What Makes a Team?

Team researcher J. Richard Hackman identifies four criteria for defining a team:

1. Members are interdependent around a team task.
2. Members know who is a member of the team.
3. Members know the extent of the team's authority.
4. Membership is stable over time.¹

Hackman uses the term real team for teams that meet these criteria, as opposed to teams in name only. Where Hackman uses the term real team, I use the term team. Let's explore each of these criteria that make a team.

Why Interdependence Matters So Much

The reason that interdependence matters so much is that poorly managed interdependence becomes a root cause of many team and group problems. When team members are interdependent with each other, they need to rely on each other to produce a joint result. This leads team members to develop expectations for how other team members should work with them. These expectations lead members to hold others accountable. When team members' expectations or sense of accountability aren't met, it reduces their ability to achieve the joint result, and it also negatively affects working relationships and individual well-being.

Teams and groups accomplish their work and avoid these problems by dividing the collective task among members and, where they are interdependent, coordinating their work. The type and degree of interdependence and the type of coordination needed to manage it affect many elements of the team or group's design. As the level of interdependence increases, so does the level of expectations and accountability between team members. Teams have a greater need to coordinate, it's more difficult to coordinate, and their inability to coordinate well has a stronger negative impact on their performance and working relationships.^5,6 If the team elements are designed well—if they support the level of interdependence and coordination needed—the team can achieve better results.

There are different types of interdependence, which I've shown in Figure 6.1.⁷ Each type of interdependence is created by designing some element of the team, and each influences team behavior in a different way. Let's begin by defining them and how they work. The two main types of interdependence are structural and behavioral. The first main type, structural interdependence, as its name states, refers to how elements of the team are designed or structured so that team members will work together to accomplish the task.

There are two kinds of structural interdependence—task interdependence and outcome interdependence. Task interdependence is the extent to which various elements of the team's work are designed so that team members need to interact with each other to accomplish the task, such as a sales team that sells as a team. The second type of structural interdependence is outcome interdependence, and there are two kinds. Goal interdependence is the extent to which performance is measured as a team, as individuals, or some combination. A team's goal interdependence increases the more that performance is measured as team goals rather than only individual goals. For example, if sales team members' goals were focused only on their parts of the sales, then goal interdependence would be low; if they were focused on the overall goals of the team, goal interdependence would be high. The second kind of outcome interdependence is reward interdependence—the extent to which rewards that individual team members receive depend on other team members' performance. If the year-end bonus a team member receives is determined only by that member's individual performance, reward interdependence is low. If the bonus is determined by the overall team performance, then reward interdependence is high. For example, if sales team members were rewarded only for how well they performed their part of the sales, reward interdependence would be low; if they were rewarded based on the sales for the entire team, reward interdependence would be high.

To create task interdependence and outcome interdependence, you design different elements of the team, which affect the team in different ways. You design the level of task interdependence by changing how the work itself is conducted; you design the level of outcome interdependence by changing the consequences that follow from accomplishing the work.

The other main type of interdependence, behavioral interdependence, is the extent to which team members actually interact with each other to accomplish their task. It's important to distinguish between structural and behavioral interdependence because designing a team with high structural interdependence—task interdependence, reward interdependence, and goal interdependence—doesn't necessarily ensure that team members will actually act interdependently. The opposite is also true. Sometimes teams with little structural interdependence choose to work together in a way that creates high behavioral interdependence.

When you're helping a team increase its effectiveness, interdependence is one of the first places to look. This includes understanding the main team tasks that need to be performed, and how task interdependence and outcome interdependence are designed into the team—or need to be designed into the team—to increase the three types of team results.

Teams Aren't Better than Groups: It's a Matter of Fit

A group that performs very well doesn't become a team. There are high-performing groups and high-performing teams. How well an entity (that is, team or group) performs doesn't determine whether it's a group or a team. What distinguishes a group from a team is the design. If the work is designed so that members are interdependent around a team task, they are a team; if they're not interdependent, they're a group. Whether a group or a team is effective depends partly on the fit between how the work is designed and how members act. If members are interdependent around a task but act as if they're not, they're a less effective team—but still a team.

Unfortunately, since teams became popular again in the 1990s, many organizations have pushed to make teams the default unit of work, even when the work could be better accomplished as a group. Simply telling a group that it's a team or exhorting it to act like a team doesn't make it a team.

Deciding whether to be a group or a team is an important decision; it affects the way many elements of the group or team are designed and the ability to achieve results. And whether to be structured as a group or a team isn't always clear. Often the task to be accomplished doesn't predetermine a certain degree of interdependence, especially among knowledge workers; the task could be designed with a little or a lot of interdependence. What matters is that there is a good fit between the task to be accomplished and the degree of interdependence used to accomplish it.

