How to Fix “Team Creep”

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2017

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mark Mortensen, an associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, discusses the research on "multiteaming"—when employees work not only across multiple projects, but multiple teams. It has significant benefits at the individual, team, and organizational levels. Among them: multiteaming saves money. The cost—stretched employees—is hard to see. And that is where the tension, and the risk, lies. Mortensen is the co-author, with Heidi K. Gardner, of “The Overcommitted Organization” in the September–October 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone it's Kurt we need your help with our annual survey this is your last chance to help us get to know you so we can make idea cast even better for you
0:09.8	it's easy just go to HBR.org
0:13.0	podcast survey.
0:15.0	Again, that's HBR.org.
0:17.0	And thanks for listening. Welcome to the H-I Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green Carmichael.
0:37.5	Here's the old way of working. One person on say three projects all with the same team and the new way that one
0:46.1	person with those three projects but now working with three different groups of
0:49.7	people aka multi-teaming at its best multi-teaming. At its best, multi-teaming lets us learn from different departments.
0:56.2	At its worst, bouncing between groups stretches us thin. But today's cast says
1:01.8	multi-teaming organizations are running a bigger risk than
1:04.4	employee burnout. Putting one person on projects that are otherwise unconnected
1:08.8	means that if that person is tied up with one project, all the other projects stall.
1:14.0	Mark Mortenson is here to talk about how managers can get the benefits of multi-teaming
1:18.3	without leaving their staff stressed out.
1:21.2	He's an associate professor at Inziad and an expert on
1:23.8	organizational collaboration. He's also the co-author along with Heidi Kay Gardner of
1:28.5	the over-committed organization. It's in the September-October 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review and on HBR.org.
1:36.0	Mark, thanks so much for being here today.
1:38.0	Thank you so much for having me.
1:40.0	So how do managers react when you tell them about that kind of risk?
1:44.4	This is a topic that comes up quite a bit in executive sessions or consulting with companies
1:49.2	and we start talking about these issues.
	...

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