Building Successful Teams

This chapter focuses on techniques for building successful teams. Setting goals, providing feedback, and holding accountability are three of the techniques discussed.

Accountability in Teams

Conditions for Effective Accountability

For accountability to work, teams need to have the resources, skills, and authority to do what they are being held responsible for. If leaders expect teams to accept the blame for failing to achieve an assigned goal, they should ensure that success is within the team's reach. For this reason, the choices made about goal-setting, team composition, and process design have a direct effect on the degree of responsibility a team can assume for its performance.

Government accountability: Governing authorities have the obligation to report, explain, and answer for resulting consequences of their actions.