You can tell when there isn't a good fit. When a group is inappropriately made to work like a team, members don't see the need to attend team meetings. They consider them a waste of their time. When they do attend, they get frustrated being asked to solve problems that don't significantly involve them and to spend time deciding how to work together on issues that don't require the level of coordination being asked of them. As a result, they often tune out, unless the topic focuses on their particular part of the business. When members do participate, they focus on their own interests rather than also considering the needs of teammates or the larger organization. At other times, they are quiet or engaged on their smartphones. There is little curiosity and accountability because members don't consider that anything of consequence to them is on the agenda.

You can also tell when what should be a team is designed as a group, with little or no interdependence. The team spends its time listening to updates but not addressing the real issues that are affecting the team. Members become frustrated with other members because they don't get the information, collaboration, or other resources they need from each other. Their frustration mounts because they don't have a venue to solve these problems directly with each other; instead, they must work through their common boss or handle the issues one-on-one.

A Better Question: For What Tasks Do We Need to Be a Team?

I've been discussing interdependence as if an entity is either a group or a team, but that's an oversimplification. Even though a team may have a primary task, a team often has several tasks, some for which they need to be interdependent and others not. Rather than asking whether we are a team or a group, a more useful question is: “What are the tasks around which we need to be a team and what are the tasks around which we need to be a group?” This enables the team or group to design its elements to reflect different levels of interdependence, depending on the task. For example, effective teams solve problems and make decisions in different ways, depending on whether they are dealing with an issue on which they are interdependent or not interdependent.

What Makes a Good Team Effectiveness Model

Models and theories are essential to your work. As the statistician George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”⁸ Just as some teams are designed better than others, so are some team effectiveness models. To the extent that you use models that are well designed, you increase the chance of improving your practice and helping groups. A well-designed team effectiveness model will improve your ability to design, diagnose, and intervene with teams and groups. As the social psychologist Kurt Lewin said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Here are some of the ways that the TEM is useful.

The TEM is a normative model, which shows you what a team should look like if it's effective. In contrast, a descriptive team model explains how teams function, not how they should function. It's not designed to help you identify whether the team is effective, and if it's not, what to do. A good example of a descriptive model is the widely cited, four-stage Tuckman model of group development.⁹ Based on his review of 50 studies of mostly therapy groups, Tuckman identified four developmental stages: forming, storming, norming, and performing (he later added a fifth stage adjourning). Tuckman wasn't describing how these therapy groups should evolve, only how they did evolve. Unfortunately, many team practitioners have treated Tuckman's descriptive model as a normative model, assuming that for teams to be effective, they should move through all of these four stages in the order described. Because many descriptive models identify less than effective behavior, if you confuse a descriptive model with a normative model, you may be contributing to a group being less effective than it could be. In contrast, a normative model enables you to watch a group in action and identify gaps between how the team is currently functioning and how it would function if it were more effective.

The TEM is a causal model. It describes how the team elements interact to create the team results. This enables you to predict what's likely to happen to a team if you see certain structures, processes, or behaviors. It also enables you to help a team conduct a root cause analysis so it can make changes that solve problems instead of simply addressing symptoms. In other words, a causal model helps you identify the points of leverage for helping a team improve its effectiveness. A simple list of five or seven things that teams need to do to be effective isn't a causal model.¹⁰ It may be easy to understand, but it doesn't help you understand what to do if a team isn't effective.

The TEM is internally consistent. If a model is internally consistent, then all of its parts fit together. They aren't in conflict. Internal consistency is important because it ensures that when you use the model to intervene and design, you don't create conflicts for yourself or the team you're helping.

The TEM is relatively comprehensive; it captures much of what the research has found to contribute to effective teams. Like any model, it's a simplified way to describe how something works, but it identifies the factors that explain most of what contributes to effective teams.

The Team Effectiveness Model: The Big Picture

The TEM (Figure 6.2) defines (1) the results an effective team achieves, (2) the elements that a team needs to achieve these results, (3) how each of these elements should be designed, and (4) how the elements are related to each other. Although it's called the Team Effectiveness Model, it's equally relevant for groups and teams. That's because the elements that make work groups and teams effective are the same; what may differ is how the elements are designed. You can use the TEM with a variety of groups and teams, including leadership teams, functional teams, cross-functional teams, project teams, and task forces. It's designed for groups and teams that discuss work issues and make decisions about them. You can use the TEM for groups and teams whose members come from one part of an organization, many parts of an organization, or more than one organization.

The TEM has three parts—mindset, design, and results—and incorporates the mutual learning approach. The results of the TEM and the mutual learning approach are the same: (1) performance, (2) working relationships, and (3) individual well-being. The mindset of the TEM and the mutual learning approach are also the same (see Chapter 4 to review the mutual learning and TEM results and mindset). However, the mindset in the TEM represents a collective team mindset rather than an individual mindset.

