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The Capability Foundation: Expertise That Makes Excellence Possible
Team capabilities-the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes like personality-form the foundation of team effectiveness. Unlike attitudes such as motivation or trust that can change quickly, capabilities are relatively stable competencies that consistently contribute to team performance. While high capability doesn't guarantee success, insufficient capability can doom a team to failure.
The relationship between talent and performance isn't always linear. Studies by Roderick Swaab revealed a "too-much-talent" hypothesis where teams with too many stars (beyond about 60% of team members) can actually perform worse due to status competition and coordination problems. This effect appears in highly interdependent sports like basketball and soccer but not in more individualistic sports like baseball.
Beyond task expertise, effective collaboration requires teamwork capabilities-the knowledge, skills and attributes that enable people to work together. These include communication skills (clear messaging, active listening), feedback skills (providing constructive feedback, encouraging reciprocal feedback), conflict skills (productive disagreement, conflict resolution), interpersonal skills (empathy, emotional regulation), and leadership skills (accountability, motivation).
Unfortunately, toxic team members can devastate team effectiveness. Research identifies seven common deviant workplace behaviors: making fun of others, saying hurtful things, making inappropriate remarks, cursing at colleagues, playing mean pranks, acting rudely, and publicly embarrassing others. The "Dark Triad" of personality traits-Machiavellianism (belief that manipulation is acceptable), narcissism (inflated self-worth), and psychopathy (lack of concern for others)-consistently correlate with counterproductive workplace behaviors. These toxic traits spread through emotional contagion, affecting even individuals who never interact with the original source.
When building effective teams, we must consider not just individual capabilities but the team's collective profile. Sometimes one expert in a specific area is sufficient, but in other cases, team performance depends on the average capability or even the weakest team member's ability. Research demonstrates that a team's overall profile predicts performance beyond what individual competencies alone would suggest.
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The Cooperative Mindset: Trust, Safety, and Belief in Success
Cooperation-the attitudes and beliefs team members hold about their team-emerges from experiences with current and previous teams and is influenced by all other teamwork drivers. Four key cooperative attitudes significantly impact team effectiveness: trust, psychological safety, collective efficacy, and cohesion. These attitudes serve as an early warning system-when they decline, performance problems typically follow.
Trust isn't just nice to have-it's a business imperative. When team members trust each other, they consistently demonstrate better performance. Trust is particularly important in highly interdependent teams, when authority is centralized, and when team members have dissimilar skills. Trust in leadership is equally crucial-employees who trust their leaders perform better, show greater organizational commitment, and go beyond basic job requirements.
Trust is built on three key judgments: ability (can they do what they say?), benevolence (do they want what's good for me?), and integrity (do they follow acceptable principles?). Building trust requires monitoring your "trust score" through others' behavior, seeing situations from others' perspectives, avoiding commitments you can't keep, owning mistakes, and occasionally taking actions that clearly benefit others over yourself.
Psychological safety-the belief that team members can take interpersonal risks without being penalized-is crucial for team effectiveness in dynamic environments. Google's Project Aristotle discovered psychological safety was their top predictor of team effectiveness-teams with higher psychological safety were rated effective twice as often, generated more revenue, had lower turnover, and better leveraged diverse ideas.
Collective efficacy-the shared belief that the team can succeed in a particular task or situation-becomes increasingly important in highly interdependent teams. When efficacy is high, teams view difficult tasks as challenges rather than obstacles, set more ambitious goals, exert greater effort, persevere through difficulties, and bounce back from setbacks. This sense of agency enables resilience-the ability to withstand and recover from challenges.
Cohesion functions as the glue that keeps teams united. Research recognizes two components: social cohesion (interpersonal attachment among members) and task cohesion (shared belief in the importance of the team's work). A significant threat to cohesion comes from fault lines-hypothetical dividing lines that split teams into subgroups based on shared characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity, education, nationality, or location.
