Academic-Consultant Collaboration. Doing Research across the Divide

24 Pages·2011·0.335 MB·English

by  Ruth Wageman

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Academic-Consultant Collaboration:
Doing Research across the Divide
Ruth Wageman
Excerpted from Useful Research
(cid:2)Ten
Academic- Consultant Collaboration
Doing Research across the Divide
Ruth Wageman*
Some ten years ago, an unusual research collaboration began. A trio of
se nior con sul tants, deeply experienced in working with chief executives, re-
fl ected on countless observations of wheel- spinning, confl ict- ridden leader-
ship teams and wondered whether it really had to be that way. Th e pop u lar
press writings on top teams provided help . . . o f a sort. Th ese works described
similar patterns: confl icts among members never surfaced eff ectively, chief
executives driving an agenda with no signs of team own ership of the strat-
egy, repeated returns to the same sticky issues. But the underlying message
in these works was less helpful: Th at’s just how it is with teams of top leaders
(e.g., Katzenbach, 1997a, 1997b).
So far, the story is not unusual: Observant practitioners noted a pattern of
dysfunction and an opportunity to provide help to clients. Th ey began ex-
ploring a signifi cant opportunity to build a new practice for their fi rm.
Th en the story becomes unusual. Th ese se nior con sul tants turned to an
academic colleague to fi nd out whether scholarly research on top teams might
guide interventions to improve their functioning. With a literature review of
upper- echelons research (Hambrick, 2000; Hambrick & D’Aveni, 1996; Ham-
brick & Mason, 1984) and another academic colleague drawn into the mix, this
group collectively reached a conclusion: Existing research is informative about
leadership team dysfunctions, but the fi eld is wide open for some inventive new
understandings of how to help such teams become more eff ective.
What motivated the con sul tants (Debra A. Nunes, Mary Fontaine, and
James A. Burruss of Hay Group) was a growing frustration that chief execu-
* I would like to thank Richard Hackman and Jim Burruss for their help with a version of
these ideas presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association
held in Boston in 2008; and Mary Fontaine and Deb Nunes for their contributions to our
analysis of the enablers and obstacles to consultant- academic collaboration.
1
tive offi cers (CEOs) were taking pop u lar writings as license to live with dys-
function in their leadership teams. What drove the academics (Richard
Hackman at Harvard and me, then at Dartmouth) was a conviction that
what is seen as “normal life” in upper echelons— zero task interdependence,
competition for a coveted top job, no clear team purposes— are circumstances
under which no other team would be expected to function eff ectively. More-
over, these conditions, we suspected, w ere eminently malleable. Our shared
conviction became the following: It d oesn’t have to be that way. Would we be
interested in undertaking some fi eld research together, with the aim of de-
veloping a diagnostic model for leadership teams that would inform a top
teams consulting practice? We would.
We undertook a study of what became a sample of 120 leadership teams of
organizations around the world, which headed whole businesses or major
business units (Wageman et al., 2008a). Teams were in the sample for a vari-
ety of reasons: Some were led by CEOs who sought help with in eff ec tive lead-
ership teams; others had undertaken strategic and structural changes to
their organizations and wanted advice about the implications for how their
leadership teams operated. Some were poor performers, whereas others were
fundamentally sound.
We assessed their eff ectiveness in providing quality leadership to the
enterprise. Sixteen expert observers, all con sul tants working with leader-
ship teams, drew upon an array of archival, survey, and observational data
to rate each team on Hackman’s (2002) three criteria of eff ectiveness: (1)
how well the team served its main constituencies, (2) the degree to which
the team showed signs of becoming more capable over time, and (3) the
degree to which the net impact of the team was more positive than nega-
tive on the well- being and development of the individual leaders who made
up the team.
We also assessed the design and leadership of each team to identify those
features that most powerfully diff erentiated superb from struggling leader-
ship teams. Members of all teams completed the Team Diagnostic Survey
(TDS) (Wageman, Hackman, & Lehman, 2005), which captures a team’s
main design features, the quality of its work pro cesses, the behavior of the
leader, and the quality of members’ relationships. Finally, for many of the
leaders in the sample, we also had social motive profi les (McClelland, 1985)
and competency assessments (Spencer & Spencer, 1993).