The main difference between the TEM and the mutual learning model is their middle columns; in the TEM, it's design, and in the mutual learning approach, it's behavior. The TEM design column includes three factors that contribute to team effectiveness—context, structure, and process. These include organizational and team-level factors, indicating that it takes more than effective behaviors to create an effective team. Still, as Figure 6.3 shows, the TEM includes the eight mutual learning behaviors within the structure element called team norms, including mutual learning behaviors.

Clear Mission and Shared Vision

The mission is the purpose of a team; it answers the question, “Why do we exist?” A team achieves its mission by accomplishing various goals, which in turn are achieved by performing various tasks. A vision is a mental picture of the future that an organization seeks to create. Whereas a mission clarifies why the team exists, a vision identifies what a team should look like and how it should act as it seeks to accomplish its mission. Together, a mission and a vision provide meaning that can inspire and guide the members' work. Many teams have mission and vision statements in their conference rooms. But the value of a mission and vision lies in the shared commitment that members make to achieving them, not in the laminated poster on a wall.

Ultimately, it's the team leader's responsibility to set or confirm the mission for the team. But mutual learning leaders don't simply lay out a compelling mission and then expect people to sign up for the trip. Using the mutual learning mindset, they are transparent about not only what the mission is but why it's that mission as opposed to other plausible missions. They're also curious about others' views of the mission and seek to incorporate their interests and ideas. When others make suggestions that the leader finally decides not to incorporate into the mission, the leader is accountable for explaining his or her reasoning. The leader also asks team members to be accountable by saying whether they are willing to commit to the final version of the mission the leader and the team developed. Assuming that members are committed to the team's mission simply because they're on the team is too big an assumption to leave untested.

Ultimately, mission and vision are personal. For team members to commit to them, the mission and vision need to speak to them directly. When members aren't able to commit to the mission and what's required of them to achieve it, mutual learning leaders respond with compassion rather than seeing this as an act of insubordination or organizational treason.

Motivating Task

Even when team members are interdependent with each other, team members can become disengaged because the team task isn't motivating. What makes a team task motivating isn't how charismatic or compelling the leader is or the rewards that follow from strong performance; it's the design of the team task itself. Some teams design members' work in ways that doing it becomes uninteresting; other teams design their work so that doing the work is itself motivating. Research shows that for a team task to be motivating, it should meet the following conditions:¹⁵

• It requires members to use a variety of their skills.
• It involves a whole and meaningful piece of work with a visible outcome.
• The outcomes have significant consequences, either for customers or others in the organization.
• It gives members significant autonomy over how they accomplish the task so that they feel ownership of their work.
• It generates regular and trustworthy feedback to team members about how well the team is performing.

For the team leader, providing informed choice means enabling the team to jointly design the task. It's difficult to know the variety of skills that members have and want to use, what they consider a meaningful piece of work, and what they consider autonomy. By jointly designing the task with the team and being curious, the team increases the chance that the task meets these conditions.

To increase the degree of task interdependence, the team designs the task so that multiple team members exchange help and resources interactively to complete the work.

Appropriate Membership

An effective team has a carefully selected membership. Of course, members need to bring an appropriate mix of knowledge and skills to successfully complete the team's goals. But there are also many team member characteristics that are strong predictors of team performance. Some of these include personality factors such as team member agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, and preference for teamwork.¹⁶

Selecting team members that prefer to work as a team is particularly important if a team is interdependent around its task. Research shows that teams whose members share egalitarian values create more interdependence than teams with shared meritocratic values.¹⁷ Team members who prefer to work individually are not very influenced by team or organizational values that promote cooperation, but, unfortunately, team members who prefer to work cooperatively are influenced by individualistic cultures to become more individualistic.¹⁸ This is one example of how building a team in which interdependent members actually work as a team is a multifaceted task that means taking into account individual characteristics, team design, and the context in which the team functions.

Teams also need to decide how many members will comprise the team. When Abraham Lincoln was asked how long a man's legs should be, he responded, “…long enough to reach from his body to the ground.”¹⁹ Similarly, the answer to the question, “How many members should be on a team?” is “Just enough to complete the task.” A team with more members than it needs to complete the task will spend unnecessary time on coordination that could be spent working directly on the task. In addition, as the team grows, members can lose interest in the work and reduce their effort. Still, the research does not show a clear relationship between team size and team performance, perhaps because the appropriate size of a team depends on its task.²⁰

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, a team must also have clear understanding of who is on the team and a team membership that is stable enough to have the time to learn how to work together well.

Clearly Defined Roles, Including Leadership

In many teams, team members consider the formal leader solely responsible for the team and the formal leader takes on this role. By formal leader, I mean the head of the team. As a result, the formal leader leads the meetings, sets team agendas, guides the flow of discussion, and identifies next steps. Members participate but leave the leadership roles to the formal leader. This is what I call a one-leader-in-the-room mindset. If you've consulted to a team like this, even if the team accomplished its goals, you probably saw that the team members were overly dependent on the formal leader.

