Interpersonal Coordination on High Performance Teams

What's the key ingredient to high performance when teams function in demanding, high-stress environments? Mary Waller and her co-authors have studied this question in the context of airplane cockpit crews. They published a paper recently titled "More than a feeling: rapport and complex task performance in teams."  They examined three elements of rapport within these teams while they worked in flight simulators:

1. Interpersonal liking: how positively did the individuals engage with one another
2. Emotional positivity: how optimistic and positive was the emotional tone of their conversations
3. Interpersonal coordination:  How well synchronized was their verbal communication and action

Sally Blount summarized their key finding: “Positivity and liking are great. But unless you can translate that positivity and liking into improved collaboration, it doesn’t have a significant impact on team performance.”  After analyzing video recordings of the teams in the simulator, the researchers observed how the coordination among the high-performing teams tended to be more complex, nuanced, and synergistic.  Kellogg Insight summarized the findings:

Overall, the researchers found that, on average, the teams with the highest levels of interpersonal coordination communicated more often, especially with commands, observations, suggestions, and laughter. The interactions between these pilots also were “significantly more complex” than the interactions between pilots with lower interpersonal coordination.

“In the low-interpersonal-coordination groups, you had less communication and also less encouragement and building off of each other,” Blount says. “So, if things aren’t going well, you might be saying, ‘This guy isn’t helping me, so I’m going to hunker down,’ versus ‘Okay, we got this,’ and ‘I see that. What do you see?’”

Not surprisingly, the pilots themselves did not always perceive the link between rapport and performance correctly.  

Interestingly, when liking and positivity were high, the pilots themselves thought they performed better, but that perception did not always translate into better expert evaluations. The tendency to associate more-positive interactions with better performance is common within teams, but it can be misleading and is a well-known contributor to groupthink, Blount says.

What If We Have to Argue the Other Side's Position?

Imagine that your team has arrived at an impasse.  After a constructive debate about two viable options, the dialogue begins to deteriorate.  People's positions begin to harden, and two polarized camps emerge.  Individuals begin restating their arguments, often forcefully, rather than sharing new information or analysis.  Voices and tensions rise.  What can you do as a team leader in these circumstances?

Here's one interesting strategy you might consider.  I learned about this technique from the leader at a non-profit organization several years ago.  The senior management team had arrived at an impasse.  The leader adjourned a contentious meeting one day by giving team members some homework.  He asked the members in each of the two entrenched camps to come back the next day with a memo and presentation that made the case for the option for which the opposing camp had advocated.  In short, he asked each subgroup to step into the other side's shoes.  

He wanted them to try to understand the other side's perspective, line of reasoning, and assumptions.  He felt that they had stopped listening to each other and ceased trying to understand one another.   Asking them to swap roles could deepen mutual understanding, and in so doing, perhaps help the team uncover common ground or opportunities for compromise.  

In the end, the exercise did not immediately end the impasse, but it led to a much more constructive dialogue and debate.  Ultimately, they chose a course of action with which everyone could live, and for which all team members agreed to cooperate on implementation.  Everyone did not get all that they wanted, but they felt that they had been heard and understood by their colleagues and their leader, and thus, they could commit to the final decision.   

How NOT to start your next meeting

How Does Team Size Affect Innovation?

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang & James Evans have published a paper in Nature titled, "Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology."   The scholars assembled a dataset of more than 65 million papers, patents, and software projects from 1954-2014.  They discovered that larger research teams tended to develop incremental improvements, while small teams conceived disruptive innovations.   

The findings remind me of Steve Jobs' preference for small teams.  Ken Segall, formerly an advertisting agency creative director, worked with Jobs for many years.  He described Jobs' philosophy on super-smart, small teams in an article for Fast Company several years ago:

Start with small groups of smart people–and keep them small. Every time the body count goes higher, you’re simply inviting complexity to take a seat at the table... The idea is pretty basic: Everyone in the room should be there for a reason. There’s no such thing as a “mercy invitation.” Either you’re critical to the meeting or you’re not. It’s nothing personal, just business.

Steve Jobs actively resisted any behavior he believed representative of the way big companies think–even though Apple had been a big company for many years. He knew that small groups composed of the smartest and most creative people had propelled Apple to its amazing success, and he had no intention of ever changing that. When he called a meeting or reported to a meeting, his expectation was that everyone in the room would be an essential participant. Spectators were not welcome.

