Absent Leaders and Combined Teams

By Beth LAY (USA)

A Conversation with Asher Balkin on Brittleness Encroaching

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

Asher Balkin is a Research Engineer at the Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. Asher has worked in fields as diverse as public health, international security, surgical research, and human/automation interaction.

Following are notes from a conversation with Asher as he advised leaders from Lewis Tree Services, a line clearance company with 4500 crews distributed across the US and deemed an essential service in how to respond, early in the COVID virus situation. https://lewistree.com/about-us/new-view-safety/

As COVID-19 spreads, there are an increasing number of leaders and team members absent due to illness, precautionary self-quarantine, childcare, etc. To adapt to this situation, teams reconfigure, and leaders fill in, but ultimately there are not enough people to cover the work and our systems become stressed and stretched.

Absent leaders, and teams who do not normally work together, often result in brittle situations.

Combined teams
When you change anyone on a team, you change the entire team. You have a different team. It takes several weeks, at a minimum, to integrate into one team. When combining teams, the first several weeks of working together are high-risk while the team may be out of sync. Communication breaks down. People cannot predict each other’s actions, or how they do work, because their routines are different.

Absent leader
A leader being out of sync is more dangerous than combined teams. Every leader has a different style and teams adapt to their leader’s style. Fill-in leaders may assign work that is a mismatch with skills. They may not know the customers. With an unfamiliar leader, team members may hesitate to raise concerns.

Bringing teams together and having leaders fill-in for each other ultimately enables us to be more flexible—increasing resilience—if we plan for it and manage differently as teams and leaders adapt. It provides the opportunity to learn from someone new, practice new skills, and build relationships so that people ask for and offer help. In the military, cross-training is common. For Marines, being basic riflemen is the mission, yet they have regular jobs, too. Cross-training builds bench strength at multiple levels.

A core strategy of Resilience Engineering is having extra help ready to deploy. General, non-specific resources, who can help in a wide range of situations, are needed when uncertainty is high. For example, during the first wave of COVID-19, nurses’ associations reached out to retired nurses for help directly in hospitals or to train new nurses. Another version of this strategy is to drop in an expert without a predefined role to co-locate and offer help, where needed.

Following are strategies to plan and manage differently when your system is stressed or stretched

• Build a reserve of individuals who are ready to help (i.e., non-specific, general resources)
  • Bring retired leaders on as contractors
  • Identify high-potential team leaders who are willing to fill in (as a development opportunity) and have them shadow for a week
  • Move people in field-support roles to direct field-contact roles,  They can act as an extra set of eyes (quality checks), offer general help, and assist leaders to free up capacity.
• Ensure the success of a new or temporary leader
  • Perform handoffs covering team capabilities and gaps (i.e., team insights)
  • Overcommunicate; include more details than normal when sharing work plans
  • Make everything as explicit as possible (assumptions get us in trouble)
  • Define decision authority
  • Ask the team:
    • What do I need to know about you?
    • What would help you to know about me?
    • What problems have you had in the past when a new leader filled in?
• Ensure the success of merged teams
  • Talk about “why” the team has been brought together
  • Share the mission, project details and customer objectives
  • Share skill levels (e.g., this is what I am good at, this is what I am working on, this is what am going to need help with)
  • Ask fellow team members:
    • What do we need to know about you?
    • What would help you to know about me?
    • What problems have you had in the past with newly formed teams?
  • Identify ONE person in charge on each work site
• Reduce the workload: push off work (e.g., administrative work) that can be done later
• Postpone critical or difficult work; if necessary to perform, increase peer checks
• Increase leadership engagement and establish routine check-in points
• Proactively look for signs of stress
  • Failure is asymptotic; things spiral out of control quickly
  • Cognitive load is limited; once limits are neared, we begin to miss things (Note: This is a team as well as an individual dynamic)
  • Identify which resources are most likely to be over-loaded
• Notice stack-up of risk (watch out for three or more!)
  • Have extra leadership or safety support

Risk factors and error-likely situations