Th e collaboration began in 1999. Around 2003, our intention to write a
book for se nior leaders began to crystallize, and our writing eff orts began in
2005. Th e book Se nior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Th em Great
was released in early 2008. All told, this collaboration was nine years in the
making. What I aim to do in this chapter is use the lessons of our experiences—
both positive and negative— to generate some hypotheses about the condi-
2 PART III Pathways
tions under which academic- consultant collaboration will produce rigorous
research that informs high-q uality interventions in social systems.
Players
To draw general lessons from this par tic u lar academic- consultant collabora-
tion, it helps to know who the players were. Mary Fontaine heads the Leader-
ship practice of Hay Group and is one of the founding members of Hay
Group’s McClelland Center for Research and Innovation. Mary has her PhD
in business administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill and spent some time as a professor at Duke University. She has spent
more than 20 years consulting in the fi eld of leadership and or gan i za tion al
eff ectiveness.
Jim Burruss is also one of the founding members of the McClelland Cen-
ter. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology at Harvard University, studying
and working with David McClelland. He has for 30 and more years applied
his understanding of human motivation to helping organizations in both the
private and public sectors around the world.
Deb Nunes is vice president at the McClelland Center. She has a master’s
degree in counseling and personnel psychology from Western Michigan
University and an MBA from Boston University. Deb’s clients are primarily
large global companies, and she has spent more than 20 years helping CEOs
and the heads of major business units implement their strategies.
Each of these con sul tants has a long history of using rigorous research
directly in his or her practice. Each is deeply invested in the continuing im-
provement of his or her own practice, and all three regularly draw upon basic
research— such as work on the physiological bases of social motives inspired
by McClelland’s research (e.g., Schultheiss, Campbell, & McClelland, 1999)—
when speaking with clients about their leadership challenges.
Richard Hackman and I were both full- time academics when this col-
laboration began. Richard is a professor of social and or gan i za tion al psy-
chology at Harvard. He has conducted research on team dynamics and
per for mance, leadership eff ectiveness, and the design of self- managing teams
and organizations, among many topics. His book on leading teams (Hack-
man, 2002) was the starting place for our model of leadership team eff ec-
tiveness. At the time our collaboration began, I was a member of the faculty
of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. I remain an academic
scholar in part of my professional life as visiting faculty at Harvard in the
Psychology Department. I also have worked for the last several years as the
director of research for Hay Group, continuing to work with Deb, Jim, and
Mary.
Ten Academic- Consultant Collaboration 3
We fi ve w ere, as a group, a leadership team of sorts—o ne that shared re-
sponsibility for creating, launching, and implementing a research project in-
tended to produce fi ndings that guide eff ective action. Like all leadership
team members, we also had our own individual responsibilities— to write
and publish the work, for example, or to build a new top teams practice. So it
seems appropriate to use our own research- derived model of leadership
team eff ectiveness to analyze our collaboration.
Product
How did our own collaboration stand on the three criteria of team eff ec-
tiveness? For Criterion 1, the key question for our collaboration is the fol-
lowing: Was the work useful both for advancing theoretical knowledge
about se nior leadership teams and for informing practice aimed at im-
proving the eff ectiveness of such teams? We produced a book written for
se nior leaders about how to create eff ective leadership teams (Wageman
et al., 2008a) that draws upon our research fi ndings and our collective
observations of the challenges of leading teams of leaders. Our aspiration
was to draw upon the rich observational wisdom of the con sul tants and
the conceptual models of the academics to provide a useable framework
for leaders about how to improve the eff ectiveness of their leadership
teams. Th e book off ers working leaders myriad examples of CEOs strug-
gling with the challenges of leading leadership teams as well as vivid de-
scriptions of how they overcame them, or ga nized around our key research
fi ndings.
If one takes online and in-p erson reviews seriously, the book has been well
received among practitioners. As we have not created a journal article for a
peer- reviewed outlet, the evidence is not clear that the research achieves the
standards of academic rigor and infl uence on theory that are among the
main aspirations of scholarly research. A research article about the diffi cul-
ties of leading teams of leaders is published in a volume on leadership (Wage-
man & Hackman, 2010). Several popular- press articles for executives have
been published from the work as well (Bolster & Wageman, 2009; Nunes &
Wageman, 2007; Wageman et al., 2008b; Wageman, Wilcox, & Gurin, 2008).
