Is Your Team Effective?

How do you assess whether your team is effective? Is it that the team accomplishes its goals and meets its numbers? Those criteria are important, but alone they are a limited view of team effectiveness. To be effective your team has to meet three criteria1: 

Your team meets or exceed the standards of people who receive and review their output, whether that output is decisions, services, or products. Of course, it’s important that a team meet its goals, including the numbers it has set as targets. But that is not sufficient. Ultimately, other people decide whether your team is performing acceptably. If you are not meeting the expectations of people who receive and review your team’s work, your team is not performing effectively.

Leaders often think that the performance criterion is the only criterion for effectiveness. Although that may be true in the short run, in the long run it is essential to meet two other criteria.

Your team works together in a way that improves its effectiveness over time. If your team isn’t improving the way it works over time, chances are it won’t be effective in the long run. You have probably been on a team that met its goals, but was so dysfunctional that you promised yourself you would never work with the same people again. These teams pay too high a price for their performance. Effective teams learn from their experiences and mistakes. They talk openly about how they need to do better as a team, develop and implement plans to do so, and then evaluate their progress.

Your team provides experiences through which team members can develop their skills and have a sense of well-being. Although team members can weather frustrating periods, the team experience overall has to be a satisfying one for team members. If the team experience doesn’t provide opportunities for members to develop their skills or if the team experience creates undue stress, boredom, or frustration, you might lose your best people, and those that stay may be only partway in the game.

Don’t short-change your team by ignoring the second and third criteria. The three criteria are interrelated; you need to meet all three for your team to really be effective. 

One way people meet some of their needs for growth and well-being is to be on a team that performs well and that continues to improve how it works. If team members don’t find the team experience satisfying, they will not likely have the energy to meet performance standards or figure out how to work together better.

Teams are complex social systems; to get the most from them, you need to treat them that way.