In teams using mutual learning, team member roles are more fluid. Members may rotate chairing the meetings, taking responsibility for coordinating agendas, and identifying next steps. More important, leadership isn't confined to the formal leader. It's a shared role and responsibility. Operating from the assumption that each person may see things that others miss, each member is accountable for ensuring that the team is functioning well. When a member sees something happening in the team that may reduce its effectiveness, it's that person's role to raise it with the team, whether that person is a member or the formal team leader.

Research suggests that as teams have higher task interdependence, leadership behaviors have a more significant impact on team effectiveness.²¹ This makes sense, given that teams with greater task interdependence require more complex coordination.

Effective Team Culture

Culture is powerful but intangible. Team culture is the set of values and assumptions that team members share and that guide their behavior. A team's culture can influence how it deals with issues of quality, timeliness, authority, or any other issue relevant to the team's work. For example, one leadership team I worked with shared—and operated consistently with—the belief that if you give intelligent people the right information and let them do their work, they will create a great product. As a result, there were very few complaints of micromanaging; people were given a large amount of autonomy. They produced innovative solutions that met their customer's needs. In contrast, other organizations have a belief that people need to be told exactly what to do or carefully monitored, or otherwise negative consequences can result. In these organizations, team members have little autonomy and feel underutilized.

The core values and assumptions that constitute a team's mindset can also be considered part of that team's culture, but I have identified them separately because they are so fundamental that they influence how a team engages other aspects of its culture. Still, it's fair to say that changing a team's mindset is changing a team's culture.

You can't identify a team's culture simply by listening to what members say they value or believe. We often espouse values and beliefs that are inconsistent with our actions, and we are often unaware of our inconsistencies.²² The values and beliefs that constitute the team's culture have to be inferred by observing the artifacts of the culture,²³ including how members act.²⁴ Artifacts are products of the culture, including the policies, procedures, and structures that members create.

Culture affects everything a team does and gets reinforced through policies and behavior, but it generally operates outside team members' awareness, which makes it difficult to identify and change.

Mutual learning teams understand the power of culture. They understand that how the team thinks is how it leads. So they talk about the culture that they want to create and how it may differ from their current team culture. They identify the values and assumptions that are currently operating in the team and openly discuss whether they are helping or hindering the team. They are always asking themselves, “How does the decision or action we're about to take align with the values and assumptions we say we stand for?” This often involves discussing undiscussable issues. After they have identified gaps between their present culture and their desired culture, they jointly design ways to close this gap.

Team Norms, Including Mutual Learning Behaviors

Norms are expectations that team members share about how they should behave with each other. Norms are ways of putting the culture into action. Teams can have norms about anything, including who gets copied on e-mails, how to manage time, and who talks first in meetings.

One easily observed norm involves time. (Throughout the world, time is treated differently in different cultures.) For example, some leadership teams I work with place a high value on the precision of time and assume that honoring time commitments conveys respect. As a result, they have a norm that meetings start exactly at the designated starting time, regardless of who is absent. Other teams I work with have different values and assumptions about time. They have developed a norm that leads them to start meetings after everyone arrives, which could be 15 minutes later than planned.

Unfortunately, team norms often develop implicitly, just like the values and assumptions that give rise to them. When that happens, a team finds itself operating with a set of expectations that has mysteriously evolved over time and may not serve the team's needs.

One of the norms in many teams is that the formal leader, because of his authority, gets to play by a different set of rules than the rest of the team members. He may control or dominate the meeting, interrupt others, or switch the conversation when he thinks someone is off track. Other team members may find this behavior ineffective, but they don't raise this issue. But mutual learning teams operate from the assumption that all team members, including the formal leader, play by the same ground rules. That means that behavior that is considered ineffective for a team member is also ineffective for the team leader. This doesn't change the formal leader's authority to make decisions; it simply requires that person to use effective communication behavior in doing so.

The eight mutual learning behaviors—when adopted by a team—become team norms for putting the mutual learning core values and assumptions into action. Because mutual learning teams are transparent about their norms and make an informed choice to adopt them, they're able to hold each other accountable when they see others acting inconsistent with a team expectation. In fact, in mutual learning teams, it's a norm that all team members give feedback when they think others are acting inconsistently with a team expectation. In this way, team members share accountability for supporting each other in creating the behaviors they have agreed will lead to better results.

Reasonable Workload

Although technology has increased the speed at which we can perform many tasks, it hasn't increased the speed at which we think or can effectively discuss things with each other—two central tasks for leaders and teams. Effective teams have the ability to estimate when the demands on their time will become so great that the quality of their work will begin to suffer. More important, teams that are able to raise undiscussable issues explicitly address this when they see it coming.