But the principle evidence of the usefulness in consulting of our collaborative
research is this: A signifi cant top teams practice within Hay Group has
grown around the work, and the interventions used within that practice are
built explicitly on the implementation model that came out of our collabora-
tion. Overall, I’d suggest this collaboration scores pretty well on Criterion 1,
always allowing that the longitudinal evidence (Does the consulting practice
actually improve the functioning of top teams?) is largely anecdotal.
4 PART III Pathways
For Criterion 2, our question is the following: Did the team operate in
ways that at a minimum avoided signifi cant downward spirals over time,
and— better still— showed signs of developing increasing capability? Th is
criterion requires a little expansion, because it forms the frame for my analy-
sis of the contributors to and detractors from scholar- consultant collabora-
tion more generally.
I draw on the model of team per for mance proposed by Hackman and
Morris (1975; see also Hackman & Wageman, 2005). Th e model posits that
team eff ectiveness is a joint function of three per for mance pro cesses: (a) the
level of eff ort group members collectively expend carry ing out task work, (b)
the appropriateness of the per for mance strategies the group uses, and (c) the
amount of knowledge and skill members bring to bear. Associated with each
of the three per form ance pro cesses is both a characteristic “pro cess loss”
(Steiner, 1972) and an opportunity for positive synergy, or a “pro cess gain.”
Th at is, members may interact in ways that depress the team’s eff ort, the ap-
propriateness of its strategy, and the utilization of member talent; alterna-
tively, their interaction may enhance collective eff ort, generate uniquely
appropriate strategies, and actively develop members’ knowledge and skills.
To assess our standing on Criterion 3, I interviewed the core members of
our collaboration, so that I could legitimately speak on behalf of the team.
Was the net impact of the collaboration, on balance, a positive contribution
to our well- being and learning? Th e answer was an unequivocal “yes.” It may
be a signifi cant lesson for scholar- consultant partnerships more generally
that each member of the team expressed (a) signifi cant and cherished learn-
ing from the experience, and (b) a general feeling that they miss the team and
wish there were more such intensive learning experiences in their lives.
Pro cess: Enablers and Obstacles in
Consultant- Academic Collaborations
Our collaboration had both strengths and weaknesses on the three pro-
cesses. Based on our experience, I off er some practical lessons about what
helped us and what got in the way, and pose some practical principles for
creating conditions for eff ective collaboration between academic scholars
and con sult ant practitioners.
Lessons from Eff ort Levels in Our Collaboration
Two key eff ort- related patterns characterized our work. First, whenever we
had our periodic team meetings, we typically spent a whole day together,
examining quantitative fi ndings from analysis of the TDS data (primarily
Ten Academic- Consultant Collaboration 5
the responsibility of the academics) and exploring those patterns based on
direct observations from working with those teams (primarily the work of
the con sul tants). Almost without exception, the engagement of members at
these meetings was very high. We worked hard at developing our insights
without glossing over real diff erences in our perspectives. Th e behavioral
signs of deep commitment to the project within the meetings were very
strong.
However, we also showed some signifi cant pro cess losses around eff ort.
Often each of us committed to some analysis or pre- reading in preparation
for the next meeting. When we convened, we invariably found that several or
all of us had failed to do our “homework.” For example, the quantitative
analyses were prepared in advance and circulated to the team, but members
had not actually read or thought about the material in advance, and we
wasted considerable time at each meeting reading materials in silence as we
sat around a conference table. Levels of pre- work even declined over time, as
the team members who typically did come prepared early on learned that
others might not, and thus a downward spiral began. Moreover, these meet-
ings were well spaced out in time (once every two months or so). To under-
score the signifi cance of this proc ess loss: It took us nine years from the
beginning of the project before we wrote a complete draft of the book.
