The Five Keys to Successful Teams
July 15, 2002

What can leaders do to foster better teamwork within their organizations? A new book from Harvard psychology professor J. Richard Hackman, which studies real-time teams from airplane crews to musical ensembles, offers valuable specifics. Plus: Q&A with the author
by Mallory Stark, HBS Working Knowledge


In Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, J. Richard Hackman lays out five conditions necessary for successful teamwork: The team must be a real team, rather than a team in name only; it has compelling direction for its work; it has an enabling structure that facilitates teamwork; it operates within a supportive organizational context; and it has expert teamwork coaching.

Hackman discusses the role of leadership in establishing and fostering teams in this e-mail interview with HBS Working Knowledge's Mallory Stark.

Stark: What can leaders do to foster the five conditions (see above) you say are critical for teamwork?
Hackman: The simple answer is that leaders should do anything they appropriately can to get the conditions in place—there is no "one right way" to do so. But beyond that simple answer is a second set of requirements that are not always easy to fulfill. Leaders who succeed in creating conditions for team effectiveness, one, need to know some things; two, need to know how to do some things; and three, need an above-average level of emotional maturity and political acumen.
J. Richard Hackman

Need to know some things. As I point out in my book, a great deal of conventional wisdom about what it takes to foster team effectiveness is, to put it bluntly, wrong. Most of us believe that "harmony helps performance," for example, or that "bigger is better," or that "teams need a constant flow-through of new members to stay fresh." Our research findings provide an alternative to conventional wisdom, one that views the leader's job as, first of all, getting those five conditions in place, and then doing whatever the leader can do to strengthen them and to help teams take good advantage of them.
This requires some depth of knowledge about what those conditions are and why they provide a solid platform for group development and performance.
Need to know how to do some things. There are real skills involved in creating the key conditions for effectiveness. For example, take "establish a compelling direction for the team." Creating this condition requires much more than merely writing out a vision statement and giving it to the team. Leaders often err either by giving teams too much direction (for example, telling them not only what they are to accomplish but all the details about how they are to go about accomplishing it) or too little (for example, giving merely a vague description of the team's purposes and leaving it to the team to "work out the details"). Setting good direction for a team means being authoritative and insistent about desired end states, but being equally insistent about not specifying how the team should go about achieving those end-states. This requires some skill and, unfortunately, it is not the kind of skill commonly taught in MBA classrooms or executive leadership programs. Similar skill requirements also hold for the other four conditions.
Emotional maturity and political acumen. One usually cannot establish the conditions for effectiveness on the leader's own schedule. Trying to force a condition when the time is not right almost never works. This means that leaders, like hungry lions, must lie in wait for the right time—and then, when it is right, pounce. To wait for the right time, especially when things seem to be getting worse rather than better, requires no small measure of emotional maturity.
Sometimes there is no prospect that organizational circumstances will become more amenable to creating the key conditions. In those circumstances, leaders must draw on their political skills—identifying the people or groups whose cooperation is needed to move forward, and then finding ways to get their interests aligned with the leader's own so that constructive change can begin. In the book, I give lots of examples of how leaders in various industries have done this while still maintaining their personal and professional integrity.
Q: Once managers have established the five conditions, what are the biggest challenges faced by most team leaders?
A: You are right that getting the conditions in place should be the first priority. After that, two challenges surface. The first challenge is to keep those conditions in place (and then, ideally, to strengthen them), which can be no small matter in organizations that traditionally have been designed and managed to support and control work performed by individuals rather than teams. Constant vigilance is needed to make sure that well-intentioned colleagues who are responsible for other functions, such as human resources, technology, or reward system experts, do not inadvertently compromise the key conditions as they seek to achieve the highest level of professionalism in their own areas.
Leaders, like hungry lions, must lie in wait for the right time—and then, when it is right, pounce.
— J. Richard Hackman
The second challenge for leaders is to help teams take the fullest possible advantage of their favorable performance circumstances. In Chapter 6 of the book, I discuss team coaching at some length, and how different coaching functions—such as building team motivation, consulting to the team about its work strategy, and helping members harvest and use the lessons learned from their collective work—are best done at different times in the team life cycle. Leaders can do a great deal to help teams exploit the positive potential of a well-designed structure and context.
Q: Where do most organizations fall down in terms of creating a good team structure?
A: The three most common problems we have encountered are these. First, failing to be clear enough about who is on the team (members cannot collectively take responsibility for the team outcome if they do not know for sure just who they are) and failing to provide enough stability of membership so that members can learn how best to work together. Well designed teams learn quickly how to work well together, and they get better and better over time. But not if team membership is ambiguous or constantly in flux.
Second, failing to provide a clear, challenging, and consequential direction for the team. In the interest of "participative management," organizational leaders sometimes back off from authoritatively specifying a team's purposes; or because they are worried about how well the team will do, they sometimes assign the team only a small and relatively inconsequential part of the overall task that needs to be performed. Those are perverse mistakes, since having a vague or relatively unimportant piece of work to do actually compromises team performance. Team empowerment rarely comes from long and seemingly democratic discussions about what teams' purposes should be. As I said earlier, it comes instead from establishing a direction for the team that is clear, challenging (with no guarantee of success!) and highly consequential for the organization or its clients.
My rule of thumb is that no work team should have membership in the double digits, and my preferred size is six.
—J. Richard Hackman
Third, composing teams that are too large and too homogeneous in membership. My rule of thumb is that no work team should have membership in the double digits (and my preferred size is six), since our research has shown that the number of performance problems a team encounters increases exponentially as team size increases. Homogeneity of membership is a frequent problem because each of us works most easily and comfortably with people like ourselves. I would no doubt get along very well in a group whose other members also are middle-aged white male pipe-smoking professors. We might very much enjoy our time together. But our creativity would be higher if our group had a diverse mix of members—people who have real substantive differences in their views about how the work should be structured and executed. It is task-related conflict, not interpersonal harmony, that spurs team excellence.
There are other pitfalls as well, of course, a number of which have to do with the supportiveness of the organizational context within which the team works. For example, whether the reward system recognizes and reinforces team, as opposed to individual, excellence; whether the team members can get access to the information and resources they need for their collective work, and so on. But the three just listed are the most frequent problems we observed in how leaders structured the team itself.
Q: Your research focused on real-time teams such as cockpit crews and musical ensembles. Such teams have little room for trial and error. Is your work translatable to teams in less real-time environments?
A: Yes. I've given a good deal of research attention to real-time teams for two reasons. First, I find them fascinating. There is a real excitement to observing a team whose members know that they have to get it right the first time, that they cannot go back and try again if things do not go well. The more important reason for studying such teams is that they set a high hurdle for assessing the quality and usefulness of our findings. If we can learn what it takes for success in a highly demanding situation where there is no room for error, then surely the findings should apply as well to teams that do have the chance to redo their work if it does not come out well the first time around. I've enjoyed the challenge of trying to generate research findings that can be helpful to teams and leaders in the most stringent and consequential performance circumstances.
Q: What were the biggest surprises that you encountered in your work on teams?
A: The biggest surprise also was an unhappy one: how incredibly under-utilized members' talents were in most of the teams we studied. There were some exceptions, of course, such as the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, which scoops up and uses every scrap of musical and leadership talent that exists within the ensemble. But most teams, including senior executive teams, generally leave untapped enormous pools of member talent. The main contribution I hope my book makes is to help team leaders and members learn how to better harness and focus members' talents in carrying out the team's work—and to do so in a way that strengthens the team itself as a performing unit and that contributes to the ongoing learning and growth of individual team members.