What makes teams great?
Effective teams are essential for the success of organizations that work according to lean and/or agile principles — but not only there. In this article I will present you some criteria, or rather conditions, that contribute to teams achieving good results. Instead of “fixing” a team that does not meet the expectations, maybe changing some of these conditions will help.
All of us have probably worked in teams, whether in a professional or private context. Possibly, our experience with working in teams have been rather different. Why don’t you take a trip down memory lane and recall a team that you enjoyed working with and that achieved really good results?
How did this team start? What was it like when you joined? How did they work together with the other team members? What was the distribution of tasks on that team? Who had which role? What was typical for this team? What were the key factors that made this team work so well, perhaps even be very successful?
After you have spent some time recalling your memories, repeat this thought journey. This time with a team you did not enjoy working with.
What was different about that team?
Conditions for team effectiveness
Effective: “successful or achieving the results that you want”[i]
Richard Hackman, organizational psychologist at Harvard, has studied many teams in various fields. His definition of a team “interdependent for some shared purpose for which the collective is responsible” is valid for self-managed agile teams, too.
Whether a team gets work done effectively or not can be recognized by this[ii]:
- An effective team produces a product or provides a service of a quality that satisfies its customers.
- Over time, the team performs better and better. It improves both its collaboration and its overall skill level, because
- the individual team members learn during their joint work.
The five basic conditions Hackman identified for team effectiveness are:
- Real Team
- Enabling Structure
- Compelling Direction
- Supporting Organizational Context
- Expert Coaching.
Let us have a closer look:
Real Team
Building a “real team” is the foundation for team effectiveness.
- A real team has a team task that is appropriate for being performed by a team.
Not every task is appropriate for teamwork. Complex tasks as in R&D, IT, and medical service are mainly real team tasks. Others, e.g., creative writing, are not. - There need to be clear boundaries and no ambiguity about who is in the team and who not. This is a precondition working together effectively, for a team identity to emerge, etc.
- In addition to clear boundaries in terms of team membership, a team also needs clearly delimited authority to manage their own work process. This does not necessarily mean that their responsibility is defined top-down by a team-external authority. It can also mean that a team and the relevant organizational environment, e.g., a manager or other teams, negotiate their areas of responsibility.
- And last but not least, a team needs stability over some reasonable period of time. This is the only way for effective and efficient work processes to emerge. For R&D teams, Hackman sees a new person for fresh ideas and new perspectives every three or four years.
Compelling Direction
Effective team self-management is impossible unless someone in authority sets the direction for the team‘s work. All team members should have the same answer to the question “What‘s the mountain we‘re going to climb?”
This team direction needs to be
- Challenging: it energizes the team, attracts talents, and enhances their motivation
- Clear: it orients the team and aligns their performance strategy with purpose
- Consequential: it engages all team members and fosters full utilization of knowledge and skill.
Furthermore, and most important: the team direction specifies “ends” (end states), not “means” for self-managed, goal-directed work.
Enabling Team Structure
Only an appropriate team structure makes teamwork possible! However, too much structure (e.g., hierarchy, bureaucracy) can be dysfunctional. Nevertheless, there is a minimum set of structural factors:
- The team task needs to motivate each individual member of the team. This only works if each team member can find a meaning in it and is responsible for the result. As working for abstract recipients will hit motivation over time, a team needs feedback on how the result of its work is received by the customers.
- Basic team norms set common ground for all team members about what is ok and what is not ok. These norms need to be defined as soon as the team is launched.
- Concerning team composition:
There is a widespread assumption that homogenous teams get along better, so many teams are too homogenous. Too much agreement and too few different viewpoints might not lead to the necessary inspiring functional and technical discussions. Therefore, diversity (understood as a mix of different disciplines, education, experience, age, culture, gender…) is an asset, especially for teams that need to innovate or discover new solution approaches.
The bigger a team, the more information gets lost within its communication network. Therefore, Hackman considers 6–7 persons as the maximum team size.
Supportive Organizational Context
Any team is influenced by factors set by its context. Therefore, any organization depending on successful teams needs to set conditions that enable the teams to perform. These include
- A reward system that reinforces good teamwork rather than individual excellence (e.g., individual performance targets)
- All information necessary for the work is available to the team
- Education: any training or technical consults needed are available to the team
- Material resources needed for the work are sufficient and available to the team (e.g., space, people, money, staff time).