Th is pattern of timing is not unique to this collaboration. In my now
considerable experience conducting research with con sul tants, the rhythm
frequently evolves this way: short, intensive bursts of focus by the team
between long periods of little or no progress and poor preparation in ad-
vance of the collaborative work. Even my own dedicated team of researcher-
consultants at Hay Group fell into this pattern. Our collaborative project
with Tim Hall and other colleagues at Boston University (BU) studying the
impact of career complexity on leadership development (Wolff et al., 2008)
also unfolded this way, though it had periods of real acceleration late in the
game. Our wholly internal projects comparing the challenges faced by chief
executives in India, China, and the West (North America and Western Eu-
rope) (Gutierrez, Spencer, & Zhu, 2009) and our research on the coming
leadership drought (Wolff , Fontaine, & Wageman, 2009; Wolff , Callahan, &
Spencer, 2009) showed similar stop- start patterns. What contributed to
these eff ort patterns— both the positive energy at meetings and the long
lulls in concentrated eff ort?
Enabler: Convene for a purpose that is highly consequential for both con-
sul tants and scholars. We labored hard on this project across a span of
years because we all deeply wanted to solve the problem of how to enhance
the eff ectiveness of leadership teams. I believe it is signifi cant that the phe-
nomenon and the research question came fi rst from the con sul tants, and
6 PART III Pathways
after an exploration of the research literature, then became an intriguing
puzzle for the academics. I don’t mean to assert that the order of events has
to happen that way. But that sequence meant that the subject of the research
was without question one of some urgency and importance to astute practi-
tioners. Th ey needed to understand why CEOs had such in eff ec tive teams.
Th e leaders they worked with were feeling the pain, and the con sul tants’
deeply held professional values drove them to want answers. Th e scholars in
the group needed to fi nd out if their own understandings of teams in organi-
zations could provide some leverage on leadership teams given the very real
diff erences from other teams we understood well. As a consequence, there
was a superb fi t of people’s values with the collaborative purpose and a pow-
erful drive to work toward answers.
In my observation, few academic- consultant collaborations begin this
way. More typically, the research question comes from the academics, shaped
by the scholar’s own interests rather than a pressing practical problem for
con sul tants and their clients. Because Hay Group owns extensive databases
(millions of assessments of working leaders around the world), I am often
the recipient of requests for data from doctoral students and faculty. Th e
next study of emotional intelligence across industry sectors, or Leader Mem-
ber Exchange-b ased theory about leadership styles, or a further refi nement
of learning styles in groups is unlikely to gain much traction among con sul-
tants, when the underlying problem addressed is so obscure or small. Although
providing access to data is certainly a great way for consulting fi rms like Hay
Group to contribute to the development of new knowledge about organiza-
tions, these requests are not, in my view, ideal opportunities for true collabo-
ration between con sul tants and academics.
But just as often, a “pressing problem” identifi ed by con sul tants is some-
thing already pretty well explored in the research literature, and thus is of
little interest to a scholar seeking a great topic— though it can be of great in-
terest to con sult ants who want some new and marketable intellectual prop-
erty to sell. As research director, I also am the recipient of many requests
from colleagues about “what we should study”: cross- cultural collaboration,
matrix organizations, virtual teams, globalization, or family- owned busi-
nesses. Th ese ideas about what would make for useful research are born from
the expressed frustrations and challenges of working leaders. But they repre-
sent already well-t rodden research ground. Con sul tants cannot know that
because the problems are articulated in lay language or business jargon un-
related to academic search terms one would use to fi nd relevant research (for
example, at Google Scholar). And that is not what a typical con sul tant would
do, in any case. I hope my con sul tant colleagues will forgive the generaliza-
tion, but reaching out to academics or seeking scholarly knowledge about a
client problem is not typical behavior among con sul tants. One of my chief
Ten Academic- Consultant Collaboration 7
complaints over the last several years of working closely with management
con sul tants is that they do not read much. Typically, the fi rst reaction when
they face a novel problem in practice is to ask other practitioners if they have
faced that problem and already have a methodology for tackling it. Th eir sec-
ond instinct is to invent something based on their own ideas and experience.
Asking these questions— Has anyone ever studied this problem systemati-
cally? What does research have to say about it?— is far down the list.
