MGMT 527 Week 3 Team Leadership in Practice Example

Engaged Teams Under Pressure: Three Cases of Team Success and the Columbia Mission Management Team

Teams succeed or fail on more than talent. Some of the most capable groups in the world have failed in public, and some ordinary groups have done extraordinary work under pressure. Starbird and Cavanagh (2011) argue that engaged team performance comes from aligning a team's processes and its people around shared results. This paper examines three teams that achieved that alignment, cardiac surgery teams that learned a difficult new operation, the rescuers of 33 trapped Chilean miners and the Pixar filmmakers who critique one another's work, and identifies four reasons they succeeded. It then contrasts them with NASA's Mission Management Team during the final flight of the space shuttle Columbia, where the same four conditions were missing.

Case 1: Cardiac Surgery Teams Learning a New Procedure

When sixteen U.S. hospitals took up minimally invasive cardiac surgery, Edmondson et al. (2001) followed their operating teams. The technique changed how surgeons, anesthesiologists, perfusionists and nurses had to coordinate because the surgeon could no longer see and touch the heart directly. The hospitals bought the same equipment and attended the same training, yet some teams mastered the procedure while others abandoned it. The successful teams followed a recognizable path. Their surgeons treated the new operation as a team learning project rather than a technical add-on, chose team members deliberately and kept the same team together for early cases, rehearsed the procedure before operating, and met to review cases afterward. In those teams, nurses and perfusionists spoke up during operations because the surgeon had invited them to, and the team improved quickly. The study's central lesson is that the same technology produced different results depending on how the team's leader framed and structured the work.

Case 2: The Chilean Mine Rescue

In August 2010, a collapse at the San José copper and gold mine in northern Chile trapped 33 miners about 700 meters underground. Rashid et al. (2013) describe how the rescue, led by the engineer André Sougarret, drew together government officials, the state mining company, drilling contractors, international specialists and NASA advisers. The leaders did not wait for a single perfect plan; they pursued several drilling approaches at once and kept the teams working on them informed of each other's progress. Seventeen days after the collapse, a drill reached the miners and returned with a note saying all 33 were alive. Sixty-nine days after the collapse, every miner was lifted to the surface in a specially built capsule. Rashid et al. (2013) emphasize the leaders' willingness to admit what they did not know, to bring in expertise from outside, and to keep hope realistic while testing many options.

Case 3: Pixar's Braintrust

Catmull (2008), then president of Pixar, described how the studio built a culture in which films that begin, in his words, as ugly and unformed are made good through candid collective critique. Its central mechanism is the Braintrust, a small group of experienced directors and storytellers who watch a film in progress and give its director notes. The group has no authority: the director decides what to do with the notes. Catmull explains that removing authority from the critics made candor safer, because the director could listen without feeling overruled. Pixar also holds daily reviews at which animators show unfinished work to colleagues. The studio's record of commercially and critically successful films in its first two decades, and its recovery of Toy Story 2 when that film was in trouble, illustrate the value of a team process built for honest feedback.

Why These Teams Succeeded

Four reasons appear in all three cases. First, the leaders framed the work as learning rather than execution. The cardiac surgeons, the rescue leaders and Pixar's directors all treated uncertainty as normal and expected their teams to learn as they went. Second, each team had structures that brought people together around the work: rehearsals and case reviews in the operating room, coordinated drilling teams in Chile and regular film reviews at Pixar. Third, candor was protected. Nurses could speak up during surgery, rescuers could report bad news, and Pixar's critics could speak frankly because they held no authority over the director. Fourth, the leaders drew on expertise beyond their own rank, inviting perfusionists, foreign drillers and colleagues from other films into the decisions.

