In my role as a Non-District Specialist for the RSE-TASC I have the responsibility and opportunity to be a member of many different kinds of teams. As professionals, I bet all of us can attest to the importance of being an effective team member; however, do we spend time thinking about how to measure or assess team effectiveness? The late Richard Hackman, who was a national expert on team effectiveness in his position as Professor of Organizational Psychology at Harvard University, conducted research to answer the question: What makes teams work? In his book, Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems, he identified three criteria to guide teams in assessing effectiveness:

  1. “The productive output of the team (that is, its product, service, or decision) meets or exceeds the standards of quantity, quality, and timeliness of the team’s clients – that is, of the people who receive, review and / or use the output.”
  2. “The social processes the team uses in carrying out the work enhances members’ capability to work together interdependently in the future.”
  3. “The group experience, on balance, contributes positivity to the learning and professional development of individual members.”

I became particularly interested in what it meant for team members to “work together interdependently.” Hackman’s defined it as the degree to which teams could trust the unique strengths and skills of the individual members, and not rely on their official title, role, or status position in the organization to carry out tasks and complete common goals. His research showed that interdependency was less about what all the team members had in common, and more about how their individual talents and contributions set the conditions for effectiveness in achieving a common team objective. Additionally, when teams allowed focused task competition to arise from knowledge and appreciation of the individual members’ strengths, team members experienced a higher degree of peer teaching and learning.

More on “focused task competition” in my next blog!