Heroes, weak links, and the ugly sides of unbalanced teams
We all know that given in a well-formed team, the efforts of the team members will have a synergy that will cause the final output of the team to be more than that of all the individual outputs combined. To put it simply, we say 1+1=3 to show this synergy. But right in this simplified equation, lurks an important assumption, that our team members are somewhat equal (1 and 1). But what will happen if we have team members with different levels of capacity and performance? Say, a senior teaming up with a junior, or to put it in the same equation, 2+1. Will it still equal to 3, 4, or even 5?
Creating synergy in the team can be a quite hard task by itself, but adding the complexity of different levels of performance and output into the mixture may cause a lot of new problems, and may cause the output to become less than what we might’ve hoped for.
Note Although it’s not quite accurate, for simplicity’s sake, I will use the term “senior” to refer to the more experienced and more capable team members, and “junior” to refer to those with a lower level of skill and performance.
The pros
Most of the teams in the real world are a mixture of different skill and experience levels, and there’re many good reasons for that:
The opportunity to learn: Working with people with different levels of seniority than ours is always a great opportunity for us to learn. For the juniors, it’s more obvious. The seniors have a lot of knowledge and experience to give them. Learning in action is always much better than learning in theory, and what is better than learning from a teacher who is also your colleague, working towards the same goal as you?
But the opposite is always correct as well. The seniors can always learn a lot from their (often younger) juniors. When we go deep into a field, we can quickly become heavy with the sunk knowledge of the matter. It can make it harder for us to change directions, have a new perspective, and take a fresh look at the problems. But here come the juniors to our rescue. They are not as burdened as us, they have a new outlook, and they’re often much more creative than we are. They’re fresh blood to a team of seniors and can prevent the team from going stale.
The built-in leaders: One of the most important roles of a senior member in a team is their formal in informal leadership roles. If you have a senior member in your team, you can be sure that they can lead the team from the inside, mostly better than any junior member. They can use their knowledge and experience to lead the team and its member in much better directions than what the team might’ve had to find without them.
Higher performance: One clear reason for having one or more senior members in a team of otherwise juniors is of course to improve the performance. If you improve the performance of a team’s parts, it’s not unexpected to see an increase in its overall output. This, of course, depends on the nature of the team and its tasks. Sometimes adding senior members can cause no increase in a team’s output, as it’s limited by the performance of the weaker members. But in many cases, 1+2 is simply greater than 1+1.
The cons
Many different problems may occur in such a team, depending on the nature of the team and its tasks. Some of them are as follows:
More complex group dynamics: Having people with different seniority levels in a team can affect group dynamics greatly. The form of communication, decision-making, goal adjusting, etc can be greatly affected by this unbalance. The seniors can (and will) gain some informal roles and responsibilities that may change all the assumptions and predictions we might’ve had during the team-building process. This will cause the team to have quite a different output than what we might’ve expected, for better or worse!
The weakest link of the chain: When people with different levels of skills work on the same problem, one predictable problem to expect is having the “Weakest link of the chain” in your team. If the work of all team members is related to each other’s output, if one person can’t operate as well as the others, they can simply limit the team’s output. So a team with 4 seniors and 1 junior, can operate as well as a team with 5 juniors. This problem, of course, is not limited to teams with unbalanced skills, but it will have a much higher chance to happen in such teams.
Free riders: Free riders show their lovely faces in all sorts of teams, but when the team’s skill and performance levels are unbalanced, it’s easier for both the seniors and juniors to underperform. The seniors can simply hide behind the fact that they’re still performing better than the juniors, and the juniors can hide in the shadow of the seniors.
Heroes and Stars: No team should need neither heroes nor stars. The heroes try to do more than they should, they try to help everyone with everything and even cover for other members’ mistakes and hide them. This will cause the team to become somewhat lazy. When you have a hero who will help you with many things, do you really need to work that hard? Junior team members working with a hero, will not have the chance to make mistakes, and face their consequences, and without the pain, won’t come to the growth.
Heroes, as much as their efforts can cause harm to a team, are at least good in heart. The stars are a little more selfish in this regard. When a senior works with juniors, it’s easy for them to become the star of the team. They will outperform and outshine other team members, use their higher position to exploit the team (subtly or not) in their own favor, take opportunities for themselves, etc. They will cause much more damage than heroes, and not even with their good intentions.
The outshined stars: When there’s the sun, it’s impossible to see all the beautiful stars up there. When your team has high-performing senior members, it’s a lot easier for the junior members’ efforts to seem that big and shiny. Even when they out-perform themselves their great efforts can go unseen much easier. You won’t be able to detect the promising talent of the junior team members, who can become great seniors in the near future, because they’re currently outshined by the better-performing seniors!
When it’s good and when it’s bad?