When con sul tants do look to the scholarly literature for insight, they
often are disappointed and frustrated. Or gan i za tion al scholars may study
real problems, but those problems are framed using language that practi-
tioners will not recognize. With a foot in both camps, one useful role I have
found myself playing is fi nding and summarizing the scholarly research
relevant to a problem facing clients. For example, I might be asked: Has
anyone done a study of what it takes to transition between a line leadership
role and a matrix role? No. But they have studied why organizations design
matrix structures, and the challenges they create. Th ey also have studied
informal infl uence pro cesses and peer- to- peer collaboration across func-
tions, behaviors associated with eff ectiveness in a matrix leadership role.
Taken together, diff erent streams of research in distinct literatures can
create a sturdy platform for a knowledgeable approach with clients. But the
skill required to fi nd these studies and synthesize them is an academic
one. It is a critical path to making research useful, and one that scholarly
writers could undertake more often.
Th e danger of these intergroup diff erences is that con sul tants and aca-
demics fall into stereotyping each other. Th e academics, fruitlessly seeking
opportunities to pursue their research projects, receive a lukewarm response
and come to view cons ult ants as anti- intellectual or uninterested in evi-
dence. Cons ul tants, seeking readily applicable frameworks that speak di-
rectly to a client’s problems, view researchers as clueless about reality or
interested in novelty at the expense of utility. And both groups miss opportu-
nities to fi nd the shared consequential purposes that underlie each of their
concerns.
A key resource that cons ul tants can bring to a research collaboration is
knowledge of what their clients’ struggles are—t hat is, what would be useful—
as well as the language clients use to describe those struggles, which ulti-
mately will be needed to express fi ndings in usable terms. A key resource that
researchers bring is the skill of developing problems into researchable
questions— and knowledge of what already has been learned by others (see
Table 10.1 for a summary of the benefi ts and risks of academic- consultant
collaboration). Bringing those two resources together requires a deep con-
versation about purposes— a collaborative defi nition of a project that both
surfaces and satisfi es the main needs of both sides of the collaboration.
8 PART III Pathways
Table 10.1 Benefi ts and Risks of Academic- Consultant Research Collaborations
Benefi ts Risks
Access across many organizations, Language diff erences and potential
many diff erent manifestations of a fault lines in the team
phenomenon, enhanced generalizability
Combination of problems working Confl icting rhythms of the work of
leaders encounter and skill in posing con sul tants and researchers, leading to
researchable questions inappropriately disaggregating tasks
Direct path into practice Mishandling the learning- production
balance
Intrinsic motivation: fun and personal Confl icts over intellectual property
learning rights
Obstacle: Th e rhythms of research work and consulting work are confl ict-
ing . . . as are the incentives. For all our drive to get answers to a pressing
problem, we lost a lot of momentum as we worked together. Th e clues to why
we suff ered eff ort- related pro cess losses lie, I think, where such eff ort prob-
lems usually do: the features of the work and the features of the incentives in
our organizations.
Th e con sul tants were deeply experienced individuals who had profound
insight into leadership and group dynamics. Th ose characteristics made
them ideal partners in research that reached into new theoretical territory. It
also made them very expensive and rarely available. It is highly costly for a
consulting fi rm to invest se nior cons ul tants’ time in research- based develop-
ment of a new methodology. Only when the potential market is large, and the
method is a substantial new approach applicable to many clients— not a re-
fi nement of existing practice— is the investment of time and money worth it
to a consulting fi rm. Time spent on research is time not billing.
Th at fact, in my view, is why most consulting fi rm “research” consists
largely of analysts surveying leaders and other practitioners about “best
practices,” rather than engaging in predictive research about infl uences on
individual, group, and or gan i za tion al eff ectiveness. It simply is not viewed as
cost eff ective to develop that kind of rigorous basis for client work. Many de-
cision makers in organizations will buy consulting practices that have no
research basis, so why spend that kind of money on it? Th at certainly was not
the stance of Mary, Deb, and Jim— but more ju nior con sult ants with less po-
liti cal capital could not have made the choice to spend their time on a long-
term research collaboration. Th at choice is far more easily made by the
academics in the group, who are expected to concentrate their time on
groundbreaking projects.
Ten Academic- Consultant Collaboration 9