Team effectiveness

What team effectiveness means

In Leading Teams (2002), Hackman judged a team on three criteria. First, its output meets or exceeds the standards of the people who receive it, which means the customer's standards, not the team's own. Second, the way the team works increases its capability to work together in future. Third, the experience contributes to the learning and wellbeing of the individuals in it.

Most organisations measure only the first. The other two are the reason some teams keep improving while others deliver once and then decline.

It helps to be clear about what counts as a team in the first place. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, in The Wisdom of Teams (1993), defined a team as a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach, for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A group that shares a manager but not a goal is a working group, and judging it on team effectiveness misses the point.

Team effectiveness vs related terms

The main models of team effectiveness

Hackman's enabling conditions

Hackman argued that effectiveness depends less on who is in the team than on its conditions: being a real team with stable membership, a compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organisational context and expert coaching. Get the conditions right and good performance becomes much more likely.

Google's five dynamics

Google's Project Aristotle studied its own teams and published five dynamics on its re:Work site: psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact. It found psychological safety mattered most, and that how a team worked together mattered more than who was on it.

The GRPI model

One of the oldest diagnostic models, usually credited to Richard Beckhard in the early 1970s: Goals, Roles, Processes, Interpersonal relationships. Its useful insight is the order. Teams often blame personality clashes for problems that are really unclear goals or roles, so check those first.

Lencioni's five dysfunctions

Patrick Lencioni's model describes effectiveness by what blocks it: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results, each built on the one before. See the five dysfunctions of a team.

Tuckman's forming, storming, norming and performing is often listed alongside these, but it describes how a team develops over time rather than what makes it effective. It is most useful for setting expectations: a new team will look less effective for a while, and that is normal. See Tuckman's stages.

A team is effective when it delivers, gets better at delivering, and does not use up its people in the process.

How to measure team effectiveness

Measure all three of Hackman's criteria, not just the first:

• Output: one or two results the team's customers would recognise, plus a speed and a quality measure.
• Capability: observable behaviour such as commitments kept, problems raised early, feedback that changes work, decisions that stick.
• Individual learning and wellbeing: what people have learned this quarter, workload balance, and whether good people are staying.

Our guide on how to measure team performance turns this into a one-page scorecard. For the capability layer, the free team performance check asks eighteen questions about observable behaviour across six dimensions, with a written report naming the weakest one.

A worked example

Picture two sales teams that both hit their target this year. The first did it with steady weekly habits: deals reviewed together, new hires closing their first deal within their first quarter, nobody working weekends in the final month. The second did it through a heroic last quarter carried by two senior people, one of whom has since resigned, while the newer team members learned little and closed little.

On team performance, they are identical. On team effectiveness, they are not close. The first team is likely to hit next year's target; the second has spent the capability it needed to do so. Hackman's second and third criteria exist to make that difference visible before next year's results do.

How to improve it

Start with the conditions rather than the people. Clarify the goal and who decides what, then work on trust and the safety to disagree, then on feedback and decision discipline. The characteristics of high-performing teams describes what each looks like in a normal week, and is a useful checklist for where to start.

Tour De Force runs this as live, experiential training for teams worldwide, online and in person. Talk to us, or play The Weekly Challenge from our gamified learning apps to see the method in ten minutes.