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Coordination: The Behaviors That Drive Team Performance
Coordination-the behaviors that underlie effective teamwork-is what happens when the rubber meets the road. Meta-analysis of 138 research samples involving over 3,000 teams confirms that teams with better coordination consistently demonstrate higher performance levels and greater satisfaction and cohesion. The importance of coordination increases with the level of interdependence between team members.
Four universally important teamwork behaviors have been identified: monitoring (maintaining situational awareness), providing backup/support, adapting, and managing team emotions and conflict. These behaviors enable teams to maintain awareness of what's happening, support each other when needed, adjust to challenges, and handle interpersonal dynamics effectively.
Monitoring-remaining alert and aware of what's happening within and around the team-consistently correlates with higher team performance. Situation awareness involves perception (being aware of what's happening), comprehension (interpreting information meaningfully), and projection (anticipating what might happen next). Effective teams monitor three key areas: one another (teammates' wellbeing, performance, and needs for assistance), team performance (results, progress, areas needing adjustment), and conditions (current and upcoming factors that might affect the team).
Effective teams provide both required and discretionary support to teammates through advice/feedback, assistance during tasks, or completely filling in when needed. Whether someone offers support depends on three factors: monitoring (recognizing the need), expectations (believing help is appropriate), and capability (having the skills and time to assist).
Team adaptation is essential in virtually all environments, as even the best teams rarely excel from day one. Teams adapt in two primary ways: through real-time, event-driven adaptations (responding to unexpected situations as they occur) and reflection-driven, learning adaptations (making improvements based on identified gaps or environmental changes). Research shows that teams engaging in both types of adaptation demonstrate better performance.
Team debriefs-where members reflect on recent experiences, uncover problems, confirm successes, and agree on adjustments-significantly improve performance. Research shows teams conducting debriefs outperform others by 20%, with some studies showing up to 40% improvement.
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Communication: Quality Over Quantity
Communication involves sharing information and knowledge to enable effective team performance. Communication breakdowns make teams vulnerable to failure. In healthcare, communication problems were identified as a root cause in nearly two-thirds of sentinel events (unexpected patient deaths or serious harm).
Quality communication means sharing useful information clearly, accurately, and on time to the right people. The sharing of unique information-knowledge that other team members don't possess but could benefit from knowing-drives team performance. Whether it's specialized expertise, situation updates, or needed actions, unique information enables shared situational awareness. Communicating redundant information that everyone already knows doesn't improve performance, regardless of how much communication occurs.
Closed-loop communication prevents misunderstandings through three quick steps: the call out (initial communication), the check back (recipient conveys understanding), and the close (sender confirms or corrects). Research shows high-performing flight crews use this technique more frequently than low performers. Contrary to expectations, a study of pediatric trauma cases found tasks were completed 3.6 times faster when using closed-loop communication, proving it increases efficiency while reducing errors.
Boundary spanning involves communicating with people outside the team. Early research identified two common purposes: being an ambassador (securing resources) and coordinating tasks with other units. A third purpose is seeking input and expertise. Research shows better-performing teams have leaders with higher quality boundary-spanning behaviors.
Despite seeming straightforward, communication breakdowns remain common due to human limitations and situational challenges. The "everybody knows" bias leads people to assume others know what they know, causing them to withhold critical information unintentionally. Another challenge is automaticity-experts perform tasks without conscious thought, making it difficult to explain their process.
The relationship between trust and communication functions as a cycle that can spiral either positively or negatively. When team members openly share information, trust builds; higher trust then facilitates more genuine communication. This creates a virtuous cycle of reinforcement.
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Shared Cognition: Getting on the Same Page
During an NFL game, the Los Angeles Rams executed what appeared to be magical coordination when running back Todd Gurley and his offensive line simultaneously adjusted to defensive movements. This wasn't scripted choreography but shared cognition enabling effective teamwork. When defenders shifted, threatening Gurley's planned path, both he and his blockers read the situation and adapted as a unit.
