Teams That Work
The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness
byScott Tannenbaum, Eduardo Salas
Book Edition Details
Summary
What magic makes a team soar while others falter? In the high-stakes arena of modern collaboration, Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas unveil the secrets to crafting unbeatable teams in their groundbreaking book, *Teams That Work*. With razor-sharp insights distilled from years spent navigating the dynamics of high-risk environments, this guide demystifies the alchemy of team success. Debunking age-old myths—like whether you can shine as both a star and a team player—they spotlight seven definitive drivers of effectiveness. Packed with illuminating research and vivid real-world case studies, this book offers a treasure trove of actionable strategies. Whether you’re steering the ship, playing your part, or advising from the sidelines, discover the tools to transform your team into a powerhouse of productivity and cohesion.
Introduction
In an era where collaboration has become the cornerstone of organizational success, why do so many teams still struggle to achieve their potential? While teamwork is universally praised as essential, the reality is that creating truly effective teams remains one of the most challenging endeavors in modern workplaces. The disconnect between the aspiration for seamless collaboration and the frequent reality of dysfunction, conflict, and underperformance reveals a fundamental gap in our understanding of what actually makes teams work. Drawing from decades of empirical research in organizational psychology and human factors, this framework presents a systematic approach to understanding team effectiveness through seven interconnected drivers. These drivers represent the essential elements that must be present and properly aligned for teams to achieve sustained performance, resilience, and vitality. Rather than relying on intuition or popular management fads, this evidence-based model provides a comprehensive roadmap for diagnosing team challenges and implementing targeted interventions. The framework addresses the core questions that determine whether teams thrive or merely survive, offering both theoretical insight and practical guidance for leaders, team members, and organizations seeking to unlock the full potential of collaborative work.
Understanding Team Dynamics and the Seven Core Drivers
Team effectiveness cannot be understood through a single lens or simple formula. Instead, it emerges from the complex interplay of seven fundamental drivers that work together to create the conditions for sustained high performance. These drivers represent the essential building blocks that distinguish highly effective teams from those that struggle to achieve their potential. The foundation of this framework rests on the understanding that teams are not merely collections of individuals working in proximity, but rather dynamic systems where performance depends on the quality of interactions, shared understanding, and collective capability. Each driver contributes uniquely to team success while simultaneously influencing and being influenced by the others. This interconnected nature means that weakness in one area can undermine overall effectiveness, while strength in multiple drivers creates synergistic effects that amplify performance. The seven drivers encompass both the human elements of teamwork and the structural conditions necessary for success. They address fundamental questions about talent and skills, mindset and attitudes, behavioral patterns, information flow, shared understanding, environmental factors, and leadership dynamics. Together, they provide a comprehensive diagnostic tool for understanding why some teams excel while others falter. Understanding these drivers requires recognizing that teams exist along multiple continua that affect how the drivers manifest. The degree to which team members depend on each other, the stability of team membership, the consistency of tasks, physical proximity, and diversity of expertise all influence which drivers become most critical and how they should be developed and maintained.
Building Capability, Cooperation, and Coordination in Teams
The first three drivers form the foundational triad of team effectiveness, addressing the essential questions of talent, mindset, and action. Capability encompasses both the individual competencies that team members bring and the collective expertise available to the team as a whole. This driver goes beyond technical skills to include crucial teamwork competencies such as communication abilities, conflict resolution skills, and the capacity to give and receive feedback effectively. Effective teams require a careful balance of talent, recognizing that while insufficient capability can doom even well-intentioned efforts, simply assembling star performers does not guarantee success. The concept of collective orientation proves particularly crucial, as teams need members who naturally think beyond individual achievement to consider team welfare. This mindset cannot be easily taught but must be identified and cultivated during team formation. Cooperation represents the attitudinal foundation that enables team members to work together effectively. Four key elements define this driver: trust, psychological safety, collective efficacy, and cohesion. Trust develops through consistent demonstration of competence, benevolence, and integrity, creating the confidence necessary for members to rely on each other. Psychological safety provides the interpersonal climate where individuals feel secure enough to take risks, admit mistakes, and offer dissenting opinions without fear of punishment or embarrassment. Coordination transforms potential into performance through the demonstration of essential teamwork behaviors. These include maintaining situational awareness by monitoring team members and environmental conditions, providing backup support when colleagues need assistance, adapting to changing circumstances through both real-time adjustments and reflective learning, and managing emotions and conflicts constructively. These behaviors represent the visible manifestation of effective teamwork, converting capability and cooperative attitudes into coordinated action.
