Welcome to Teams, Talent & Productivity, brought you by Midnight Labs, the remote and hybrid teams specialists. We blend sense-making, design, and data science to build fully customised talent and team development solutions.

Previous Newsletters:

📰 variability, stability and redundancy
📰 paradigm shifts in education and optimising your ways of working

In this week’s newsletter: 

• Teams: How to create a Delegation Board.

• Talent: Principle of Development breakdown - Embodiment.

• Productivity: Individual autonomy vs. collaborative effort.

Teams

In our research on teams at Midnight Labs, a recurring challenge that has emerged is delegated decision making. Teams often struggle with clarity on who holds the authority for specific decisions, which can lead to bottlenecks and inefficiencies in a distributed work environment. To address this, creating a delegation board has proven to be a highly effective solution. It establishes clear roles and responsibilities, ensuring that all team members understand their decision-making boundaries and authority levels.

The process of creating a delegation board begins by defining the scope and objectives. This involves identifying what the board aims to achieve—be it accelerating decision-making processes, enhancing clarity, or empowering team members. Determining which projects, processes, or areas of work the board will cover is crucial. This step ensures that the board’s setup is perfectly aligned with strategic goals and addresses relevant areas of operation within the organisation.

As we move to the implementation phase, the board lists key decisions or activities and assigns appropriate levels of delegation, from full autonomy to complete oversight. This not only ensures operational clarity but also engages team members in the decision-making process, fostering a sense of ownership and accountability. Once established, the delegation board is integrated into daily operations, continuously reviewed, and updated based on ongoing feedback and the evolving needs of the team. This tool can not only streamline operations, but, if you used well, can enhances team morale and effectiveness by clearly defining how and by whom decisions are made. Check out our step by step guide to creating a Delegation Board here. 

Talent

As mentioned in the last newsletter, we will be examining one of the five developmental principles that organise learning, outlined in Immordino-Yang et al.’s recent paper, each week. This week we focus on Embodiment.

Embodiment, a concept rooted in neuropsychology, reveals the interdependence of the mind and body, shedding light on how our physical experiences shape our cognitive processes and vice versa. This synergy between bodily sensations and mental functions suggests that our emotional and cognitive experiences not only influence but actively shape our brain's development. This complex interaction goes beyond the mere adaptation of our biological systems in response to environmental stimuli. Instead, it highlights a bidirectional relationship where our thoughts and feelings deeply influence our physical health and brain architecture, as well as how these, in turn, inform our future cognitive and emotional experiences.

In high-pressure corporate settings, stress can significantly affect learning outcomes by impairing cognitive functions such as memory and attention, while also exacerbating risks for mental and physical health issues like anxiety, depression, and cardiovascular diseases. To counter these effects, it's essential for companies to integrate stress management strategies into their learning and development initiatives, emphasising the importance of mental and physical health in enhancing cognitive performance.

This understanding of embodiment calls for a holistic approach to education and social interactions that considers the physical, emotional, and cognitive needs of individuals. In corporate settings, this means creating environments that foster not just intellectual growth but also emotional and physical well-being. By recognising that our brain's capacity for learning and adapting is significantly influenced by our emotional experiences, leaders and L&D teams can better support the development of learning practices that enhance both performance and overall health, promoting a more integrated approach to human development.

Productivity 

In an interesting experiment, researchers investigated the dynamics of collaboration versus individual performance using the example of shoe-tying, a skill that most people master individually with expert-level proficiency. The experiment highlighted a critical aspect of teamwork dynamics, particularly how synchronisation can impact performance negatively when it's forced rather than natural. In the experiment, ‘expert shoelace tyers’ were timed tying shoes individually and then paired with another expert to tie the same shoe together. It was found that, on average, it would take 20 attempts for the pair to achieve similar performance as when they tied the shoe as individuals.

This reminded us of recent findings that suggest that ‘Storming’ is not a distinct, one-time phase, but rather a continuous process that teams will revisit throughout their lifecycle. Traditionally, Tuckman's model of team development posits that teams go through distinct phases: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning.

Recognising that Storming is a continuous phase can help teams understand that disagreements or misalignments are not failures but part of the process of achieving effective collaboration. This insight aligns with the shoe-tying example: as individuals learn to adjust their expert skills to work in tandem, they can overcome initial coordination issues to find a collaborative rhythm that respects individual strengths while harnessing the power of teamwork. The lesson here is that effective teamwork often involves a blend of individual autonomy and collaborative effort, facilitated by an understanding that the path to seamless cooperation is iterative and may require revisiting conflicts and adjustments continuously.

At Midnight Labs we use the definition of a ‘Team’ described by Gorman et al: “Teams are viewed as a system of coupled elements that interact over time to produce patterns that are themselves not contained within the team’s members”.

So when we look at teams’ ways of working, more specifically the way they collaborate, some questions we always ask are:

• Is the expected outcome not possible by any one individual?

• Does collaborating improve the speed or quality? 

We find sometimes teams are trying to tie a shoelace with two people.

I hope some of this was useful to you, if it was, please feel free to subscribe if you haven’t already so you don’t miss the next one 🙂 

Thanks for reading!

Midnight Labs