Explain the importance of team norms.

Question

What will be an ideal response?What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Team norms are defined as informal and interpersonal rules that team members
are expected to follow. These standards may be explicit and formally stated by the
leader or members of the team. But norms may also be implicit. They are not written
down, and communication of the norms to team members depends on the ability of the
leader (or team members) to effectively convey the expected behaviors. Norms have a
strong influence on team members’ behavior, and they are often difficult to change. For
example, some teams allow team members to miss team meetings, and this disrupts
the flow of work. While this isn’t written down anywhere that it’s OK to miss meetings, it
just starts happening. One team member misses without an excuse and since there is
no penalty, others start to miss too. This is an example of an implicit norm. Implicit
norms are tricky in that they are difficult to detect, and it is easy to misinterpret them. Of
course, norms can have a positive influence on team member behavior as well. An
example of the power of team norms was demonstrated by the results of research
conducted by Google’s People Operations department who set out to study teams with
the goal of building the perfect team. The project was code-named Project Aristotle and
hundreds of Google teams were studied to learn what made some more effective than
others. No matter how they analyzed the data, the composition of the teams did not
matter (nothing showed that demographics or personality combinations created a great
team). What the analysts learned was that team norms made the difference. These
“unwritten rules” defined the team performance culture. The specific norms they
identified were communication and empathy. High-performing teams engaged in
conversational turn-taking in which all members spoke in roughly equal proportions
(communication). The second norm was that high performing team members had high
social sensitivity--they were good at interpreting team members’ feelings based on their
tone of voice and facial expressions (empathy). The Google research team shared their
findings about communication and empathy with Google employees to make these implicit norms more explicit. Explicit norms are written down and discussed. One way to
make norms explicit is by developing a team charter.