Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMWORK - Coggle Diagram
THE SECRETS OF GREAT TEAMWORK
Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership).
What teams need to thrive are certain “enabling conditions.” In our own studies, we’ve found that three of Hackman’s conditions—a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context—continue to be particularly critical to team success.
About the Research
The key takeaway for leaders is this: Though teams face an increasingly complicated set of challenges, a relatively small number of factors have an outsized impact on their success. Managers can achieve big returns if they understand what those factors are and focus on getting them right.
The Enabling Conditions
Let’s explore in greater detail how to create a climate that helps diverse, dispersed, digital, dynamic teams—what we like to call 4-D teams—attain high performance.
Compelling direction
The foundation of every great team is a direction that energizes, orients, and engages its members. Teams cannot be inspired if they don’t know what they’re working toward and don’t have explicit goals.
Strong structure
Teams also need the right mix and number of members, optimally designed tasks and processes, and norms that discourage destructive behavior and promote positive dynamics.
Team members from diverse backgrounds often interpret a group’s goals differently.
Supportive context
Having the right support is the third condition that enables team effectiveness. This includes maintaining a reward system that reinforces good performance, an information system that provides access to the data needed for the work, and an educational system that offers training, and last—but not least—securing the material resources required to do the job, such as funding and technological assistance.
Shared mindset
Establishing the first three enabling conditions will pave the way for team success, as Hackman and his colleagues showed. But our research indicates that today’s teams need something more.
The team’s problems were due to differences in resources, not to a cultural clash.
Evaluating Your Team
Evaluating team effectiveness on three criteria: output, collaborative ability, and members’ individual development.
The ideal approach combines regular light-touch monitoring for preventive maintenance and less frequent but deeper checks when problems arise.
Teamwork has never been easy—but in recent years it has become much more complex. And the trends that make it more difficult seem likely to continue, as teams become increasingly global, virtual, and project-driven.