Direction, team structure and organizational context are key for the quality of team performance processes developing over time:
- The amount of effort team members apply to their collective work
- Their common performance strategy for carrying out team work, and
- The level of skills and knowledge applied.
Expert Coaching
These three team performance processes are the main levers for team effectiveness. Therefore, team coaching is all about improving them:
It needs to be pointed out that peer coaching (coaching/teaching/helping within the team) is key for success and more important than coaching by a leader. Depending on the context, internal or external coaches can support.
Effective agile teams
“Get the enabling conditions in place at the start and keep them there” is Hackman’s conclusion for the team lead role — let us translate it as Scrum Master, Product Owner and/or manager in agile organizations.
The genuine design of agile teams, e.g. a Scrum team, covers already many aspects of the five conditions for team effectiveness. Other aspects need to be looked at with particular attention.
This starts with careful team composition and a team kick-off creating a positive atmosphere, in which the team agrees on the most important rules for working together (e.g., basic expectations, especially on intra-team and inter-personal feedback and on how to deal with conflict).
Self-managing[iii] teams are central to agile product development. Their overall direction needs to be set and a team goal needs to be fuelled by an attractive product vision with a roadmap guiding to it. The Product Goal newly introduced in the latest version of the Scrum Guide supports a team knowing where its journey is heading to. A lack of direction, e.g., due to an unclear vision or a missing roadmap, quickly affects motivation negatively.
Considering Hackman’s conditions for team effectiveness, there are good reasons why real agile teams should be cross functional (interdisciplinary), long-lived feature teams whose members dedicate 100% of work time to the team. It is only then can they really get going:
- By continuously working on their team task — a feature or feature set — they may develop more product accountability and get more direct customer feedback than component teams or teams for dedicated product development phases.
- Team longevity supports the emergence of effective team processes and increasing team-know-how. Long-term team members who are fully dedicated can focus on the team task and are available for communication permanently.
- Frictions caused by repeatedly onboarding new team members are reduced.
Finally, the agile principle of continuous improvement enhances the development of favourable team processes. Agile ways of working, especially Scrum, include various feedback loops on product and processes. This way, constructive customer feedback during Sprint Reviews can both support team effectiveness (building the right thing for the customer) and team motivation (learning how customers receive their produce). Last but not least, Sprint Retrospectives offer a protected space for reflecting and improving team performance processes.
One step beyond
Once these conditions are met, nothing should prevent effective and even very smart teams — right?
Unfortunately, this is only half the truth. The structural factors described so far are minimum enablers for a team to work effectively. Sad but true: even a team of geniuses is no guarantee for great results, no matter how perfect the conditions are. Individual intelligence and performance cannot be summed up for predicting collective team intelligence. In order for a team to actually work better than the sum of its parts, more is required:[iv]
- Gender diversity: Collective intelligence grows with the proportion of women in the team. This is closely related with the next factor.
- Social perceptiveness of the team members, defined as their ability to pick up non-verbal cues (e.g., facial expressions, tone of voice) as part of empathy skills. It is not that women are generally better people, but on average they are better than men at perceiving what might be happening in other humans’ inner life.
- Equal distribution of conversation, i.e., no one is dominating the conversation and everyone has an equal opportunity to speak.
Go back in your mind to the teams you thoughts of at the beginning. Did you recognize some of the characteristics of those teams here? For better or for worse? To what extent were “hard” factors that made working on those teams a good experience or an unpleasant one? And what part did the atmosphere in the team play, i.e., more “soft” factors?
What constitutes a team atmosphere favourable for team success and how we can all contribute to it will be the topic of further blogposts. Stay tuned!
[i] Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/effective, accessed on January 12th, 2021
[ii] Ibid and Hackman, Richard 2002: Leading Teams. Setting the Stage for great Performances. Boston.
[iii] For a definition of self-managed teams, see https://medium.com/transform-by-doing/successful-teamwork-self-organizing-teams-cb8af6fca03f, accessed on January 12th, 2021
[iv] Woolley, Anita et al. 2010: Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. In: Science, Vol. 330. See also Anita Wooley’s talk for Google re:work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy6-qJmqz3w, accessed on September 23rd, 2020.
“Collective intelligence” is defined here as “ability of a group to perform a wide variety of tasks”.
