Chapter 4 – Enabling Effective Teamwork

This idea of constant change however can make it difficult to set scopes to develop teams that can be taught and used by leadership or managers over a longer period of time. This chapter will focus on what enabling conditions a team needs, while still allowing for a dynamic process.

In the 1970s, organizational behaviour pioneer J. Richard Hackman began researching teams across many disciplines including The Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Apollo 13 Mission Control Team, T he U.S. Navy SEALs, Pixar Animation Studios, and working with US Intelligence in war games on Project Looking Glass. These are only a few examples of his studies.

Through studying teams across so many disciplines, Hackman was able to make revolutionary discoveries during his tenure. While there were some differences in what made these teams successful, he was able to observe and codify three broader core themes relevant to all teams in all disciplines that helped enable each team to perform.

Hackman observed that the team members’ personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles are not what matter most when it comes to teamwork. Instead, what he calls ‘enabling conditions’ are what teams require to succeed. He codified these as the team needing a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context.

While these are the core fundamentals which can be encouraged and supported externally. There was an internal study in 2012 by Google ‘Project Aristotle’, led by Julia Rozovsky, Google employee at the time, which questioned why some of the work teams were more high performing and sustainable than others. The results to this in-depth study showed that teams who feel comfortable enough with each other to take risks, produce more, and achieve better results than teams who do not. So instead of members thinking in terms of ‘me vs. you’, or ‘us vs. them’ they had a common mindset that trust between members was very important. Google called this concept Team Psychological Safety (TPS). However, it was Amy C. Edmondson who f irst introduced the concept of psychological safety in the early 1990s and published by the end of the decade. In her work, Edmondson explored the importance of creating a psychologically safe environment within teams for promoting learning and innovation.

Since then, the concept has gained widespread recognition and has been influential in discussions about team dynamics, leadership, and organizational culture. The notion that “A shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking, creates higher performing teams” has become even more important due to the need for creativity in the computing and sciences sectors. And with the technology changing so quickly, trust has become more important than ever between members in this fast changing world.

Though we have shown briefly what core conditions help to enable a productive team environment, to maintain these core conditions, there needs to be continual reviewing of the external structures and internal evaluation of the teams. This is best done in an off-handish manner to continue allow for the dynamic process and productivity of the team. This will be discussed at the end of the chapter before the conclusion.