For more on the Wu, Wang, and Evans study, check out this interview with two of the authors:

How Does Narcissism Affect Team Performance?

Source: Wikipedia

Emily Grijalva, Timothy D. Maynes, Katie L. Badura, and Steven W. Whiting have published a new research article titled, "Examining the “I” in team: A longitudinal investigation of the influence of team narcissism composition on team outcomes in the NBA."  Narcissism in the NBA?  I'm shocked!  LeBron James?  Kevin Durant?  These folks are narcissistic? Come on! Actually, the research is terrific, because they collected detailed information about game-level performance. What did they find? The authors report that, "Teams with higher mean and maximum levels of narcissism as well as higher narcissism members in core roles (i.e., central and influential roles) had poorer coordination and in turn performance than teams with lower levels."  That finding should not surprise us at all.  

Perhaps even more interestingly, they looked at how narcissim related to performance over time.  They found that coordination improved over time for teams with low levels of narcissism.   You get to know one another better, understand each other's strengths and roles, and your collaboration is enhanced. On the other hand, teams with high narcissism did not experience similar types of improvement in coordination among the players.    Narcissism, then, appears to get in the way of the type of collaboration, information sharing, and integrated action that high performing teams must exhibit.   

Apportioning Blame When a Group Failure Occurs

Source:  Wikimedia Commons

Do all team members receive an equal portion of blame when a group failure occurs? That is the question explored by researchers Ginger Zhe Jin, Benjamin F. Jones, Susan Feng Lu, and Brian Uzzi in a paper titled, "The Reverse Matthew Effect: Consequences of Retraction in Scientific Teams."  To study this question, the schlars gathered data on roughly 500 academic papers that had been retracted between 1993 and 2009.   These retractions occurred due to "ample evidence that a paper fabricated data, plagiarized the work of others, committed a major error, or had other serious problems."   The researchers found that the junior faculty members tended to incur more serious repurcussions than the senior faculty members who had co-authored with them.   The senior people did not experience a drop in their citation rate relative to the control group, while the junior faculty members did.  

What explains the unequal apportionment of blame.   The authors posit two explanations in an article on Kellogg Insights:

The first is that more eminent authors have typically published a larger body of work than their greener coauthors.  “When you’ve seen someone’s prior work,” he says, “you’re confident in that person. But the person without that reputation, you can’t judge. It’s realistic to assume that the person you haven’t seen before is likely to be the source of the problem.”  The other explanation is far less generous: Perhaps the better-known member of the team uses his or her social and institutional power to deflect the blame from him- or herself and to scapegoat less prominent collaborators.

The paper offers a warning to those who experience failure as part of a group project.  They need to be careful about how others judge them, as well as how their more senior teammates might deflect blame.   Of course, the broader implication is that we should evaluate how much finger pointing and scapegoating goes on after failures.  In general, organizations will thrive if they can focus on learning from failure rather than assigning blame.  In fact, finger pointing often crowds out learning and improvement efforts. 

How Might We?

Too often, we find it easy to poke holes in a proposal put forth by colleagues.  We find all the flaws rather easily.  However, we don't provide feedback that actually helps strengthen the proposal, nor do we offer any plausible alternatives.  In those moments, team leaders need to consider what might be the best secret weapon at their disposal. It's a simple question:  How might we?   In those cases, when the discussion is quite negative, focused only the flaws in a particular idea, the leader might interject by asking:  How might we make this idea work?  How might we address the shortcomings that have been identified?  How might we find a different way to achieve the same objectives?  How might we deisgn a test or experiment to validate the assumptions that are being scrutinized here?  The goal with a good "how might we" question should be to encourage the team to consider new possibilities.  Moreover, it should help shift the dialogue and the mindset from "it will never work" to a "maybe we can find a way to get this done."  

Source: Blue Diamond Gallery

The question, of course, presumes that the group agrees on the goals and objectives, but simply disagrees on the path to achieving those outcomes.  What if the team doesn't actually agree on the goals?  Then the leader needs to step back, put aside the proposals on the table, and try to clarify why alignment does not exist.  In some cases, leaders may be taken aback by lack of agreement on core goals and objectives.  It may be because people feared speaking up and expressing their disagreement regarding a particular goal.  A lively dialogue about goals need not be a negative occurrence.  Sometimes, such discussions can really help clarify the strategy moving forward.  From time to time, it's useful to check in and make sure that a team is aligned with regard to the outcomes it is trying to achieve.  A shift or evolution in the goals might just be in order.  