Effective Problem Solving

Many teams spend much of their time solving problems. A problem is simply a gap between a desired outcome and the current situation. Problem solving is the systematic approach a team uses to close the gap.

Teams have many systematic processes for solving problems, such as Lean, Six Sigma, and other continuous improvement methods. All of these methods can be very powerful, but only if team members are willing to be transparent, curious, accountable, and compassionate with each other. If team members withhold information or assume that they are right and others are wrong, these problem-solving processes become battlegrounds for unilateral control mindsets. Teams that use some formal type of problem-solving process are typically more skilled at the technical side than at raising and discussing challenging issues. As a result, they end up trying to solve problems without all the relevant information.

Appropriate Decision Making

When people first learn about mutual learning, they often assume that they'll need to make decisions by consensus. It isn't so. The difference between a team that uses mutual learning and one that uses unilateral control isn't with the kind of decision-making rules they use—it's their mindset.

Mutual learning and unilateral control have the same general decision-making rules: (1) The team decides either by consensus or another rule, including delegating it to a part of the team to decide; (2) the leader decides after discussion with the team; (3) the leader decides after discussion with individual team members; (4) the leader decides without discussion with team members; or (5) the leader delegates the decision to the team or certain members. Now let's explore how leaders using unilateral control and mutual learning might apply the same decision-marking rule but create different outcomes.

If leaders use unilateral control to approach a consensus decision, they're thinking, How do I get my team members to buy in to the solution that I have already developed? If they're using mutual learning, they're thinking, How do I ensure that we get a decision that is based on valid information that ideally meets all stakeholders' needs? The solution may be one that they thought of before the meeting, one that another team member suggested, or one that the team jointly crafted in the meeting.

If leaders are operating from unilateral control, they assume that they understand the situation and are right. When others offer views or solutions that disagree with their views, they privately question others' motives and discount others' views. But if leaders are operating from mutual learning, they assume that others may see things that they don't. They openly question others and try to learn from their various views.

Many times leaders need to make decisions without consulting others; this is not necessarily operating from unilateral control. They're operating from unilateral control if they consider their own needs only and assume they have most or all of the information needed to make a sound decision or if they don't tell their direct reports about these decisions, let alone how they arrived at them. In the same situation, leaders are operating from mutual learning if they act as a steward, thinking about all stakeholders' interests; make the decision recognizing that they have less than full information; and have a sense of accountability to their direct reports. They tell their direct reports the decisions they made and the reasoning underlying them. They ask if their decision may create any problems, recognizing that, in some situations, they may not be able to change the decision.

If mutual learning leaders have already made a decision, they tell people so. They don't go through the charade of getting input if they've made up their mind. They understand that going through the motions of getting input and then implementing the decision they had already made creates team member cynicism, not engagement. They understand that seeking input without genuine curiosity or openness to change is manipulative and reduces trust and commitment.

Team members don't expect to be involved in every decision; nor do they want to be. But they do expect the formal leader to be transparent with them about whether she's made up her mind about something or how open she is to being influenced. And team members expect that the formal leader won't waste the team's time by getting input on issues that have already been decided.

How a team makes decisions also reflects how it is accountable to others inside and outside the team. In one organization, a leadership team was voting whether to select a particular internal candidate for an HR position. One team member expressed some concerns about the candidate but recused himself from the vote because he didn't have any specific data to back up his concerns. A second team member said he had had concerns for over a year about some actions the candidate had taken. The president asked the second team member whether he had shared his concerns with the candidate. When the member said, “no,” the president replied, “Then your vote doesn't count, either.” That team member learned a lesson about accountability: he couldn't withhold feedback from an employee and then use that same information to vote against the employee's promotion.

Productive Conflict Management

Effective teams appreciate that conflict is a natural part of teamwork and organizations. They understand that conflict is sometimes simply what occurs when people advocate for different solutions that can't all be implemented. The mutual learning mindset makes it easier for a team to engage conflict productively. Because members assume that differences are opportunities for learning, they don't dig in to positions and try to win the conflict. Nor do they try to avoid the conflict or simply accommodate others' positions.²⁵

Instead, they get curious, engage others, discover the source of their different views, and work to bridge the differences. Bridging the differences isn't the same as compromising. When you compromise, you can still operate from positions, seeking to maximize your own gain. When you bridge the differences instead of splitting them, you understand where your assumptions differ from others and where your interests are aligned, even when your positions are in conflict. This enables the team to generate solutions that aren't possible through compromise. Because team members assume that no one has all the pieces of the puzzle and that people can disagree without having questionable motives, they can address high-stakes conflicts without having them negatively affect working relationships.²⁶ In fact, mutual learning teams often report that after resolving a high-stakes conflict, they often have a better working relationship with the other parties. Teams that have higher task interdependence also require greater skill for managing conflicts.

Balanced Communication

Teams need to communicate so that members get the information they need when they need it and so that the team develops a common understanding of the issues it discusses. Without common understanding, team members can go off in different directions and can create conflicts even if they are acting with the best of intentions.