Shared cognitions absolutely matter in work settings, not just sports. Psychologists use terms like "shared mental models" (SMM) and "transactive memory systems" (TMS) to describe these phenomena. Research strongly supports their importance-a meta-analysis of 65 studies found teams with stronger shared cognitions demonstrated better motivation, more teamwork behaviors, and stronger performance.
The authors identify eight types of shared cognitions that influence team coordination, adaptation, and performance:
1. "Where to" - shared understanding of vision, purpose and goals
2. "What's important" - agreement on priorities
3. "Who should" - role clarity about responsibilities
4. "How to" - shared knowledge of tasks, norms and procedures
5. "Why to" - understanding the rationale behind actions
6. "Who knows" - awareness of where expertise resides within the team
7. "What if" - shared understanding of contingencies and appropriate responses
8. "What's up" - collective situation awareness about current conditions
Shared cognitions boost team performance through three key mechanisms: increasing team effort, improving routine coordination, and enabling faster, smarter adjustments. Different types of shared cognitions contribute differently to these outcomes. Shared understanding of vision, purpose, goals and priorities increases motivation and effort. Shared cognitions about roles, tasks, norms and interdependencies improve routine coordination. Finally, shared understanding of contingencies, expertise, situational cues and rationales enables teams to make faster and smarter adjustments when circumstances change.
The relationship between team familiarity and performance follows an inverted U-shape-both too little and too much familiarity can inhibit effectiveness. Professional familiarity (knowing teammates' work-related strengths and weaknesses) matters more than personal familiarity (knowing about hobbies and family) for team performance.
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The Power of Conditions: Context Shapes Behavior
A high-end retailer's attempt to shift from individual sales to collaborative teamwork illustrates how organizational conditions powerfully shape behavior. Despite directives to collaborate, salespeople continued individualistic behaviors-like pretending to answer phones to avoid handling returns that wouldn't generate commissions. This wasn't irrational but a logical response to conditions where individual sales determined compensation and promotion.
Conditions-the context in which teams operate-include both tangible elements (organizational policies, compensation structures, resources, information access) and intangible factors (senior leader support, organizational culture). These conditions operate at both organizational and team-specific levels, either enabling or constraining team effectiveness.
Psychologist Walter Mischel introduced the concept of situational strength to describe how powerfully a situation controls individual behavior and minimizes personality influences. Strong situations lead everyone to interpret expectations similarly and incentivize specific behaviors, inducing conformity. Even naturally selfish people will collaborate when situational cues are strong enough, as with deep-sea diving teams where members rotate positions and literally depend on each other for survival.
Organization-wide conditions influence multiple teams simultaneously through policies, practices, and leadership behaviors that either support or inhibit teamwork. Hiring processes that never assess collaboration skills suggest teamwork is unimportant. Promotion decisions reveal what's truly valued-if "me-first" individuals advance while team players get overlooked, employees learn that selfishness pays.
Even when senior leaders work behind closed doors, their behaviors and communications establish the cultural tone for teamwork throughout the organization. Research examining over 60 top management teams found that when senior leaders collaborated cooperatively, employee satisfaction and retention levels were significantly higher throughout the organization-even though most employees never directly interacted with these leaders.
Beyond formal policies and leadership behaviors, subtle cultural cues send important signals about teamwork. Who eats together can reinforce or break down hierarchical boundaries-research with firefighting teams showed those who shared meals reported slightly higher performance. Physical workspace design also communicates values about collaboration.
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Leadership That Enables Team Excellence
This chapter focuses on team leadership rather than just "team leaders," recognizing that leadership behaviors can come from anyone on a team. Effective team leadership fundamentally involves ensuring all necessary "drivers" are in place and enabling team learning and adaptation.
Research conclusively shows that leadership significantly impacts team performance. Meta-analyses found that appropriate leadership behaviors positively correlate with various measures of team effectiveness. Both task-focused leadership behaviors (providing structure) and person-focused behaviors (empowering team members) contribute to team effectiveness regardless of the interdependency level among team members.
