Ruth Wageman’s first field research project, as she recalled it in 2020, began with a reorganization. She was a graduate student at Harvard, and the people she was studying were service reps who had just been put into self-managing teams.
For the reps it was a big change. Each had once had his or her own customers, schedule and preferred way of doing repairs. Now they shared territories, designed their work processes as a team and coordinated their schedules. Their front-line managers changed jobs too. A manager who had supervised 10 to 20 individuals became the coach of two to four teams.
The managers wanted to know what that meant. What “precise alchemy of coaching behavior,” in Wageman’s words, would turn their teams into superb ones? Coordinating tasks? Asking good questions? Cheering them on and recognizing good work? Which of their old supervisor habits, like telling a team its problems and how to solve them, had to go?
Design against coaching
She also published a separate field study in 2001 in Organization Science. It compared two kinds of things leaders do for self-managing teams: the design choices they make when setting a team up, and their hands-on coaching once it is working. Her frequent co-author, the Harvard psychologist J. Richard Hackman, described it in his books as a study of self-managing field service teams at Xerox.
Both kinds of leader behavior, she found, affected how well a team managed itself, the quality of members’ relationships and how satisfied members were. Only design affected how well the teams actually did the work. In Hackman’s summary, for performance outcomes, design features accounted for 37 percent of the variation, and leaders’ coaching for less than 1 percent.
Coaching wasn’t useless. The two interacted. Well-designed teams were helped more by good coaching than poorly designed ones were, and they were hurt less by bad coaching.
Sixty, thirty, ten
Later Wageman and Hackman built a survey, the Team Diagnostic Survey, around the conditions that their studies suggested mattered most, and tested it with hundreds of teams. From that work came a rule of thumb they called 60-30-10. Hackman put it as his “best estimate”: 60 percent of the variation in team effectiveness depends on how far the conditions for a good team are in place, 30 percent on how the team is launched, and 10 percent on hands-on coaching once the work is under way. Wageman framed it as advice on where leaders should put their energy.
The front-line managers from her first project, she wrote, found the 60-30-10 idea “both immediately helpful, and also reassuring.”