Crediting the Team vs. the Individual

Min Kay, Devon Proudfoot, and Rick Larrick have written a new article titled, "There’s No Team in I: How Observers Perceive Individual Creativity in a Team Setting."   The authors focus on the extent to which we attribute the quality of creative output to an individual vs. the team as a whole. In a discussion about the research, Larrick explains, "“Any time that you have so much of a company’s success tied up in the perceived success of a single individual, there’s a risk.” 

Source: Wikimedia

In explaining the experimental research findings from the research he conducted with his colleagues, Larrick states, "“It’s striking how little people adjust for the role of a team unless they’re hit over the head with the image of a team."  Indeed, in their studies, these scholars found that showing people an photographic image of all team members actually enhanced the extent to which they attributed the creative success to the group vs. an individual. However, if people are simply told about the presence of a team, but not shown the visual image, they are more likely to give an individual a great deal of the credit for the creative output. 

Larrick concludes, "If you want people to have faith in a team that can sustain success over time even with potential turnover, that’s when you want to call attention to it being a team output that is more about process and culture than one person.”  I would add that the best leaders insure that others know about the importance and the contribution of the entire team.  Moreover, they don't attribute to much of a project's success to their own actions, but instead recognize the valuable contributions of those working with them.  

How Expertise Can Become a Liability

Andras Tilcsik and Juan Almandoz published an interesting article in the Rotman Business School's management magazine this year titled, "When Expertise Becomes a Liability."  They studied over 1,300 banks during the 1996-2012 time period.  124 of those banks failed (slightly less than 10%).  In conditions of decision uncertainty, having more domain experts on the board of the bank meant a higher probability of failure.  They argue that having some domain experts is important and essential,  but there can be too much of a good thing.  Having a few people with expertise in other domains can be quite beneficial.  

Why the liability of expertise?  They argue that a high proportion of domain experts on a board leads to three problems.  First, domain experts can be very entrenched in their views, and they may be unwilling to look at issues in new ways as the environment changes.   Second, domain experts may exhibit high degrees of overconfidence in terms of their ability to make projections and forecasts.  Finally, a high proportion of domain experts might be associated with a lack of constructive conflict and debate within the board.  Why?  Non-experts may be unwilling to challenge conventional wisdom, ask tough questions, or offer dissenting views if they are greatly outnumbered by domain experts on the board.  

Can a Team Have Too Much Talent?

Hire a Superstar or Dump a Toxic Worker?

Should you make it a priority to hire the next superstar talent for your team, or remove the toxic worker who is dragging the group down?  Which action has the most impact?  Kellogg's Dylan Minor and his co-authors have examined this question.  They define toxic workers as those who engage in violations of company policy and/or act unethically.   These scholars find that toxic workers actually induce others around them to behave inappropriately at times.  Moreover, these people drive good people away, leading to costly turnover in the organization and a talent drain. For these reasons and others, they can do serious damage to a team.  These scholars actually quantified the positive impact of adding a superstar to your team versus the impact of removing a toxic team member.  They conducted their study based on more than 58,000 hourly service workers at 11 firms.   They found that removing the toxic member and replacing them with an average performer created more than twice the value of simply adding a superstar to the team to replace an average member. 

Overclaiming: How We (Mistakenly) Judge our Contributions to Group Work

Melissa Dahl recently wrote an article in New York Magazine about University of Chicago Professor Nicholas Epley's research on "over-claiming" behavior.   By overclaiming, Epley means the tendency for people to claim too much credit for their contributions to group work.   He and his co-authors have asked people to estimate the percentage of work that they believe they contributed to a group's output.  They found that the sum of all members' estimates consistently exceed 100%.  Why does this take place?  Plain and simple, people are egocentric.  

In more recent work, Epley has explored the over-claiming phenomenon in more depth.  He has found that, "People wrongly assume that time spent on a project is productive time spent on a project, and claim credit accordingly."    In one experiment, he asked people to work in groups of three to tackle word puzzles.  Two people actually did the work, while one person was assigned to act as a supervisor.  They were asked to "leverage the synergies" of the team.   In another set of groups, the third person simply was asked to be an observer, rather than a supervisor.  The two groups did equally well on the word puzzles. In other words, the supervisor did not make a meaningful contribution.   However, they claimed to have made a substantial contribution!   