These reasons fit what research says about team leadership. Pooling studies of who leads inside teams and how, Burke et al. (2006) found that both task-focused and person-focused leader behaviors were related to team effectiveness, and that empowering behavior was particularly related to team learning. Zaccaro et al. (2001) argue that team leaders work largely by shaping the team's shared understanding, motivation, emotional climate and coordination, rather than by directing each task. Starbird and Cavanagh (2011) make a similar point in practical terms: engagement grows when people see the line between their own tasks and the team's results and work inside processes that invite their contribution. Lacerenza et al. (2018) add that team development interventions, especially structured debriefs after performance, are among the most dependable ways to improve teamwork, which matches the case reviews of the surgical teams and the daily reviews at Pixar.

The Contrasting Case: Columbia's Mission Management Team

On January 16, 2003, a piece of insulating foam broke from the external tank of the space shuttle Columbia during launch and struck the left wing. During the sixteen-day mission, engineers on a debris assessment team grew concerned and sought satellite or other imagery of the wing, but their requests did not reach or persuade the Mission Management Team, which concluded that foam strikes were a maintenance issue rather than a flight risk. On February 1, 2003, Columbia broke apart during reentry, and all seven crew members were lost. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (2003) concluded that NASA's organizational causes were as responsible as the physical cause, citing a culture in which past success with foam strikes had made them seem acceptable and in which dissenting engineering views struggled to be heard.

Measured against the four reasons, the Mission Management Team lacked each one. Its meetings framed the foam strike as a known issue to be closed rather than an uncertainty to be learned about. Its structure separated the engineers who held the concern from the managers who made the decision. Candor was not protected; the board found that engineers felt unable to press their concerns more forcefully. And the team did not reach for available expertise, since the requests for imagery that might have answered the question went unfulfilled. The individuals involved were capable and committed, which is the most sobering lesson of the case: without the right team processes, capability was not enough.

A Biblical Perspective

Paul describes the church as a body in which no member can tell another that it is not needed, and in which the parts that look least important turn out to be the ones the body cannot do without (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 1 Corinthians 12:21-22). The Columbia engineers were treated as the weaker members of the body, and their concern was the one the mission most needed. The successful teams in this paper honored every member's contribution, from the perfusionist to the drilling contractor to the animator showing unfinished work. Solomon's observation that plans fail without counsel and succeed with many advisers (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Proverbs 15:22) describes Pixar's Braintrust almost exactly. A Christian team leader has both a practical and a moral reason to build teams in which every voice can be heard.

Conclusion

The three successful teams in this paper worked in very different settings, yet they shared four conditions: leaders who framed the work as learning, structures that brought people together around the task, protected candor and a willingness to draw on expertise regardless of rank. The Columbia case shows that the absence of these conditions can defeat even an exceptionally talented organization. For a project manager, the practical implications are concrete: frame a new project as a learning effort, hold rehearsals and reviews, make it safe and expected for team members to raise concerns, and seek out the person who knows the most about a problem regardless of where that person sits on the chart. These are the processes through which talented people become an engaged team.

References

Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Klein, C., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Halpin, S. M. (2006). What type of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(3), 288-307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.02.007

Catmull, E. (2008). How Pixar fosters collective creativity. Harvard Business Review, 86(9), 64-72.

Columbia Accident Investigation Board. (2003). Report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (Vol. 1). National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Edmondson, A. C., Bohmer, R. M., & Pisano, G. P. (2001). Disrupted routines: Team learning and new technology implementation in hospitals. Administrative Science Quarterly, 46(4), 685-716. https://doi.org/10.2307/3094828

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Lacerenza, C. N., Marlow, S. L., Tannenbaum, S. I., & Salas, E. (2018). Team development interventions: Evidence-based approaches for improving teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 517-531. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000295

Rashid, F., Edmondson, A. C., & Leonard, H. B. (2013). Leadership lessons from the Chilean mine rescue. Harvard Business Review, 91(7/8), 113-119.

Starbird, D., & Cavanagh, R. (2011). Building engaged team performance: Align your processes and people to achieve game-changing business results. McGraw-Hill.

Zaccaro, S. J., Rittman, A. L., & Marks, M. A. (2001). Team leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 12(4), 451-483. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1048-9843(01)00093-5