Martine Haas and Mark Mortensen in their excellent article called “The Secrets of Great Teamwork” from the June 2016 issue of the Harvard Business Review write that there are four key components to creating a successful team. They are as follows:
- Compelling Direction: “People have to care about achieving a goal.”
- Strong Structure: “Every individual doesn’t have to possess superlative technical and social skills, but the team overall needs a healthy dose of both.”
- Supportive Context: resources, information and training to achieve the desired goal.
- Shared Mindset: “Distance and diversity, as well as digital communication and changing membership, make them [teams] especially prone to the problems of “us versus them” thinking and incomplete information…. The solution to both is developing a shared mindset among team members - something team leaders can do by fostering a common identity and common understanding.”
In order for teams to work better with a combination of adaptive challenges and technical problems, there needs to be a compelling direction as noted above. This is the foundation of every great team, namely a direction that energizes, orients, and engages its members. As Haas and Mortensen noted, “teams cannot be inspired if they don’t know what they’re working toward and don’t have explicit goals.”
The challenge for many team leaders is that their pre-pandemic team has evolved into a 4-D team. And now, many 4-D teams are actually “team of teams,” referencing the work in the following book: Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement For A Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell (Penguin Publishing Group, 2015).
So, why is a “compelling direction” so important to problem solving at the team level?
As Haas and Mortensen explain, “On 4-D teams, direction is especially crucial because it’s easy for far-flung members from dissimilar backgrounds to hold different views of the group’s purpose.” Most of the time during this pandemic, team members do not even agree on what the team is supposed to be doing. Therefore, “Getting agreement is the leader’s job, and she must be willing to take personal and professional risks to set the team’s direction.” As they further explain,“[Team] members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.”
This spring, sit down with your team and read the aforementioned article. Then, clarify the purpose and the direction of the team. This will become the foundation for success for the rest of the year.
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