Epley explains the meaning of this finding:  "People like awarding themselves E's for effort, another tendency that can result in claiming more credit than you really earned."  In other words, people aren't really judging their contribution to the task's accomplishment.  They are measuring the time and effort that they spent on the task.  Of course, time and effort does not equate to substantive contribution in many cases!  

How does one stop the over-claiming from becoming a problem within a group?  In a paper with Harvard Professor Eugene Caruso, Epley discovered that asking team members to reflect on the contributions of their fellow team members can make a big difference.  In other words, you have to direct people to look beyond themselves.   If asked to focus on others for a moment, rather than themselves, over-claiming is reduced.   That's an interesting finding, but I don't think a bit of reflection solves the problem entirely.   I do something a bit different that helps to address over-claiming behavior.  At the end of a major group project, I ask students to evaluate the contributions of all team members, but I tell them that the sum of all percentages must equal 100%.  That too does not solve the problem entirely, but it helps. 

11 Ways to Improve Your Meetings

Zena Barakat, a journalism fellow at Stanford, has written a terrific blog post about how to improve your meetings.  She lists eleven interesting ideas.   I want to highlight two ideas here:

Ignite conversation: “Bring something into the meeting to provoke discussion” — a competitor’s work, for example ­– “for people to react to so you aren’t talking about abstract things,” said Jeremy Utley, director of executive education at the d. school.

Boss, know when to go away: If you want to encourage a debate and unrestrained creative output, sometimes the boss should not come to the meeting or know when to leave. “Even if you are the nicest, warmest, most likable leader, know what meetings not to go to,” said Sutton (Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford). “The status difference means that people are afraid to say things.”

I would add three other suggestions to this very good list.  First, think carefully about what you want to accomplish at the meeting.  Ask yourself:  In the ideal state, when this meeting ends, what will have happened?  What will we have accomplished?  Consider sharing your vision with the team.  Second, identify how the participants can best prepare for the meeting.  What materials should be distributed in advance? What would you like to ask the attendees to do in advance so as to be ready for a meaningful conversation?  Third, are there people that I might like to "warm call" before the meeting?  A cold call is when you suddenly ask someone to speak during a meeting.  For some attendees, that will be a shock, and they won't react well. They may be very uncomfortable speaking up in a room with more senior folks in attendance.  A "warm call" may be just the trick to encourage their active participation.  You call them aside before the meeting, and you inform them that you like to call upon them during the meeting.  Let them know precisely how you would like them to participate.  Do you want them to join in a brainstorming process, relate a lesson from their past experience, play the devil's advocate, bring a new option to the table, etc.   The warm call can bring a new perspective to the table that might not otherwise be voiced. 

The Downfall of Many Cross-Disciplinary Teams

Yesterday, one of my former students asked for advice.  He has been selected to lead one of six task forces focused on different dimensions of quality for his company.   These six task forces have senior executive sponsors, and they will be responsible for reporting findings and recommendations to the chief executive.  He's very excited about the opportunity.   The responsibility and visibility associated with this project do not usually fall to people at this relatively early stage of his career.  He sat with me to talk about this new role, and he wanted to know what challenges or obstacles he should be prepared to face.  I offered the following observation.  On these types of cross-disciplinary teams, the leader needs to be extremely mindful of the fact that each team member has a "full-time job" in the organization.  Tensions may emerge between the team member and the manager to whom they report on a day-to-day basis.  The manager may become upset that this special project is soaking up significant amounts of the employee's time.  As the leader of the cross-disciplinary team, you need to be prepared to work with each team member to address this potential obstacle to success.  The project leader must be able to outline expectations with each member, and to speak directly with the day-to-day managers so that they understand their employees' roles and responsibilities on the project.  The leader also must be respectful of team members' commitments, particularly at times when they might be especially busy in their day-to-day job.   In my experience, this struggle to balance the obligations of team members serves as the largest pitfall that cross-disciplinary teams face in organizations. 

Pick the Best Players - No, not exactly!

