What Makes a Great Team?

Effective teams pursue a common outcome and have a common goal they want to reach. Healthy teams have mutual respect between members of the team and management. Plus, team members value one another’s contributions and skill sets. Having a team allows people with different strengths to work together, in psychologically safe environments.

Sports teams want to win a match or a game, military teams want to win a battle, business teams want to grow their business, and for-impact teams want to be more effective at making a positive difference in the world. Common outcomes, common goals.

The importance of teamwork in getting anything done beyond what an individual can do on their own is self-evident. And also a hot topic- Google has 1.6 billion searches logged for exactly this question: “What Makes a Great Team?”

The widespread tendency of humans to form teams suggests that in the evolution of humanity adaptive challenges made teaming important for survival. Teams serve most fundamentally as a form of technology to help humans take advantage of their innate capabilities and solve adaptive problems. Teaming affords humans a means to achieve goals that they cannot accomplish (or would accomplish less efficiently) otherwise.

Collaborations can be simple (e.g., one person lifting up another to reach high-hanging fruit) or complex…