What is an effective team?

"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." — Helen Keller

Teamwork is a critical part of any company’s success. When groups of people work together well, we can integrate a variety of skills and perspectives to solve problems and make stuff.

Three benefits of good teamwork are:

• Productivity: Doing as much as possible with what you have.

• Stability: Low turnover.

• Ease: Low management overhead.

This boils down to increased revenue, lower costs, and fewer headaches for leaders.

But for something so valuable, teamwork is often poorly understood and many organizations struggle to create effective teams — even (especially?) at the leadership team level where it is most critical.

This is because people are complex and teams are made of people (the Soylent Green reference is unintentional 🙂).

To solve complex problems we need to simplify them without being reductive. Put another way, we need to zoom out so we can see the whole thing and all the parts, connections, and relationships that make it work or not.

We need to strip away the distracting details so we don’t get lost in the weeds; or is it that we have to see the forest, not the trees? Oh man, sorry for all the outdoor metaphors — it’s spring here in NYC and I’m dying to go for a walk in Prospect Park.

In my work on effective teams, I focus on three forest-like characteristics:

• Efficiency: Eliminating waste and using resources, especially time, to maximum impact.

• Engagement: Creating a culture where everyone cares about the work — and each other.

• Self-Direction: Creating an environment where the team is able to (and actually does) take initiative.

There are other things that are important, too — like continuous improvement, trust, facility with difficult conversations, and strategic alignment — but these either flow from or into the three characteristics above.

This stuff is complex so everything is multivariate (the fancy word for organizational chaos). This means that knowing what a team needs in order to be better at any given moment can be hard to know.

That said you can set up (or reset) an existing team by following a few simple steps:

1. Understand The Context: Get clear about the team mission and the market, social, and technical space it must operate in. Pay special attention to what is volatile and uncertain.

2. Set The Foundations: Establish a starting set of roles, agreements, processes, and tools. Lay the foundations for good interpersonal relationships and shared accountability.

3. Guide The Evolution: Continuously fine-tune (and radically change if needed) how the team operates. Help it adapt to changing conditions and learn from its successes and failures.

What would you add to any of these lists?

— Bob Gower

PS If you’re ready to improve the performance of your team or company, hit reply and let’s talk.

PPS I’m researching teamwork at scale now. If you lead a team of significant size in an enterprise environment, I’d love to interview you and get your perspective; so hit reply and let’s talk.