Want to create a great team? Here’s what you should focus on! At YES Psychology we’re excited about making teams work better. We’ve written about the incredible team that launched the James Webb telescope, the Matilda’s inspiring performance at the 2023 Women’s World Cup, and leadership lessons from the Tour de France.
Today, we take a closer look at what makes teams successful, by exploring the seven drivers of team effectiveness from Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas’s latest book Teams that Work.
The Seven Key Drivers of Effective Teams
1. Capability is key but insufficient for team success
The first of the seven drivers is team capability. Tannenbaum and Salas recommend thinking about your team’s capability in two ways: their ability to do the tasks required by the job (task-related capability) and their ability to work effectively as a team (teamwork capability). When it comes to assessing your team’s teamwork capability, think about your team’s communication skills, feedback skills, conflict skills, interpersonal skills and leadership skills.
However, you can’t guarantee a high performing team just by throwing together a bunch of talented people. This is where the other six drivers of team effectiveness come in.
2. Cooperation matters
Cooperation in teams matters. But it’s not something you can transport from one team into another. Cooperation builds over time – and it’s dynamic. So if you’ve got a newly formed team, made up of individuals who’ve cooperated well in the past, don’t assume cooperation will instantly and magically appear in your newly formed team. It takes time, attention and effort.
When it comes to cooperation, focus on creating trust, building psychological safety, a belief in the team, and team cohesion. Leaders should think of these four things as a warning system – when they decline, performance problems are likely to follow.
And when it comes to psychological safety, don’t forget about role clarity (ie. where team members are clear on their job, responsibilities and what is expected). Research shows that teams with greater role clarity have higher psychological safety and better performance. Role clarity is critical – it’s something we focus on in our work on psychosocial risks and hazards.
3. Coordination is at the heart of teamwork
But what forms of coordination matter most? According to Tannenbaum and Salas, the four most universally applicable and consistently important coordination behaviours are:
- Monitoring (maintaining situational awareness)
- Providing back-up / support
- Adapting
- Managing team emotions and conflict, including maintaining morale
The importance of coordination is something that jumped out at us when we interviewed an anaesthetist and a former air traffic controller for our recent workshop ‘Acting and Reacting: Achieving High Performance Whatever the Day Throws at You’. They talked about the importance of continually scanning the environment, including keeping an eye on how others are doing, being ready to provide (or ask for) support when needed, and learning from experience.
4. When it comes to Communication, ‘more is not better, better is better’
Tannenbaum and Salas emphasise that when it comes to communication, it’s about the quality of the communication, not how much the team communicates. And quality communication means sharing useful information clearly, accurately and on time to the right people.
We frequently run workshops on Leading Crucial Conversations in YES Psychology, where we help teams explore the sorts of conversations they need to be having and why, the principles that underpin effective conversations, and how to prepare effectively for them.
5. Cognition is about being able to answer the question ‘Are we on the same page?’
Tannenbaum and Salas note that teams generally perform better when they consistently understand and describe the team’s vision, purpose and goals, priorities and roles, tasks and expertise, and respond to if-then scenarios in similar ways (for example, if this challenge happened in the next month, this is what we’d do).
The reason shared cognitions boost team performance is because they enhance motivation, support coordination, and help the team make smarter adjustments.
So if you don’t know how your team would answer questions about these things, it’s definitely worth a conversation to find out.
6. Conditions are the result of what you encourage and tolerate
Conditions are about the environment or system your team operates in – these can help or hinder team effectiveness. Think about the availability of resources, the degree of autonomy people have in their role, and the broader work environment. Also consider broader conditions like your organisation’s policies and practices, including how you manage performance and create expectations around teamwork. Do you reward teamwork or individual performance? Do you reward short-term wins or strategic thinking? We find it’s also helpful to think about the potential unintended consequences of what you’re rewarding.
Conditions affect how much individuals are willing and able to coordinate with one another. They also impact the degree to which a team learns, adjusts and innovates. If you care about these things as a leader, then you should pay attention to the environment your team operates in, and what you reward.
7. Coaching is about Leadership – but it’s not just for leaders
The last of the seven drivers is coaching, and it’s about the leadership behaviours that you and your team members demonstrate.
YES Psychology does extensive coaching with leaders and managers and can train you and your teams on the right skills for effective workplace coaching.
We also work with leaders on the most effective leadership behaviours for success. Our checklist of effective leadership behaviours encourages leaders to consider questions such as:
- Are we taking action to build relationships, credibility and trust?
- Have we created a clear vision and linked this to everyday work?
- Are we taking responsibility to manage and follow-up on key issues and promised actions?
The importance of team debriefs
If there is one practice Tannenbaum consistently recommends, it is conducting regular team debriefs. Research indicates that teams that routinely reflect on their performance outperform teams that do not by an average of 20% (Tannenbaum & Salas, 2024). And the key is this. It’s not about doing team debriefs when things go wrong, it’s about doing team debriefs on a regular basis (when things are going well, and when things are a bit tough), so it becomes a part of your normal routine.
At YES Psychology, we focus on building the skills and environment for effective team debriefs. And we are big fans of encouraging leaders to do regular check-ins with the team, rather than only asking team members how they are when something doesn’t look right. In our experience, it completely changes the conversation.
Want to find out more?
Effective teams rarely succeed because of a single factor. Rather, team effectiveness emerges from the interaction between capability, cooperation, coordination, communication, cognitions, conditions and coaching. By paying attention to each of these drivers, leaders can create environments that support performance, learning and wellbeing over the long term.
To find out how YES Psychology can support your organisation to build high-performing teams, visit our website or contact us to start a conversation.