"Somebody is not as smart as everybody."

There are five ingredients in most effective teams:

• purpose
• leadership
• membership
• interaction
• deliverables

It appears that each is necessary, but none are sufficient without all the others.

Purpose. You would suppose that a team is formed precisely because of a purpose. (You would suppose that, but I at least have seen other things happen. :-)) The effective team's purpose has the following qualities:

• Based on organizational need
• Founded according to sound, reasonable principles
• Tied into the self-interest of the team members, thus making it easier to sell to them
• Faced with a competitive imperative

Leadership. The team leader is not to be confused with line management, even when the line manager is the team leader. (In that case, it's necessary for the leader to wear a different hat.) The effective team's leader has the following attributes:

• Willingness to work to achieve (and maintain) "buy-in," to build confidence
• Willingness to make decisions based on team findings, rather than solely on personal judgment
• Willingness to let experts be experts, and to manage work rather than do it
• Ability to grant or obtain authority for members to carry out decisions
• Ability to grant incentives for team members to make one another "look good"
• Understanding of the skills and behavior of the team members

Membership. If the team members have to be drafted, then the purpose of the team should probably be reexamined. So for this aspect of the effective team, we assume "buy-in" has been achieved -- that the members start with commitment to the purpose. (Some teams are partly founded on religious fervor. It was unclear to me from this discussion whether a religious conversion to the team's purpose is necessary.) To achieve the rest of what the membership needs, it is quite possible in some cases that training will be necessary:

• Mutual respect
• Reliance on one another to be willing and able to do their jobs
• Common, confident view of group objectives
• Freedom to raise questions and criticism

Interaction. The term "trust" was raised again and again in this discussion, and it became clear that in the context, "trust" didn't mean "with our family secrets." It meant recognition of professional responsibility and reliance on having said responsibility fulfilled. Having established trust in this sense, interaction is based on this trust in the day-to-day functioning of the team:

• Protection of one another's self-esteem
• Soft-pedaling our natural tendencies to cover our asses
• Setting aside of all preconceived notions of how things (other than fundamental engineering principles) are "to be done," of natural resistance to change
• Responsibility for our own actions and group-assigned tasks

Deliverables. The obvious deliverable is the fulfillment of the group's purpose, if it can be fulfilled; and some detail as to why not otherwise. (Some in this discussion felt that a truly effective team could not fail to fulfill a truly worthy purpose.) Not so obvious is the deliverable of "lessons learned." There are two kinds of those: the group kind, that should be documented in plain "English" (or, written clearly in whatever your language happens to be); and the individual kind, to be filed away in our memories to be drawn on (or recorded on resumes) later.

Rewards. Individual performance evaluations and rewards are simply inconsistent with team performance, particularly if the individual is on the team full-time, and may even undermine the team. (Deming was one author who showed why individual performance evaluations tend to be tied into random chance anyway.) Most participants in this discussion felt that rewards should be tied into team performance, and shared nearly equally among members (some suggested peer evaluations could be used to determine MVPs if appropriate), and might well be used as a "carrot" to help achieve "buy-in." Confidence is, after all, tied into the employee's self-interest, and there's more than one way self-interest is expressed. :-)

Personality Types

Recognizing what personality types make up your team can go a long way toward helping you predict what contributions each member can make. A Myers-Briggs personality test would give us 16 different personality types, from which management -- if it has the flexibility, and who does? -- would design teams of folks that complement one another. This table shows us a FEW of those types, drastically (and you may even think, incorrectly) simplified.