Effective team leaders, like good sports coaches, ensure essential leadership functions are performed-either by themselves or by empowering others. The seven essential team leadership functions fall into three categories: Task-focused functions (ensuring clarity and alignment, holding teammates accountable, removing obstacles and garnering support), Team-focused functions (managing team emotions and attitudes, fostering psychological safety, encouraging participation and empowerment), and a function that addresses both team and task concerns (promoting learning and adaptation).
Transformational leadership distinguishes itself from transactional approaches by encouraging team members to "go the extra mile" beyond basic job duties. Research across multiple studies confirms it relates to higher team performance, even after accounting for transactional leadership behaviors. Transformational leadership creates better outcomes because effective teamwork requires more than each person merely fulfilling basic roles-it needs coordination, mutual assistance, commitment to team goals, and collective belief in success.
Shared leadership doesn't mean having multiple formal leaders or running the team as a democracy. Rather, it describes how different team members step up-often informally and dynamically-to perform leadership functions when needed. Meta-analyses of 50+ studies confirm that teams using shared leadership are more effective and can adapt more quickly to emergent needs.
Servant leadership, introduced by Robert Greenleaf in 1970, centers on genuinely serving followers and creating opportunities for their growth. While it might initially seem too "soft" for some, servant leadership doesn't mean abandoning power or responsibility-it relies less on formal authority and more on trust built through focusing on followers' needs. Meta-analyses confirm that servant leadership positively affects employee performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, and especially commitment and trust in leadership.
Civil leadership has two main tenets: don't be a jerk and don't tolerate incivility in the team. Unfortunately, leader incivility is common-about 60% of workplace incivility incidents are initiated by those with higher organizational status. Research from NCAA Division I women's basketball teams shows that teams with uncivil coaches won fewer games because incivility lowered psychological safety.
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Building Teams That Truly Work: Practical Applications
Team effectiveness comprises three components: sustained performance (generating positive results over time), team resilience (bouncing back from adversity), and vitality (maintaining energy and resources for future success). Teams burning out while achieving milestones aren't truly effective.
Leading a team effectively means ensuring it has all seven C-drivers (capabilities, cooperation, coordination, communication, cognition, coaching, and conditions) and enabling continuous learning and adaptation. Team leaders should ensure their team has necessary talent, staff with team-oriented members without burning them out, build collective efficacy by celebrating wins, promote psychological safety, prepare members to back up one another, conduct periodic debriefs for team adjustment, monitor communication quality, maintain shared cognitions about priorities and roles, sharpen leadership skills, and improve the team's operating environment.
Great team members elevate those around them while pursuing personal excellence. They stay alert to team needs, offer help proactively and accept assistance graciously, continuously seek ways to improve, fulfill all commitments, communicate effectively, care more about finding the right solution than being right personally, acknowledge mistakes openly, both provide and seek feedback constructively, avoid toxic behaviors, and represent their team positively when interacting with outsiders.
As a senior leader, you must actively foster teamwork through your actions, not just your words. Promote collaboration by highlighting team successes rather than individual heroes, create psychological safety by admitting mistakes and treating errors as learning opportunities, ensure your senior leadership team is on the same page about priorities and responsibilities, cultivate cross-functional relationships to break down silos, and regularly review organizational practices to ensure they reinforce teamwork rather than undermine it.
Team debriefs-structured reflections that help teams learn and improve-are powerful tools for team learning and improvement. Research shows debriefing teams outperform others by 20%. Effective debriefing requires conducting short periodic reviews, scheduling dedicated time, letting team members speak first, acknowledging your own mistakes, encouraging full participation, creating psychological safety, and focusing on making adjustments.
The most effective organizations recognize that teamwork isn't just a nice-to-have-it's a strategic imperative that drives innovation, performance, and organizational resilience. By understanding and implementing the seven drivers of team effectiveness, any organization can transform how their teams work together, creating sustainable success in an increasingly complex and collaborative world.