The mutual learning approach provides basic principles and specific guidance for balanced and effective communication. By balanced I mean that members communicate directly with the people from whom they need information and with whom they need to solve problems. In many teams, team communication operates from the assumption that members are accountable to the leader. As a result, when challenging situations arise, the leader often serves as the hub of communication, with each member sharing relevant information with the leader. But in mutual learning teams, communication operates from the assumption that each team member is accountable to the full team. As a result, members are accountable for sharing their own information directly with the relevant team members. The team leader doesn't serve as an intermediary for team members who are having conflicts with each other.

Teams that use a mutual learning mindset communicate about a wider range of issues. They're able to discuss issues that other teams don't know how to or aren't willing to discuss. As a result, they're able to address barriers to team effectiveness that other team members can't. Finally, because they understand that both thoughts and emotions are important for making good decisions, they talk about their feelings as part of problem solving and managing conflict, leading members to have a deeper understanding of each other.

The degree of interdependence also affects how a team communicates. Research shows that members of groups with high interdependence share more information with each other than do members of groups with low interdependence.²⁷ In addition, when group members have very different pieces of relevant information, it has a much greater effect on team performance when interdependence is high compared with when interdependence is low.²⁸

Clear Boundary Management

Every team has to figure out how to work with the larger organization it is part of as well as individuals and groups outside of the organization.²⁹ This is managing a team's boundaries. When a team is working with other teams, it has to figure out (1) what information to share with other teams and what information it needs from other teams; (2) where its responsibility for a task ends and the other team's responsibility begins; and (3) which team gets to make which decisions. If a team doesn't manage these boundaries well, it can end up without enough information to accomplish the task or taking on tasks that are beyond its expertise, responsibility, or resources; alternatively, it could end up with another team performing its work. Finally, it could end up without appropriate control over its own area of responsibility.

When team members seek agreement on these issues with other teams, they're often doing so as peers; neither team has the authority to unilaterally decide these issues. In mutual learning, if the teams can't collaboratively reach agreement on these issues, they don't unilaterally escalate the issue to a higher level. They jointly escalate it to the two formal team leaders. Fortunately, mutual learning teams are less likely to have to jointly escalate these kinds of boundary conflicts with other teams, even when the other teams don't know about mutual learning.

Clear Organizational Mission and a Shared Vision

An organization has a mission and a vision that serves as the umbrella for all of its teams. Clearly, a team's mission and vision should be congruent with those of the larger organization. Still, a team may find times when others outside its team are acting in ways that seem at odds with the organization's espoused mission and vision. Mutual learning teams are willing to engage others with curiosity and compassion when this occurs.

As an organization undergoes significant changes in its mission, expect that teams will face challenges. A health care provider that began moving to an accountable-care organization model found that the shift in mission and vision led to key structural changes that required its clinical leadership team to redefine the team's roles and reporting relationships with other key leaders in the organization.

A Supportive Organizational Culture

Just as each team has a culture, so does the larger organization. Teams that work in an organization with a supportive culture have a greater chance of being effective because team members share the basic values and assumptions that guide organizational behavior in general. When a team has a culture at odds with the larger organizational culture, even simple work with other teams can be challenging.

Many organizations espouse values and assumptions similar to mutual learning, but few organizations, including those that espouse this kind of culture, act in ways that consistently demonstrate it. In practice, most organizations' cultures resemble unilateral control to a greater or lesser degree. One organization development manager told me that his organization had a great culture on paper but that leaders and teams didn't know how to live the culture every day. He saw mutual learning as a way to translate the company's compelling but abstract culture into everyday behavior. The teams you're helping may be in a similar situation.

Then again, the organizations you're helping may espouse a culture of unilateral control. If so, the challenge isn't simply developing new behaviors to put the culture into action; it also means changing the values and assumptions that are embedded in the organization. As difficult as it is to change a team's culture, it's exponentially more difficult to change the larger organization's culture, if only because of its size. If the team you're working with is senior enough, it may decide that the mutual learning core values and assumptions reflect the kind of organization culture that it wants the organization to embody. If so, modeling the values and assumptions in that team is a good start for others to learn what is possible.

But even if the team isn't in a position to formally influence the culture of the larger organization, when it works with people outside the team, it can influence how those people think and act. I've worked with many leaders who, after a particularly challenging but effective meeting, were approached by another leader who said something like, “How did you do that? I've been trying for months to get an agreement with that group, and you did it in a few hours.” By modeling successful mutual learning and having people see the results, they are more likely to become curious about how to create similar results. These are opportunities for team members to explain what they were doing and the mindset that made it possible.

