What makes a Team Effective?
Why do some teams thrive and flourish while other teams - made up of equally capable people - flounder and get stuck?
Leaders who are unable to predict team success end up frustrated by the lost time, missed opportunities, and failure to deliver on promises. Leaders sometimes blame themselves, blame the team, look for a scapegoat, or scrap the team's project altogether in order to make the difficulty stop.
However, leaders who understand and install the critical structural factors necessary for team effectiveness get much better results. Let’s understand team effectiveness first and work backwards to the conditions necessary to achieve it.
How do the experts define team effectiveness?
While most of us define an effective team as one that “gets results," Harvard researchers Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman have identified three criteria that capture the true effectiveness of teams:
The task output meets or exceeds the needs of the team’s clients. So, this is about getting results and how the team performs in the eyes of its clients. Clients can be customers (in the case of a sales team, for instance) or a range of internal and external stakeholders (in the case of an executive team).
The team becomes an increasingly capable performing unit over time. Maybe you’ve seen a team that “got results” implode or become toxic and untenable. In our model, a team is only effective if the team members meet the needs of their clients in a way that makes them more capable over time.
Members’ personal learning and growth are fostered by their team experience in the team. Members who are part of the team are better off and more capable as a result of their being on the team.
What drives team effectiveness?
All teams have to do work. And their work generates the team’s outcomes. If you think of a team’s work as “task processes,” there is a huge number of task processes involved in the functioning of a team and many points of intervention when a team is struggling. However, Wageman’s research has found which task processes actually drive effectiveness. They are:
Effort. How hard members work toward shared purpose.
Strategy. The quality of the team approach to the work.
Knowledge and Skill. How well the team uses its full range of capabilities.
What needs to be in place to get great task processes?
There are six structural elements you can put in place that will increase the chances that your team will have great task processes and therefore great team effectiveness results. In fact, Wageman’s research shows that these six conditions predict up to 80% of a team's performance effectiveness. These conditions - which are measurable through an innovative assessment called the Team Diagnostic Survey - are divided into two categories: The Essentials and The enablers. Let’s take a closer look.
The Essentials
Condition 1 - It's a real team that is bounded (meaning it's clear who is/isn't on the team), stable (meaning the membership stays intact over time), and interdependent (meaning the members share accountability for the purpose).
Condition 2 - The team has a compelling purpose that is clear, compelling, and consequential.
Condition 3 - The right people are on the team. The right people can think in terms of the overall organization, an ability to work collaboratively, and behave in generative (rather than derailing) ways.
The Enablers
Condition 4 - The team has a solid structure including the right size, doing meaningful team tasks, and shared norms of conduct.
Condition 5 - The team operates within a supportive context which means there are appropriate rewards, access to information and resources, and the right skills/education to do the job.
Condition 6 - The team has access to expert team coaching from either an internal or external person who monitors and provides feedback on the way the team works.
When you’re wondering why a team you lead isn’t performing despite being full of outstanding individuals, maybe it’s time to look at the six conditions. Getting the six conditions established is a valuable investment to ensure focused team performance especially during periods of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
