Executive Interviews: Interview with Bill Fischer on Building High Performance Teams
May 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Bill Fischer
Professor of Technology, IMD

• It must be a dream for every company to have virtuoso teams, for their promising potential. Yet, as you observed, “despite such potential, most companies deliberately avoid virtuoso teams, thinking that the risks are too high.” Why do companies avoid virtuoso teams knowing fully well the potential benefits of having virtuoso teams?
  We think that most managers are intimidated by great talent, and are afraid of creating the challenging environment which celebrates opinions and egos. In our view, we want opinions, and they tend to come along with egos; so that’s the price to be paid to get better ideas. Most managers, we believe, find it less stressful to work with “harmonious” groups, but ultimately pay the price of getting “harmonious” results, when bold, and ambitious ones are required.

• One of the biggest stumbling blocks for any team performance is individuals' egos and idiosyncrasies. However, you have suggested building the group ego. How to build group ego and what are the benefits of building group ego?
  When you are facing the need for “big change”, you need more, rather than fewer, opinions. Note that we are speaking about opinions and not just “information.” In such situations we need opinions because they represent pre-digested information and, as a result, it is quicker and more efficient to work with opinions. But, opinions are typically associated with egos, and so this is a prescription for a more difficult management situation. The group ego is really “pride” of association with other great individual performers, who are allowed to continue to be great individual performers, even though they are now part of a team. When these project teams are “branded”, such as Apple’s Lisa, Mac, or iPod teams, Apollo 13, Microsoft’s x-Box team, Intel’s Pentium team, etc., this group pride also becomes visible and portable, and works to become an important part of the individuals’ resumes.

• What happens to virtuoso teams in these current economic crisis times?
  We think that they become evenmore important than when times are good. We’ve never been in a crisis such as this before; we need more good ideas than ever, and this calls for more virtuoso team experiences. As my coauthor, Andy Boynton, has observed last fall in The Boston Globe: When you have to rethink the whole financial system [which we do]... You want the smartest people in the world at the table figuring it out. Candidates should be willing to labor around the clock. They’ll be required to toil together in close proximity and at a frenetic pace. They must hammer out breakthrough solutions, putting aside politics, ignoring general consensus, and sparing no one’s feelings.” It makes sense, doesn’t it? And, we need similar approaches at all other levels, including the firm.

• The world is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis created by a few greedy investment bankers. The effects of this crisis are quite pronounced. What is the importance of team work and high performance in such troubled times?
  Teams have a higher probability of having more good ideas than individuals do, and VTs have a much higher probability than do your typical teams. In addition, those ideas need to be novel and we need to generate them faster, rather than slower. Virtuoso Teams provide our best hope for such achievement.

• What according to you are high performance teams? What are their unique characteristics? Can you give examples of a few companies that have created and nurtured high performance teams?
  One good way to compare highperforming teams with VTs, is to consider the fortunes of all-star teams in sports, where individual stars are typically recruited to such teams, whether they are football, cricket, basketball, or baseball, and yet they are not forced to be all-star individuals within a team context. The failure is typically not so much that of the all-star performer, as it is with the leader, who all too often fails to exercise the discipline that is needed to move a team from individuals operating individually, to all-star individuals operating within a teamcontext.