25 February, 2025

Why leaders need to take an ‘orchestral approach’ to measuring the success of your MDT.

Research from the Harvard Business Review tells us that multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) financially outperform homogenous teams over time. Are there other ways to measure the success of MDTs? If so, what are they, and how do you implement them?

If you lead teams, you’re likely familiar with measuring team performance. Setting KPIs and performance targets, checking client sentiment, staff engagement surveys, and more.

But what about when you’re dealing with an MDT, where you have multiple team members with wildly different disciplines to your own. For example, a leader with a legal background might work on a contract management project with a team of developers, data scientists, and AI specialists.

You may feel like you’re a completely different species, or that you can’t connect with one another. In these cases, measuring the team’s success—and leading more broadly—can be challenging. Although we don’t always like to admit that.

So, how do you measure the performance of team members with wildly different skills and experience to your own?

Before I answer that, let’s take a brief segue into the world of music, one of my keen interests.

Specifically, the career of composer and conductor John Mackey.

John has written for orchestras (Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York Youth Symphony), theatre (Dallas Theatre Centre), and extensively for dance (New York City Ballet). The New York Times describes Johns works as ‘electrifying, a terse, powerful explosion of transformative energy.’

I reference John here because, interestingly, he is a rare example of a notable composer and conductor who does not play an instrument.

Beginning in childhood, John composed classical multi-instrumental arrangements using 8-bit and chiptune software, thanks to a keen understanding of the foundational elements of composition: timbre, tempo, key, meters. A familiarity with the function and purpose of each, without necessarily a mastery of the applied practical execution.

You’ve likely picked up on the parallels to be drawn with leading—and measuring the success of—an MDT. A similar phenomenon is articulated very neatly in Episode 5 of This Multidisciplinary Life by Mick Sheehy, Lead Partner and Founder of PwC’s Australian and APAC NewLaw practices:

‘If you bring together lots of different disciplines, a lot of areas that you yourself don’t necessarily know about, how do you make that full team feel like you’re the right person to lead it?’

‘It’s about getting the right balance of understanding what’s going on with [the team], but without micromanaging’

‘I can assure you a data scientist doesn’t want me to come in and tell them what to do. I know [comparatively] very little about data science. But at the same time, they also need to know that I have at least an understanding of what they do, and the value they bring and how it intersects with the other parts of the team, so that they have confidence when I’m making decisions [or determining] strategic directions.’

The orchestral approach to measuring success in an MDT

As a leader, it’s common to feel the challenges of managing and measuring multidisciplinary teams. Especially when the niche specialisation of team members eclipses your own knowledge in certain fields. But as John Mackey proves, you don’t need to master every instrument to conduct an orchestra.

In my experience, the best way to measure the success of an MDT is through a two-fold approach.

Take time to establish a ‘whole of team’ picture. To continue with my musical analogy, this is listening to the orchestra perform as a whole. Quite often in orchestral rehearsals, the conductor will not stay only on the podium listening to the musicians. They will move to different parts of the venue to hear the entire orchestra in different audience seats. This gives the conductor more data to know if one instrument is out of balance or if crucial solos can be heard at the right time. For you, establishing a whole-of-team picture could mean assessing things like:

Project outcomes (e.g. process improvements, quantifiable impact through money saved or revenue generated)
Quality of deliverables
Timeliness (are milestones being met as planned?)
Client and stakeholder satisfaction as it aligns with purpose of the team or area of business—check out episode 4 in conversation with Jemima Harris, Chief Legal Officer at Megaport— for more on the importance of building culture and purpose in multidisciplinary teams.
Team satisfaction
Resource utilisation (is each team member contributing a commensurate amount of time or value to the work?)
Communicative effectiveness
Learning and knowledge sharing (are team members gaining insights from each other, building more diverse individual skillsets, and applying them effectively?)

At the same time, it’s important to measure success at an individual layer: a tune-up with each individual member of your multidisciplinary team. This could involve:

Tracking individual KPIs you help set together (these could be performance-based, qualitative, or anecdotal)
Checking in to ensure people are staying motivated and engaged, and aligned with the purpose of the MDT
What does career progression look like for each team member in the MDT? This is especially important where the ‘business’ of the overall organisation might be different to the team member’s core discipline. For example, a technologist working within a law firm.
Individual pulse checks with each team member looking at wellbeing, personal motivations, and listening to their feedback about how the team is traveling.

Need guidance in measuring the performance of your multidisciplinary team?