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Groups don’t become teams because that is what someone calls them. Nor do teamwork values by themselves ensure team performance. So what is a team? How can managers know when the team option makes sense and what they can do to ensure team success? In this article, drawn from their recent book The Wisdom of Teams, McKinsey partners Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith answer these questions and outline the discipline that makes a real team. The essence of a team is shared commitment. Without it, groups perform as individuals; with it, they become a powerful unit of collective performance. The best teams invest a tremendous amount of time shaping a purpose that they can own. The best teams also translate their purpose into specific performance goals. And members of successful teams pitch in and become accountable with and to their teammates. The fundamental distinction between teams and other forms of working groups turns on performance. A working group relies on the individual contributions of its members for group performance. But a team strives for something greater than its members could achieve individually. In short, an effective team is always worth more than the sum of its parts. Katzenbach and Smith identify three basic types of teams: teams that recommend things–task forces or project groups; teams that make or do things–manufacturing, operations, or marketing groups; and teams that run things–groups that oversee some significant functional activity. For managers, the key is knowing where in the organization real teams should be encouraged. Team potential exists anywhere hierarchy or organizational boundaries inhibit good performance. Considering the extra level that teams can achieve, the authors believe that teams will become the primary work unit in high-performance organizations.
The word team gets bandied about so loosely that many managers are oblivious to its real meaning—or its true potential. With a run-of-the-mill working group, performance is a function of what the members do as individuals. A team’s performance, by contrast, calls for both individual and mutual accountability.
Though it may not seem like anything special, mutual accountability can lead to astonishing results. It enables a team to achieve performance levels that are far greater than the individual bests of the team’s members. To achieve these benefits, team members must do more than listen, respond constructively, and provide support to one another. In addition to sharing these team-building values, they must share an essential discipline.
The Idea in Practice
A team’s essential discipline comprises five characteristics:
1. A meaningful common purpose that the team has helped shape. Most teams are responding to an initial mandate from outside the team. But to be successful, the team must “own” this purpose, develop its own spin on it.
2. Specific performance goals that flow from the common purpose. For example, getting a new product to market in less than half the normal time. Compelling goals inspire and challenge a team, give it a sense of urgency. They also have a leveling effect, requiring members to focus on the collective effort necessary rather than any differences in title or status.
3. A mix of complementary skills. These include technical or functional expertise, problem-solving and decision-making skills, and interpersonal skills. Successful teams rarely have all the needed skills at the outset—they develop them as they learn what the challenge requires.
4. A strong commitment to how the work gets done. Teams must agree on who will do what jobs, how schedules will be established and honored, and how decisions will be made and modified. On a genuine team, each member does equivalent amounts of real work; all members, the leader included, contribute in concrete ways to the team’s collective work-products.
5. Mutual accountability. Trust and commitment cannot be coerced. The process of agreeing upon appropriate goals serves as the crucible in which members forge their accountability to each other—not just to the leader.
Once the essential discipline has been established, a team is free to concentrate on the critical challenges it faces:
- For a team whose purpose is to make recommendations, that means making a fast and constructive start and providing a clean handoff to those who will implement the recommendations.
- For a team that makes or does things, it’s keeping the specific performance goals in sharp focus.
- For a team that runs things, the primary task is distinguishing the challenges that require a real team approach from those that don’t.
If a task doesn’t demand joint work-products, a working group can be the more effective option. Team opportunities are usually those in which hierarchy or organizational boundaries inhibit the skills and perspectives needed for optimal results. Little wonder, then, that teams have become the primary units of productivity in high-performance organizations.
Early in the 1980s, Bill Greenwood and a small band of rebel railroaders took on most of the top management of Burlington Northern and created a multibillion-dollar business in “piggybacking” rail services despite widespread resistance, even resentment, within the company. The Medical Products Group at Hewlett-Packard owes most of its leading performance to the remarkable efforts of Dean Morton, Lew Platt, Ben Holmes, Dick Alberting, and a handful of their colleagues who revitalized a health care business that most others had written off. At Knight-Ridder, Jim Batten’s “customer obsession” vision took root at the Tallahassee Democrat when 14 frontline enthusiasts turned a charter to eliminate errors into a mission of major change and took the entire paper along with them.
A version of this article appeared in the March–April 1993 issue of Harvard Business Review.
noun
an organized group of people who are working together or helping someone
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formal a small group of people who secretly work together to get power for themselves
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one of the groups into which people are divided in a competition
noun
American a group of doctors who work together in one building
noun
a group of people who represent a larger group or organization and are chosen to do a particular job, for example to study something and suggest what action to take: can be followed by a singular or plural verb
noun
a group of people who work together to do a particular job
noun
a group of people with a particular skill who work together: can be followed by a singular or plural verb
noun
a group of people who work together for a particular purpose
noun
people who do the same job or share the same interests, or the organization that they belong to
noun
British a group within an organization that tries to get other people in the same organization to discuss new ideas and make changes
noun
a group of doctors or other professional people who work together in the same building
noun
a group of people who are sent to do a difficult job
noun
a group of people who judge a competition: can be followed by a singular or plural verb
noun
a group of people who share the same aim and work together to achieve it
noun
a group of people, organizations, or places that are connected or that work together
noun
the people who work during the night
noun
the people who work in an office
noun
a group of people who are available to work
noun
Americaninformal in the past, a group of ordinary men gathered together by a law officer to search for a criminal
noun
a group of people that is organized to search for someone who is lost or missing
noun
the people who work during a particular shift
phrase
just enough workers to keep a service or office operating, or the service being operated this way
noun
a group of people who work together: can be followed by a singular or plural verb
noun
a group of people who work as a team within a larger group or organization: can be followed by a singular or plural verb
noun
British a group of people who examine a problem or situation and suggest a way of dealing with it