In Brief
The Pros
By assigning people to multiple teams at once, organizations make efficient use of time and brainpower. They also do a better job of solving complex problems and sharing knowledge across groups.
The Cons
Competing priorities and other conflicts can make it hard for teams with overlapping membership to stay on track. Group cohesion often suffers. And people who belong to many teams at once may experience burnout, which hurts engagement and performance.
The Fixes
Leaders can mitigate these risks by building trust and familiarity through launches and skills mapping, identifying which groups are most vulnerable to shocks, improving coordination across teams, and carving out more opportunities for learning.
A senior executive we’ll call Christine is overseeing the launch of Analytix, her company’s new cloud-based big-data platform, and she’s expected to meet a tight go-live deadline. Until two weeks ago, her team was on track to do that, but it has since fallen seriously behind schedule. Her biggest frustration: Even though nothing has gone wrong with Analytix, her people keep getting pulled into other projects. She hasn’t seen her three key engineers for days, because they’ve been busy fighting fires around a security breach on another team’s product. Now she has to explain to the CEO that she can’t deliver as promised—at a time when the company badly needs a successful launch.
