How to Assemble a Team

When Danny Ocean plans the biggest casino heist in history (yes, I am talking about the movie “Ocean’s Eleven”), he carefully assembles his crew of specialists. He knows his goal and which skills will be needed for achieving it (surveillance technician, pickpocket, explosives expert, “grease man”, etc.). He finds the best people for the job and then he recruits them carefully. He talks to them personally and invites them to join his crew. And he knows how to motivate them by providing a compelling purpose: When Rusty Ryan (aka Brad Pitt) is hesitant and states: “I need a reason. And don’t say money”, Danny responds: “Because the house always wins. Unless when that big hand comes along, you bet big. And you take the house.” Beating the house that always wins is exactly what Rusty needs to hear, so he’s in. And he’s highly motivated (until he finds out that Danny follows his own, secret agenda, of course). 

We are not in the business of robbing casinos - at least I hope so. But we, too, need to assemble teams and create the conditions that allow them to become highly effective. Unfortunately, the process of recruiting people into a team often looks very different in our industry. Instead of starting with the goal, the big task at hand and the skills needed and then finding the right people, we often start by finding people who are available and putting them into a team¹. Instead of inviting carefully selected team members personally and explaining why the work is important (Amy Edmondson calls this enrollment), we often send an email or slack message and ask folks to join a new team (or we ask someone to ask someone else to join). 

In my previous post, I wrote about the skills, abilities and traits we want to have on our team. But it’s not only important who we select to be on the team, but also how we do the selection and recruitment. Ideally, there’s a good reason why we need exactly this person on the team, we invite team members personally and there’s a clear, motivating purpose for all team members. Of course reality is messy and we rarely have the luxury of assembling our dream team, but I think we should make an effort to come closer to this ideal.

Self-selecting Teams

But why should some leader select team members at all? Why not initiate a process where people can self-select the team they want to be part of? Self-selection can be good alternative, when we (re-)form several teams simultaneously and it yields a couple of obvious advantages:

• The people who are closest to the work often know best which skills are needed.

• Self-selection fosters a sense of autonomy and purpose (because folks can self-assign to the work they feel most passionate about).

• If prepared and facilitated well, self-selection can be much quicker than determining membership from the outside.

I believe that self-selection can be very powerful and I have seen great things resulting from it. There is one big caveat, though. While research seems to be inconclusive about the question whether self-selection generally makes teams more effective, it has demonstrated one effect consistently: People have a strong tendency to work with people who are similar to them.² This phenomenon is called homophily, and it will almost inevitably lead to a decrease in diversity in our teams. And it is well established that having diverse information, knowledge, skills and perspectives is essential for effective team work, at least if some level of innovation and creative problem solving is needed.

Homophily is not a deal breaker for self-selection, but it is something that needs to be countered by designing the right constraints and appropriate facilitation. Such constraints need to be communicated clearly before the self-selection process starts and should make sure that each team has all the needed skills, certain team sizes are not exceeded, that the highest priority task is staffed appropriately before people self-select into other teams etc. There can also be constraints that directly counter homophily, e.g. “Each team needs to have at least two people who have never worked with each other before.”

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¹ When it comes to leadership teams, they are often built around a different principle: “Who needs to be on the team because of title or hierarchy?” Again, this is far from ideal, because it will rarely lead to the right mix of skills. In addition, it will inflate the team size.

² Chen, Roy and Gong, Jie (2018) Can self selection create high-performing teams?
Fischer, Mira et al (2023) : When, and why, do teams benefit from self-selection?