Rewards Consistent with Objectives

Designing rewards to obtain better team performance isn't straightforward—the best approach depends on the type of interdependence. If the team task doesn't involve interdependence, it doesn't matter whether the rewards are individual or team-based.³⁰ If the task involves high interdependence, team-based rewards are essential for obtaining strong performance. Teams that receive group incentives for an interdependent task outperform teams receiving individual rewards.³¹ But if the team task is hybrid—that is, some tasks involve interdependence and some don't—rewards don't elicit better performance, even when they are congruent with how the team task is performed.³² In general, it's difficult for hybrid teams to be effective.

One graphic design team in a financial company illustrates how a change in team rewards affects performance. This design team had an excellent reputation, having won a number of industry awards. Members were highly interdependent on projects; they worked closely together, not concerned about who got credit. The team leader rewarded the team as a whole for their work—a reward design consistent with the research above. But HR changed the reward system so that each team member had to be rated and ranked individually and given a merit bonus based on individual effort. The team found itself paying attention to who was doing what; henceforth, work that had flowed naturally among them now was in contention. To their credit, they recognized that the new reward system undermined their effectiveness, and they approached HR to describe their concerns and see if their interests could be met. Unfortunately, HR maintained that the team could not have a team-based reward system. They had to divide the performance pay among the team, and they couldn't divide it equally among all of the members. Eventually, most of the team members left to start their own firm.

Rewards need to be congruent with the values that the organization espouses. When I introduced mutual learning to leaders in a global oil company, I first showed them the unilateral control approach. I asked, “Does anyone recognize this approach?” One leader said, “Yeah, that's basically what we use here.” Another leader added, “Use it? We've been rewarded for it—I've been rewarded for it—for years!” The organization was concerned about the results that its leadership practices were generating but hadn't realized that it had designed the reward system so that it reinforced the unilateral control results.

Often organizations hope to create a certain culture even as they reward behaviors that are inconsistent with it.³³ Employees are exhorted to be transparent and accountable at the same time HR policy prohibits them from talking about their salaries with others. Leaders receive survey results evaluating their leadership in which the evaluations are anonymous so the leader can't know who has said what about him and those who said it don't have to be accountable to him for the accuracy of their statements. Ultimately, this leads to cynicism as people see the gap between what the organization says is important and what it rewards and prohibits. And cynicism is a first step toward apathy or exit.

Mutual learning teams identify how organizational systems are rewarding ineffective team behavior, and they try to change these systems. Even if a team is unable to change or influence them, it can discuss the negative consequences of the systems and explore ways to minimize their effects.

Information, Including Feedback

Every team needs information from the larger organization to accomplish its objectives and improve the way it works. Information is the lifeblood of informed choice.

Resources

Apart from information, a team needs other resources, including technology and material resources. For virtual teams, this includes the technology to work together across time and space. While using mutual learning may not increase a team's ability to obtain additional resources, it can increase the chance that it better understands the reasoning of those providing the resources.

Training and Consultation

Teams need training and consultation to periodically develop their skills and get help solving problems. But the training or consultation a team receives may be at odds with the mutual learning culture it's trying to create. Many leadership teams have told me the different unilateral control techniques they have learned at some point in their careers—either from internal or external consultants. They often mention the sandwich approach to negative feedback, talking last so they learn what their team members really believe and asking rhetorical questions to get people to figure out what you mean.

Often internal HR and learning and development units espouse mutual learning but provide tools and techniques that are unilateral. One organization described its performance management process as a conversation with the employee, but at no time did it teach leaders how to be curious about the inferences leaders made about the direct report or the direct report's reactions to the leader's plan for the direct report.

The approach that mutual learning teams use with training and consultation is the same one used by teams that focus rigorously on their team strategy. They assess every decision they make by asking if it's congruent with the strategy. If it's not, they make a different choice. Regarding training and consultation, mutual learning teams assess the training product or service and ask whether it's congruent with their core values and assumptions. They know that it will create problems for the team if they use training or consultation methods that aren't.

Physical Environment

Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.” The physical environment that a team works in has subtle but powerful effects. One consumer products organization designed its new facility based on its desire to increase collaboration. It designed enclosed and open office spaces to meet the different leaders' needs; informal café-like places with tables and comfortable chairs located near stairs so that people could easily start or continue a conversation; a very prominent open staircase to encourage people to walk and therefore meet each other more frequently than on an elevator; conference rooms that people could reserve; and other conference rooms that could only be used spontaneously. All of these environmental decisions stemmed from the organization's specific values and assumptions about encouraging collaboration and spontaneous conversation within teams and across teams.

Contrast that example with a professional development organization that moved into a new building and assigned most of the conference rooms to key leaders so that others could no longer meet spontaneously. Or, worse, an agricultural equipment manufacturer that found out it had redesigned its building to include almost no spaces for people to meet.

How a team's space is configured reflects the values and assumptions of those who design the space. If a team has control over its space, it can ensure that it reflects how the team wants to work together. If it doesn't have control, it can try to influence those decisions or make ad hoc changes so the physical environment facilitates rather than hinders the team's ability to work together.