You have an important project at work.  You need to assemble a team to complete the critical task.  Who do you select?  Pick the best people, of course.  Well, perhaps not.   As  Tara Nicholle Nelson   writes in Fast Company, 

"A-players Don’t Always Make Great Team Players. Motivated by credit, praise, promotions, and raises, Superstar employees are often amazing individual contributors. But they are not always amazing to work with.  When multiple A-listers are on one team, unless the culture aggressively fosters collaboration and cooperation, they can become competitive with each other, hoard resources, and spend way too much time focusing on what each other is doing, versus focusing on beating your company’s actual competitors in the marketplace."

I have always argued that team creation should involve picking the right players, not simply the best players.  Picking the right players means thinking about how they will complement one another.  Can they fit into certain roles on the team?  Do they have personalities that will enable them to collaborate effectively?  Are they all willing to put the organization's goals above their own personal or departmental interests? 

A New Way to Start Meetings (and Share Information)

Keith Murnighan, a professor at Kellogg, has a thought-provoking blog post about how to run more effective meetings.  Murnighan begins by pointing out an age-old problem that occurs in groups -  discussion tends to focus on the information that all members have in common, while unique information (privately held by individuals) does not get shared, discussed, and/or integrated effectively.  Gary Stasser first discovered this problem in the 1980s in a series of experiments.   Stasser found that groups spend far too little time discussing and analyzing privately held information.  Many reasons exist for this phenomenon; Murnighan offers one  plausible explanation: 

Even when people are conscientious and thoughtful, their natural tendencies are not to bring in new, useful information but, instead, to bring in information that everyone already knows.Why would anyone do this? Well, let’s imagine that you are the leader, and I am a member of your team. I want to impress you as you are my boss. Let’s also imagine that I am not shy about stating my point of view. As a result, when you ask for information, I will try to be the first person to share my thoughts.Now, what kinds of information will I share? If I present information that everyone knows, and do it fairly articulately, how will everyone else react? Their natural instinct will be to nod their heads, because I am confirming what they know – and it feels good to have your information confirmed.In contrast, how will these same people respond if I present new, unique information that no one else has? Their natural instinct in this situation is to ask a question about it. What does this signal? The implicit subtext of a question is “How the hell do you know that?”

How does Murnighan propose to solve the problem?  Drawing on the ideas of his colleague, Victoria Husted Medvec, he recommends that a leader request that key data and ideas be sent to him or her in advance of the meeting. Then, the leader should post flip charts around the conference room with the concepts and thoughts that have been collected. As team members enter the room, they will naturally peruse the flip charts, and they are likely to pay particular attention to novel ideas and information, i.e. the surprising, the new, the unexpected.  Murnighan suggests that each flip chart should include the name of the person who offered that particular data point or idea. 

At first glance, I love the idea.  Over the past few years, I have advocated distributing key information and analysis to team members in advance of meetings.  In that way, you can have a more thoughtful discussion, because people have had a chance to digest the information a bit.  However, I do see two major concerns with Murnighan's recommendation.  First, you have to be careful that people do not become too invested in a very public position that they have established at the outset of a deliberation.  You don't want the discussion to become all about advocacy and for entrenched camps to emerge.  You want to make sure that people take a look at all the information, and that people are genuinely engaging in collective inquiry... i.e., trying to work together to solve the problem.  Secondly, putting the names on the flip charts may cause people to judge the person more so than the idea.  I wonder if it might be useful to leave the names off of the flip charts at the outset. Give people an opportunity to review the data and the concepts without attribution at first.  Then during the discussion, people can disclose ownership.   It might lead to a more unbiased assessment of the information.  

Conflict Avoidance: Does It Happen Less Often in Diverse Teams

Columbia Business School Professor Katherine Phillips and her co-authors have conducted several interesting experiments examining how people approach group work differently depending on the people with whom they expect to work.   According to Columbia's Ideas at Work newsletter, here is the major conclusion from their recent studies: "The researchers found that, in fact, when individuals anticipate going in to a homogeneous environment, they don’t process information as deeply or effectively as when they anticipate going into a diverse environment." 

For instance, in one experiment, participants completed a survey about their political opinions.  The researchers informed each subject that they would be meeting in-person afterward with another subject to engage in a problem-solving task.  Before that meeting, the scholars asked each subject to analyze a murder mystery and to try to solve it.   Then they were told the political affiliation of the person with whom they would be collaborating.   Finally, the subjects had to write an essay expressing their conclusions about the murder mystery.  In this first experiment, the meetings did not actually take place.  The scholars were interested in the attitudes that had formed leading up to the meetings.  

