What is an effective team?

The 1967 movie The Dirty Dozen is about taking a group of convicted men and turned them into a team capable of executing a high stakes operation behind enemy lines against the nazies in WWII.

Individually, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but the whole challenge, and the premise of the movie, is to make them work together as a team.

They mostly succeed, but one of them is a psycho and almost ruins the mission. I guess there’s a lesson there too: everyone can be part of a team, but not everyone can be part of your team. Selecting the team is as important as building the team.

The difference between a good team and a bad team is staggering

Show me two businesses:

1. One’s got assets, money in the bank, technology, but bad, ineffective teams
2. The other one doesn’t have much of anything, but it does have great teams

And 8 times out of 10 I’ll pick number 2.

A rich business with bad teams is a decaying business. They used to have good teams, that’s how they succeeded, but then they lost it, they stopped caring, leadership got bad, and are now living on borrowed time. Cruising on inertia, but not for long.

It’s not one thing. It’s not even a few. It’s many.

People like to summarize it all to one thing. One idea, one sentence.

It’s not their fault, it’s the way the game is played. Send punchy, short messages, and people are more likely to react to them. Explain the nuances and people fall asleep. Or maybe I’m being too much of a doomer.

Some say effective teams are all about purpose. Others empathy. Or skills. Others use the fancier term of psychological safety. Discipline. Routines. Motivation. Grit. Trust. Honesty. Etc.

In truth, none of them is the secret ingredient. They all are, and more, and not all teams need the same thing at the same time.

Some teams need trust. Some need discipline. Some need a purpose. More often than not, they need a mix, but the mix is never exactly the same. There’s trends, patterns, aspects you can generalize, but it’s not the same. No two teams are exactly the same, no matter how much some managers would like it to be like that.

And yet, we have to come up with models that everyone can take and apply to their situation.

Why am I telling you this?

Because of models. I’m working on my own 3S Model for Highly Effective Teams. I want to launch it this autumn, together with a video course and other products around it.

And more than that, I know most of you work in teams, some lead teams, some lead teams of teams of teams.

Effective teams are everything. You know it too, you’ve all worked in that great team once where things just seemed to flow and find their natural place, and stuff got done, and there was no politics and no bs and it work had purpose.

How can we replicate that?

That’s what my model will be about.

Now you tell me

What does your team need?