Helping Design a New Team or Group

Here are the steps for designing a newly formed team or group:

1. Agree on the team mission, vision of the team, mindset, and culture. These four elements form the foundation that the team will use to design the rest of the team elements. The team designs each of the other elements so they advance the mission and are congruent with the team vision, mindset, and desired culture.
2. Agree on the main tasks that must be accomplished to achieve its mission. This includes tasks that can be accomplished by individual team members or a subgroup of the team and that must include all team members.
3. Agree on which of these tasks team members need in order to be interdependent. Because a given team—especially leadership teams—can often be designed with more or less interdependence, if members don't agree about where and how they are interdependent with each other, this disagreement will spill over into most elements of the team's design. In one leadership team I worked with, the leader believed that the team task had a high degree of task interdependence, but most of his team believed there was a relatively low level of interdependence. Capturing their different views, at one point in the meeting the leader declared, “We need to agree: Are we a gymnastics team, or are we a hockey team?”

   The tasks around which teams are interdependent vary greatly depending on the level of the team in the organization. Work teams are interdependent around producing the organization's products and services or the functions that support them. But leadership teams don't make a product or deliver a service—they make decisions that define the products and services and how the organization functions to produce and deliver them. Senior leadership teams are often interdependent around the following tasks: setting the organization's mission and vision; defining organizational level strategy; approving major capital expenditures; shaping organization-wide change; ensuring organizational leadership; and serving as stewards of the organization's culture.

4. Design the appropriate level of interdependence into the task. Using the mission, vision, mindset, and team culture as a foundation, design how the task is performed so it has the appropriate level of interdependence. There are four ways to design a team task so it increases or decreases interdependence:³⁵
   • Design the physical technology of the task. The team can increase interdependence by designing the physical technology so members must work simultaneously on the task or interact with each other. Alternatively, the team can design the task so it reduces or prevents simultaneous action, such as an assembly line.
   • Assign responsibility for completing the task. To maximally increase interdependence, all team members can be collectively responsible for completing the full task. To reduce interdependence, individual members can be assigned responsibility for completing specific tasks.
   • Establish rules and processes. To increase interdependence, rules and processes can be established that expect members to share information, communicate with each other, and solve problems and make decisions together. To reduce interdependence, the opposite kinds of rules and procedures can be established.
   • Distribute the resources necessary to complete the task. To increase interdependence, the resources can be distributed among team members so they need to share these resources to complete the task. To decrease interdependence, resources can be allocated to individuals responsible for those individual tasks.
5. Design the rest of the team structure and process elements. With the four foundational elements and the task designed, the rest of the elements can be designed to be congruent. The design of the other elements will already have taken place in the previous step. For example, allocating responsibilities for tasks will naturally lead to designing team roles. Establishing rules and processes will naturally lead to designing better avenues of communication, conflict resolution, and problem solving.

Helping Redesign an Existing Team or Group

When you are redesigning an existing team or group, the process begins with identifying the gaps between the current and desired state. Here are the steps:

1. Using the TEM, agree on the elements of results, then design, and finally mindset, where there is a gap between the desired state and current state. Circle each of the elements where there is a significant gap. When you are considering team norms, remember to include the eight mutual learning behaviors.
2. Starting with the elements of the results and working backward toward design and mindset, conduct a root causes analysis. Agree on how the elements of structure, design, and context that the team circled in step 1 contribute to reducing each of the results elements that the team circled. Draw arrows to show these relationships. Next, agree on how the elements of mindset that the team circled in step 1 contribute to each of the circled elements of structure, design, and context. Draw arrows to show these relationships.
3. Identify and redesign the root cause elements. In the design column, root causes often include unclear mission and goals, team task, roles, and decision-making authority. Any mindset elements that are circled are by definition root causes. When you are identifying root causes, look for incongruences between the degree of interdependence required and the way the team task is designed. Keep in mind that interdependence is not an element in the model; rather, it is a characteristic that is embedded in elements throughout the model. Also, remember that redesigning mindset elements is changing the team's culture; agreeing that team members want to shift their mindset is necessary but not sufficient for changing the culture.
4. Identify and redesign the nonroot cause elements. Even if team members change to a mutual learning mindset, there may still be elements of team structure, process, and context that need redesigning. Identify these needed changes so that the combination of the changes in mindset and team structure, process, and context significantly reduce or eliminate the gaps identified in step 1.

If you want to also focus on the team's strengths, create a second part for steps 1 through 3, in which the team identifies elements in which there are not significant gaps between the desired and current state.

In my experience, this process takes about three days, depending on the size of the team, whether the team is new or trying to improve its effectiveness, and the extent to which team members' views are similar or different. This is time well spent. A team can perform no better than its design makes possible.