According to Columbia's Ideas at Work newsletter, "The researchers found that both Democrats and Republicans wrote considerably less detailed statements when they anticipated meeting with someone of their own political party than when they anticipated meeting someone of a different party."  The scholars posit that people tend to want to avoid conflict with people with whom they have many similarities.   They are less concerned about clashing with those quite different than themselves.  As a result, individuals seem to be less prepared when anticipating a meeting with someone with whom they have many similarities, even when those common bonds have nothing to do with the task at hand. 

In a subsequent experiment, the meetings actually did take place.   The scholars found that those who prepared more detailed essays did, in fact, solve the mystery more often than those with less comprehensive initial analyses.  In short, preparation did matter on this task, and the individuals expecting to meet with people quite different than themselves invested more time and effort into preparing for the problem-solving task. 

Running a Better Meeting

We have all been stuck in terrible, unproductive meetings.   The discussion rambles on, and people constantly move off topic.  The agenda is unclear.  The meeting comes to a close without clear action items and assignments of responsibility.   How can we improve meetings?  We have all heard the typical advice.  Set a clear agenda.  Distribute key documents for review in advance of the meeting.  Select the attendees carefully.  And so on...  

Today, though, I read one piece of advice that I think bears emphasizing here.  Inc.'s Laura Garnett recently interviewed Dave Kashen, co-founder MeetingHero, a startup that has developed a cloud-based meeting tool.   Kashen offered several tips of making meetings  more productive.  I found one tip a bit different than the usual advice, and I'm going to apply it in my own work:

During the meeting, periodically summarize the discussion.

Kashen's suggestion: "Great facilitators instinctively do this. They stop every now and then to let people know where they are in the process and what has happened so far. This helps to ensure everyone is on the same page (and makes it easier to resolve inconsistencies if not), and frees people up to focus on the next part of the conversation. We realized that this function can largely be served by allowing the group, or a designated notetaker, to create a real-time meeting summary as it's going. That way the whole group knows where they are, and the summary can be sent out immediately after the meeting instead of someone having to go back through a set of notes and remember what happened."

Picking the Right Players

When you are assembling a team for an important project, how do you select the team members?  Do you select individual star performers in your organization?   How does that work out for you?  Recall, for a moment, one of the many great scenes in the movie Miracle, about the 1980 U.S. Men's Olympic Hockey team.  In that movie, Coach Herb Brooks talks with one of his assistants at the end of tryouts.  The assistant is incredulous.  He questions Brooks, wondering how he could have made some of the selections that he has made.  The assistant does not think that Brooks has assembled the most talented team possible.  Brooks responds that they won't win if he picks the best players.  He has to pick the right players.  In other words, he could not just assemble an all-star team.  He needed to find people with the right mindset and attitude.  He needed to fill certain roles.  He needed players with complementary skillsets.  

Are you picking your teams in the manner employed by Coach Brooks, or you trying to put together an all-star team?  You might think about that scene from Miracle the next time you have to staff a very important project at work. 

Red Sox: how much does chemistry help teams?

Does team chemistry lead to winning, or does winning lead to good chemistry?  I've heard that question debated frequently as my beloved Red Sox unexpectedly head to the World Series tonight.  I think the question is misleading though.  What puzzle are people trying to solve when posing this question?  They are observing unexpected success.  They see a team that is clearly more than the sum of its parts.  That's the riddle here.  Chemistry is a simplistic answer, though, for why the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.  

Team synergy results from a combination of factors, not simply from the fact that players get along with one another (who can forget the 25 players, 25 cabs era of 20 years ago with the Clemens Red Sox?!?).  Synergy derives from good team design.  That means selecting complementary parts, not simply assembling all-stars based on statistical models (sorry, Theo).  It also means thinking about who your team leaders will be, and how they will lead through both words and actions.  Finally, it means not overreacting to a small sample of poor performance.  The Sox didn't let one bad year cause them to forget the longer term pattern of strong performance for players such as Lester and Buchholz.  

Synergy also involves creating the right environment in which people are motivated to excel.  John Farrell has created an environment of collective accountability.  He's also been transparent, communicating his decisions and rationale to players clearly and firmly.  

What about the beards?  Well, they are fun.  They are a wonderful bonding experience.  In the end, though, the team design and environment matter most.