Mark Mortensen, a 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.
Key episode topics include: collaboration and teams, leading teams, business management, organizational restructuring
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With all of the projects that are part of knowledge work, sharing people across multiple project teams has its upsides: cost savings, process improvements, the capability to solve complex problems.
Be ready though, as a project team leader or organizational leader, to manage the risks, which are stress and burnout, rocky transitions, reduced learning and motivation, problems with one project stalling progress for the others.
INSEAD professor Mark Mortensen wrote about these upsides and downsides in a 2017 Harvard Business Review article titled “The Overcommitted Organization.” Which led to this conversation with HBR IdeaCast host Sarah Green Carmichel. In it, Mark explains why so many organizations rely on multiteaming, what managers often overlook about its costs, and how to keep coordination from becoming a bottleneck.
Here’s Sarah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Mark, thank you so much for being here today.
MARK MORTENSEN: Thank you so much for having me.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, how do managers react when you tell them about that kind of risk?
MARK MORTENSEN: This is a topic that comes up quite a bit in executive sessions or consulting with companies. And we start talking about these issues. And the interesting thing is, when I lay this out, what I typically hear is a whole lot of silence, a whole lot of wide-eyed silence of, We’re not really measuring that. And then usually a few scribbled notes of, Maybe we should. For me, I found this fascinating. This is also a big motivator of why we wanted to write this piece: I think this is actually a very important thing and an important message to get out there as something for organizations to be thinking about.
This occurs primarily because the person who has the best understanding of the teams and the projects that any given individual is on is that individual themselves. And the way in which we staff projects today, very often, is almost on a dyadic relationship, right? A manager says, Hey, I really need you on this project. Can I have 20 percent of your time? And what happens as a result is people have these relationships: I’m on this project 20 percent, this project 20 percent, this project 40 percent. A, they don’t always check that the math works. Sometimes they end up with a 137 percent dedication, and that’s obviously a problem. B, nobody knows, nobody has the big picture—or very often, nobody has the big-picture sense of what are all the projects and all the teams that somebody is working on.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Let’s just run through, what are the pros for the organization.
MARK MORTENSEN: So, for the organization, as we said, there’s this this idea of efficient use of resources: If I am only needed 50 percent on one project, why not use the other 50 percent of my resources? And also, the learning argument, the information transfer argument, particularly at the level of the organization. If you want the organization, different parts of the organization, to know what’s going on, having those people cross staffed across different projects and different teams is a really good way for doing that.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And the cons?
MARK MORTENSEN: Obviously, a lot of the cons come at the individual level or at the team level, and they get aggregated up. The one con that’s really an organizational-level challenge is what I call human capital interdependence. So, you can think of it as, there’s a new type of risk on the block that we haven’t really been thinking of. Managers for years have been thinking about their processes, have mapped them all out in excruciating detail to figure out, If I do X, what’s going to happen after that? What, is it going to be Y? Is it going to be Z? How do I understand that? And part of that is also to understand the risks, right? If I have a failure at this point in my process, what’s going to happen downstream? Now, this is always framed in terms of, This particular task I’m doing, how does it affect the next task, right? And this may be, this is an input to that task. It could be, this is a competitor to that to that output—whatever it might be.
What’s coming into play here is we may have interdependencies based purely on the fact that we share individuals, even though the work we’re doing on these teams is totally separate. If I have a production designer—automotive designer—they might be doing work on a car. They also might be doing work on a truck. They also might be doing work on a motorcycle. Now, every one of those projects, if it shares that one person, is now interlinked. There’s nothing that has to do between those projects. There’s no strong reason that those projects have to be kept lockstep. But now that there’s one person who shared across them, all of a sudden, they find that they are. And what happens, and this is where we see this new risk coming, is an issue that comes based on the motorcycle project or on the, the car project, right? There’s a safety recall. Suddenly all hands on deck. Everybody has to try to fix this problem.
Well, if that takes all those people away from their other projects, that may mean that suddenly the truck project is on standby because we’re missing our two key engineers because they were pulled away. There’s nothing about the car and the truck that on paper look connected. There’s nothing about them that actually means that they have to stay together. But because they share people, now they find that they’re actually bound very tightly. That’s a new type of risk that we face.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Who is the most likely person to be on multiple teams and, kind of, suffer from that, sort of, too much of a good thing that this can lead to?
