In the past few months, many of our clients have asked if we can help their teams improve how they work together. With the recent partial return to the office in the US and more widespread acceptance of a virtual and hybrid way of working, leaders are turning their attention to helping their teams communicate, collaborate, and generate results more effectively.

Given this focus, we thought we’d share some of the research and perspectives on teams that we are finding most helpful:

• Richard Hackman, who studied teams for 40 years, is one of the first scholars to study and write about team effectiveness. Hackman argued that the right conditions—team structure, purpose, management, systems, and coaching—are what set teams up for success. In our experience, Hackman’s findings have stood the test of time and are still as useful today as they were decades ago.
• More recent research supports Hackman’s position that great teams are created by specific “enabling conditions,” such as a compelling and clear direction, a solid structure, and a supportive context. The research goes on to add “shared mindset,” which is a common identity or shared understanding. This fourth dimension is particularly important in distributed, remote, and hybrid teams.
• A report published in the journal Science found two qualities that differentiated more successful groups from their less successful counterparts. Those qualities are “equal participation from all group members” and the group’s average degree of “social sensitivity,” or EQ. This finding is more relevant now than ever as leaders navigate leading teams in both virtual and hybrid environments, which can make both of these dimensions challenging.
• Data analysis leaders at Google explored what made their teams effective in Project Aristotle and found that the number one driver of team effectiveness was psychological safety, i.e. ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.’’ This came as no surprise to Amy Edmondson, who first identified and wrote about this important quality of teams in 1999.
• Researchers at MIT have found that another significant driver of team effectiveness is the number of women on the team. From the most junior team to the executive suite, this research found that the collective intelligence of a group increased with an increase in the number of women in the group.
• And finally, it may benefit leaders to consider whether they really need teams, or if a better solution might be what Connie Hadley and Mark Mortensen call “co-acting groups.” These are informal pairings and groupings of colleagues who go in and out of collaboration and interaction as the work requires.

We’d love to talk with you about how we might support your teams. You can reach us at connect@bodagroup.com.

The Boda team