What Is an Effective Team?

Summary

• A team is a "small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable" (Katzenbach and Smith 1993, 45). A high-functioning team is more than the sum of its individual members. They offer complementary sets of skills and varying perspectives that make it possible to solve problems as they arise. Perhaps most importantly, teams are good at adapting to changing circumstances.
• Trust is the magic ingredient that allows team members to work together effectively. Because teams often come together in a hurry, building trust quickly is essential. Several techniques, traits, and behaviors help foster trusting relationships:
  • Reliable promises - a specialized type of commitment pioneered in Lean - formalizes the process of agreeing to a task. A reliable promise is predicated on a team member’s honest assessment that she does indeed have the authority, competence, and capacity to make a promise, and a willingness to correct if she fails to follow through.
  • Emotional intelligence, or the ability to recognize your own feelings and the feelings of others, is crucial to a team’s effectiveness. Some people are born with high emotional intelligence. Others can cultivate it by developing skills associated with emotional intelligence such as self-awareness, self-control, self-motivation, and relationship skills.
  • An unrealistically positive attitude can destroy painstakingly built bridges of trust between team members. Especially in the planning phase, an overly optimistic project manager can make it difficult for team members to voice their realistic concerns.
  • Reliable promises, emotional intelligence, and a realistic outlook are only helpful if you have the skills to communicate with your team members. This is one area where getting feedback from your co-workers or taking classes can be especially helpful.
• According to John Nelson, team motivators include a sense of purpose; clear performance metrics; assigning the right tasks to the right people; encouraging individual achievement; sailboat rules communication, in which no one takes offense for clear direction; options for mentorship; and consistency and follow-through. Team demotivators include unrealistic or unarticulated expectations; ineffective or absent accountability; a lack of discipline; and selfish, anti-team behavior. One form of motivation - uncontrolled external influences - can have positive or negative effects, depending on the nature of the team and its members’ abilities to adapt.
• Even high-performing teams can be knocked off their stride by personnel transitions or other changes. The Transition Model, developed by William Bridges, describes the stages of transition people go through as they adapt to change: 1) Ending, Losing, and Letting Go; 2) the Neutral Zone; and 3) New Beginning. Many resources are available to help teams manage transitions.
• In Agile, a self-organizing team is a "group of motivated individuals, who work together toward a goal, have the ability and authority to take decisions, and readily adapt to changing demands" (Mittal 2013).
• Diverse teams are more effective than homogenous teams because they are better at processing information and are more resourceful at using new information to generate innovative ideas. Companies with a diverse workforce are far more successful than homogeneous organizations.
• Virtual teams present special challenges due to physical distance, communication difficulties resulting from unreliable or overly complicated technology, and cross-cultural misunderstandings. For this reason, building trust is especially important on virtual teams.