Enhancing Communication, Cognition, and Coaching for Success
The next three drivers address the information architecture and leadership dynamics that enable teams to function as integrated units. Communication serves as the circulatory system of team effectiveness, but quantity alone does not determine quality. The most critical aspect involves sharing unique information that team members need but do not already possess, while ensuring understanding through closed-loop communication processes that confirm accurate transmission and interpretation. Effective team communication extends beyond internal exchanges to encompass boundary spanning activities that maintain relationships with external stakeholders. Teams must also navigate communication challenges created by distance, hierarchy, cultural differences, and the natural human tendency to assume others share our knowledge and perspectives. The quality of communication patterns often determines whether teams can coordinate effectively under pressure and adapt successfully to changing conditions. Cognition represents the shared mental architecture that enables team members to operate from common understanding. This driver encompasses agreement on direction and priorities, clarity about roles and responsibilities, common approaches to task execution, understanding of underlying rationales, awareness of expertise distribution within the team, preparation for contingencies, and shared situation awareness. When team members possess aligned mental models, they can coordinate with minimal explicit communication and adapt quickly to unexpected challenges. The development of shared cognition requires intentional effort, particularly in teams with dynamic membership or changing task requirements. Techniques such as scenario planning, role clarification exercises, cross-training, and structured debriefing sessions help build and maintain the cognitive alignment necessary for seamless teamwork. Professional familiarity proves more valuable than personal relationships for developing the shared understanding that drives performance. Coaching encompasses the leadership functions that must be fulfilled for teams to succeed, recognizing that leadership is not the sole responsibility of designated leaders but rather a distributed function that various team members can fulfill. Seven essential functions define effective team leadership: ensuring clarity and alignment, holding teammates accountable, removing obstacles and garnering support, managing team emotions and attitudes, fostering psychological safety, encouraging participation and empowerment, and promoting learning and adaptation.
Creating Optimal Conditions for Sustained Team Performance
The final driver recognizes that team effectiveness cannot be divorced from the environmental context in which teams operate. Conditions encompass both organizational-level factors that affect multiple teams simultaneously and local factors specific to individual teams. These environmental influences send powerful signals about whether teamwork is valued, supported, and rewarded within the organization. Organizational conditions include policies and practices related to hiring, onboarding, performance management, promotion decisions, and reward systems. When these elements align to support collaborative behavior, they create strong situational influences that encourage teamwork regardless of individual preferences. Senior leadership behavior proves particularly influential, as executive actions and communications cascade throughout the organization to establish cultural norms and expectations. Local conditions address the immediate environment in which specific teams operate. Resource availability, time constraints, decision-making authority, and mission clarity all influence a team's capacity to function effectively. Teams cannot simply overcome severe resource limitations or impossible time pressures through better teamwork, making it essential to address structural constraints that impede performance. The power of conditions lies in their ability to shape behavior through both explicit requirements and implicit signals. Strong conditions make expectations clear and provide incentives for appropriate behavior, while weak conditions leave teams to navigate ambiguous expectations without clear guidance. Understanding and optimizing conditions requires ongoing attention to both the intended and unintended messages being sent about the value and requirements of collaborative work. Cultural context adds another layer of complexity, as teams increasingly span geographic and cultural boundaries. Different societies have varying norms regarding hierarchy, communication styles, conflict resolution, and time orientation, requiring teams to develop shared protocols that acknowledge and bridge these differences while leveraging the benefits of diverse perspectives.
Summary
Team effectiveness emerges from the dynamic interplay of seven interconnected drivers that address the fundamental requirements for collaborative success: the right mix of individual and collective capabilities, cooperative attitudes built on trust and psychological safety, coordinated behaviors that translate potential into performance, high-quality communication that enables information sharing and relationship building, shared cognitions that provide common understanding, appropriate leadership that guides and supports team functioning, and favorable conditions that signal organizational support for teamwork. This comprehensive framework provides leaders and team members with both the diagnostic tools to understand current performance and the roadmap for systematic improvement, recognizing that sustained team effectiveness requires attention to all seven drivers rather than relying on any single factor to carry the load.
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