As we said, having an unbalanced team can be both good and bad. A lot of it really depends on the nature of the team and the tasks it wants to perform. Sometimes having senior members to a team will improve its performance in a linear fashion, sometimes it has a much greater impact, and sometimes it has no impact at all (well, except the negative impact of wasting a senior member’s time and effort). So, let’s dig into the nature of the team and see when and where having an unbalanced team can help us, or not.
The nature of the tasks
Donelson R. Forsyth, in his book Group Dynamics, talks about the different types of tasks and how they’re done in a group. From additive tasks, where the total effort of each member is added to the team’s output in a linear fashion, to the disjunctive tasks where the output can be determined by its strongest member, and of course, the conjunctive tasks where the weakest link of the chain is the defining factor for the output.
Let’s go through some of these task types, and how are they affected in an unbalanced group:
Additive tasks: In this tasks types, the performance of the team is the total sum of each member’s effort. For example, if you have a team of salespeople, the total sum of your sale is defined by each member’s individual sales. If your team is performing such tasks, you have a simple equation: 1+1=2, and 1+2=3. There’s hardly much synergy with these types of tasks, in theory at least.
In many cases, people may break down the original task to create simpler tasks. In our example, someone may create a list of leads, someone calls each lead customer from the least, the other person follows up on the calls, etc. This, of course, changes the nature of tasks to turn them into conjunctive tasks.
Compensatory tasks: In this type of task, the output is an average of each individual’s product. For example, imagine you’re trying to estimate how much budget a project needs. everyone gives their guesses, and you take the average as the final estimation.
The problem here is that you take everyone as equals and think their estimation has the same value. But in most cases, a senior member has a way better estimation form a junior. You may improve your final estimation by giving higher weight to a senior’s estimation though. But overall, in its worst (but common) case, for this type of task, 1+2=1.5 and not much more!
Disjunctive tasks: In this type of task, everyone provides a solution, and the team has to choose between the solutions. For example, when the team discusses the technologies to use for a project. In this case, each individual may have their own unique output, but the teams have to select only one output. In its worst case, if the person with the best solution can’t persuade others to choose their solution, 1+2 can equal even 1. And in the best case, at least in theory, the senior’s answer may be chosen, so 1+2=2. But reality can differ. Since people discuss a solution, they may improve it (and in doing so, lean towards an additive nature), and the final solution becomes better than the best individual solution, so 1+2=4 or 5 or even higher!
Conjunctive tasks: This is where everyone’s efforts are linked together like a chain, and this, of course, is where we can face the “weakest link in the chain”! For example, in a normal development team, you may have a frontend developer, or a backend developer. And even if the front-end developer is a senior and can produce features at a greater speed than the back-end developer, they’re limited by the back-end developer’s speed. Even in terms of quality, if the back-end code is buggy and slow, the final product won’t pass the QA criteria, even if the front-end product is perfect. So at least in theory, having a senior front-end developer can’t do much more than a junior one. So, 1+2=2 (at best).
What’s your goal?
How should you divide your senior, and junior personnel into smaller teams? One defining factor is your short-term and long-term goals, as I will discuss in two simplified scenarios.
Long-term, Team Growth: It doesn’t need much discussion on why in many cases you should aim for team and team members’ growth, and if you want to aim for this, the best solution is always mixing the senior and junior members in your team. This mixture, of course, won’t result in the best short-term performance possible, but it gives you something better: growth.
When people work with those who are senior to them, they learn a lot and become better day by day. The senior members will have a lot to learn too (as mentioned earlier). On top of this, the team itself also grows better with senior members in it. So, having a mixed team will result in having better teams and team members in the long run.
Short-term, Taskforces: You can’t always afford the luxury of the long term of the course. There’re many cases where you have to respond as fast and as strongly as possible. For example, if a crisis has happened in your company, or an unexpected opportunity has emerged, you have to give it the best you can, by forming a team out of the best members you have.
In any case, when the short-term goals become more important than the long-term ones, you might need to create a team of the best members you have, meaning the seniors.
Let’s get more real!
In today’s complex and dynamic work environment, what I told about the tasks and goals, was sort of an oversimplification. For example, a junior may be better in some specific area of your need, than any senior. They may have unique experiences and know things that even a senior doesn’t know. And the team’s work is never quite like a chain either. For example, a senior front-end developer does way more than just writing front-end code. They can help the back-end developers learn better code and improve their work, they help the whole team make better decisions, they can lead the team towards better teamwork, etc.
After all, a team is more like a living organism than a machine, and can’t be simply calculated with simple equations such as 1+1 or 1+2. But it doesn’t mean we can’t predict what might happen by adding a senior to a team of juniors and wise versa. We should try to better understand our situation and aim for the best result possible, and of course, always be open to change.
Teams of teams
The final thing to add here is that you’re not always working with a team of individuals. Your company may be formed of a team of teams. For example, what will happen if your sales team sells much more than the production team can provide? What will happen if the company grows faster than the HR team can hire? On a larger scale, balanced teams can be a problem of their own. One that needs its own special attention.