MARK MORTENSEN: So, it’s a tough question. I think different people at different levels and different roles are on it for different reasons. People who are very, very specialized, they have great expertise, they are the deep knowledge on a particular task. I have seen this very, very often also on R&D teams, right, somebody who has advanced degrees, a lot of deep knowledge in a particular thing, that person gets pulled on many different projects because I need somebody with this incredible expertise. Now, very often those people are also very, very expensive. They’re very expensive because they’re so specialized that the cost benefit tradeoff doesn’t quite work, right? For me to own that person 100 percent for me, to have that person 100 percent on my project, is very, very expensive when I only need 10 percent of them. So, one reason this happens is people with deep expertise get allocated on many, many teams because lots of teams need at least a little bit of what they’ve got, and they’re the only one who has that skill.
Now, there’s another very different role that happens, which is more of an administrative role. I mentioned before my colleague and co-author Heidi has done a lot of work and professional service firms. If you’re a senior partner, and your job is maintaining the relationship, you may be that point person, that relationship manager, on multiple, different projects, and so you’re being pulled in; even though you’re not doing deep analytical domain work on that particular piece, you own that relationship, and you have that.
One way to think of it, it’s actually two sides of the same coin: in the one case, it’s deep technical knowledge; and the other is case, it’s the relationship knowledge. It’s the people who have something unique, and they need to be stretched across multiple projects.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Teams seemed to sort of gradually expand. You know, there’s this kind of feeling of, Oh, we can just add one more person to this email or one more person to this meeting or one more person to this project. And that often actually results in, like, exponential increase in coordination costs.
MARK MORTENSEN: So, you’re raising a really good point. It’s, it’s an ideal world scenario when I say this only happens because people have this incredibly deep knowledge, and they’re the unique contributors in that way. Sometimes it also happens purely from a, sort of a horsepower argument: We need more people. We have a certain number of resources, and it may not necessarily be specialized skills or specialized knowledge, but we actually just need more hands. We need more hands on deck. And so we have people who are more exchangeable resources in that regard. But I think you’re also raising a really good point: phenomena like “team creep” is, at least, that’s the way that I often talk about it in my sessions, this happens all the time, right? Oh, it would be really great to get somebody with X point of view; or, It would be really great to get somebody from this part of the organization because we want to make sure that we’ve got buy-in; we want to make sure that they’re on board, that they understand what’s going on.
As we said, this is a conduit for information transfer. That’s a really valuable thing. Maybe we want to make sure that we have as many of these pathways as possible. So, it’s not always that we’re designing teams sitting with the playbook.
Martine Haas and I wrote an article that came out last year where we were talking about, how do you design teams, and we know from a long history of research a lot of things that go into designing teams well, we don’t always follow that advice. We often end up in a situation where little incremental changes along the way end up with a big, a little bit more of a big mess. So, I think what we see is a combination: both teams that are designed the way they are for a very good reason and ones that kind of have evolved in that way. And nobody’s really been paying attention. And, and it often happens that later on we stop and take a look and say, Wait a second; maybe we need to revisit this and think about it a little bit differently.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. So, there’s been a pretty well-documented look at that phenomenon that switch tasking and switching from one thing to the act is really draining. It’s stressful, and it’s not very efficient, and there’s sort of costs to all that switching. So why then do organizations still think it somehow makes sense to have someone spending, you know, 10 percent of their time sort of peanut-buttered across a lot of different things?
MARK MORTENSEN: So, unfortunately, as a manager, as a leader, we’re not thinking day to day about the experience of our employees. Very often that’s the case. So, I may be doing my job. I may say, you know, I need you on task or task B, and I allocate people because it doesn’t register—I don’t actually know in my head how many other tasks are you working on, how many other projects. It’s not done maliciously by any means. Part of it is just the lack of information, right?
And the benefit that I get as a team lead or as a division lead or as a vice president—whatever it might be—the benefits I get from having my people working on many different projects, those are easy to see. They come out on the bottom line. The costs aren’t always as easy to see because that