What Makes a Great Team?

Effective teams pursue a common outcome and have a common goal they want to reach. Healthy teams have mutual respect between members of the team and management. Plus, team members value one another’s contributions and skill sets. Having a team allows people with different strengths to work together, in psychologically safe environments.

Sports teams want to win a match or a game, military teams want to win a battle, business teams want to grow their business, and for-impact teams want to be more effective at making a positive difference in the world. Common outcomes, common goals.

The importance of teamwork in getting anything done beyond what an individual can do on their own is self-evident. And also a hot topic- Google has 1.6 billion searches logged for exactly this question: “What Makes a Great Team?”

The widespread tendency of humans to form teams suggests that in the evolution of humanity adaptive challenges made teaming important for survival. Teams serve most fundamentally as a form of technology to help humans take advantage of their innate capabilities and solve adaptive problems. Teaming affords humans a means to achieve goals that they cannot accomplish (or would accomplish less efficiently) otherwise.

Collaborations can be simple (e.g., one person lifting up another to reach high-hanging fruit) or complex (e.g., a group of individuals carrying out specialized roles and coordinating their efforts to run a business), but because of the significant adaptive benefits of teams, humans evolved to readily form teams, engage in teamwork, and use teams as they do for other technologies to solve problems.

This proclivity is so innate that humans are born teamwork-ready — young children do not have to learn about teaming before they can engage in it, and people team up often with little conscious effort required

So, what else can even be said about great teams? A great deal, it turns out.

Over the past half-century, huge advances in cognitive science, complexity science, evolutionary science, and the systems sciences have unearthed new, important insights into teamwork, collaboration, and human development. And much of the material being used today to develop teams is based on some rather old, out-of-date ideas that have…

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