The half-time rally

I think just about every college football fan in the country has been watching the 2018 Alabama Crimson Tide football team with awe, excitement, admiration, and respect.  The Crimson Tide is undefeated heading into next week's Iron Bowl against cross-state rival, Auburn, and they are currently ranked number 1 in the country.  What's perhaps more impressive is how they've been winning.  The Crimson Tide offense has averaged almost 49 points per game this year, while the defense has held the Alabama opponents to an average of 13 points per game (the average point differential has been over 35 points per game)!   So, the half-time score this past weekend against The Citadel turned more than a few heads - the game was tied 10-10!  After the half, the Alabama team was truer to form and eventually won the game, 50-17. 

Alabama's football coach, Nick Saban, said during his post-game press conference, "We didn’t play very well as a team in the first half, which I take a lot of responsibility for not getting our team ready psychologically. Every team that comes here and plays us is going to give us their best shot. These guys have everything to gain and nothing to lose. If you can’t motivate yourself to be the best player that you can be, then you’re not going to be ready to play." 

In coach-speak, basically that means that Coach Saban gave his players an earful during half-time.  To be a fly on the wall for that one!  Whatever he said to his players at half-time, it worked.  Which brings up an interesting question - can other teams (outside of the world of sports, of course) benefit from a so-called "half-time break"?  As it turns out, the available research says yes (for more on using sports teams as models for workplace teams, see the excellent article by Nancy Katz here).

Half-time is unique in that it represents the temporal midpoint in the normal life cycle of a team (whether it is a sports team or a project management team) facing a deadline (in either case, when time runs out).  Half-time therefore represents a special opportunity for the team to look back and evaluate what's working well and what's not working well.  Reviewing the progress to date then leads to corrective actions to learn and improve, so that the team can achieve its objectives in the time remaining.  Several years ago, Dr. Connie J.G. Gersick, then at UCLA, found that project management teams can and usually do benefit from stopping midway to critically evaluate and revise their approach (see here).  

In her initial studies (a set of field studies using actual working project management teams), Dr. Gersick found that as opposed to the traditional, sequential, and linear models of group/team development commonly reported in the literature (for example, see Tuchman's classic model of forming, storming, norming, and performing), groups and teams exhibit a variety of behaviors to accomplish their objectives and progress through several different, and often non-linear, phases of development (see here).  However, the timing of when the groups that were studied formed, maintained, and changed the ways that they worked together was surprisingly consistent.  All of the groups (several different groups were observed) started out with a crescendo and decrescendo of momentum, enthusiasm, and energy.  As progress slowed, groups then went through a "concentrated burst of changes" in which old patterns of work were dropped and new methods were adopted.  The groups appeared to re-gain lost momentum during this period, which continued on through the completion of the project.  Surprisingly, these transitions all consistently occurred at the midway point, i.e. half-time, between the start of the project and its deadline, regardless of how much time each group was allotted to complete their project!  She called her new model (at the time), the punctuated equilibrium model of group development. 

In her second study, Dr. Gersick confirmed the results of the field study with a set of laboratory simulations.  However, these laboratory-based studies shed further light on the nature of the mid-point transition, or half-time.  For example, the transition point occurs at the midpoint (halfway between the time the project team starts their work and the deadline) regardless of the pace of work during the initial phase.  More importantly, these laboratory studies also showed that if the transition point doesn't occur, teams were unable to progress to completion of their objective. 

Whether or not Gersick's punctuated equilibrium model applies to all or even the majority of groups or teams in all settings has not been adequately studied.  However, the importance of the transition that occurs at the midway point ("half-time") to the success of the team cannot be emphasized enough.  Even though the transition or "half-time" in both the field study and the laboratory simulations occurred more or less spontaneously, even a planned break at the midway point of a project or task (analogous to the half-time in sporting events) is both useful and important.  This brief resting point allows teams to reflect upon their progress and make any necessary adjustments as they work towards the team's goals.  And if that half-time is led by someone like Coach Saban, all the better!