How a group of skilled strangers became a high-performing team in under an hour
On a Spring evening in March 2019, four choral singers gathered in a roomful of strangers to take on an unusual challenge: perform a piece of music they didn’t know.
The piece – Es war ein wunderlicher Krieg from Bach’s cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden – was chosen by Saïd Business School’s Pegram Harrison for good reason. Notoriously difficult, it made the perfect study to examine the process through which individuals who are good at something can work together as a group to achieve a common goal.
In the 60 minutes that followed, this new team of singers demonstrated five remarkable behaviours. You can apply them to elevate the performance of any team.
1. Set the emotional scene
Before singing their first note, the group exchanged laughs, jokes and self-deprecating comments. ‘The emotional landscape of a hard task is just as important to deal with as the technical side of it’, says Harrison. This was their way to relax and reduce anxiety. Teams perform better in vulnerable situations when they find an emotional dimension of it to share.
2. Ask for help when it is needed
When the singers encountered difficulties, sometimes they made a note in their sheet music and carried on, while other times they raised a hand to bring the group to a stop. ‘It’s a hard thing to differentiate’, says Harrison, but understanding when you can solve a problem on your own and when you need others to help is a key skill that ‘puts team performance on a higher level’.
3. Lead with questions
There was an interesting point when one singer asked a lot of questions: ‘Does it get annoying if we do this? Shouldn’t we do that?’ What he was really doing, Harrison points out, was telling his team-mates what to do, but in a respectful way. ‘Asking questions like that is a good way to build trust and work out what is going to land well.’
4. Deconstruct the challenge
The group experimented with different methods of mastering the hardest parts of the piece. For one section, they ‘took away the distraction’ of singing the right words while they found the right notes. For another, they slowed the music down before working it back up to speed. Breaking down a challenge into its constituent parts makes it easier to solve when you rebuild it again.
5. Give and take the lead
Hearing one singer say to another, ‘We’ll follow you’, Harrison observes, ‘is an interesting statement in a team situation because it gives authority to someone else. It reflects the balance of the individual and the collective that’s so important in their ensemble. They know the most important voice to follow in that moment, but that it will change at another time.’ The willingness to play ‘pass the parcel of leadership’ is essential to making a team work well.
