Build Powerful Teams: Recommended resources on improving team effectiveness
The readings below introduce elements of the 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness framework and some of the methods in use in different contexts (local organizing teams, distributed teams, senior staff leadership teams, and coalitions).
Questions to ask yourself as you read:
How does this resonate with your experience in teams?
What surprised you about the concepts, recommendations, or examples?
Do the concepts or recommendations conflict or align with your experience? Why might that be?
How might you apply the recommendations to your work?
What challenges might you face when you implement them?
Teams for local mobilization and organizing
Creating a Structure to Share Responsibility - Chapter 5 in Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America - This book chapter describes the neighborhood team structure that the Obama campaign created to manage, motivate, coordinate, and empower volunteers. The authors show how the campaign used this structure to distribute responsibility for campaign outcomes to volunteers.
Teams for distributed mobilization
Behind the Scenes of Sunrise’s Volunteer-Led Phone Bank Program - Learn how Sunrise Movement staff and volunteers designed and supported eight teams of volunteers that led one of the largest voter contact programs in the 2020 elections. The 50 volunteers led a program that recruited and mobilized thousands of volunteers and had the level of responsibility and autonomy most organizations reserve for staff. Watch this webinar recording to learn how Sunrise used the same frameworks and processes to create hundreds of volunteer teams.
Staff and member teams
What Makes Teams of Leaders Leadable? - This book chapter describes the particular challenges that senior staff leadership teams and teams of volunteer leaders face, strategies that can help those teams be more effective, and implications for how leadership teams themselves can most effectively be led.
Teams and coalitions
Leadership in Volunteer Multistakeholder Groups Tackling Complex Problems - This book chapter explores distributed leadership in coalition efforts and how a local effort to transform the health system created effective leadership teams.
More resources on improving team effectiveness
Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great - Ruth Wageman, Debra A. Nunes, James A. Burruss, J. Richard Hackman - There are several books on the six conditions for team effectiveness. Although it’s focused on senior leadership teams in corporations, progressive organizations and activist/member teams face the same challenges and the methods to address the challenges in senior leadership teams also work in the contexts that we work in.
Leading Teams When the Time Is Right: Finding the Best Moments to Act - Written for those who coach teams and leaders. Leaders need two different types of great timing to help their teams. First, they understand what kinds of help to give teams at predictable times in their work cycles. Second, they know how to influence their teams on the fly, sensing those unpredictable moments when a well-aimed intervention can help a team get onto a productive track. Drawing on examples from the authors’ and others’ research on team leadership, the authors show how effective team leaders take advantage of the special leadership opportunities in the life of a group to create the conditions for superb team performance. This paper was written before the “Right People” condition was isolated from “Enabling Structure” condition.
A Theory of Team Coaching - After briefly reviewing the existing literature on team coaching, the authors propose a new model with three distinguishing features. The model (1) focuses on the functions that coaching serves for a team, rather than on either specific leader behaviors or leadership styles, (2) identifies the specific times in the task performance process when coaching interventions are most likely to have their intended effects, and (3) explicates the conditions under which team-focused coaching is and is not likely to facilitate performance.
How Fearless Organizations Succeed - Amy Edmondson describes three steps leaders can take to create psychological safety, the prerequisite for greater innovation and growth.
Psychological Safety, Trust, and Learning in Organizations: A Group-level Lens - This paper discusses psychological safety and distinguishes it from the related construct of interpersonal trust. Trust is the expectation that others' future actions will be favorable to one's interests; psychological safety refers to a climate in which people are comfortable being (and expressing) themselves. Although both constructs involve a willingness to be vulnerable to others' actions, they are conceptually and theoretically distinct. In particular, psychological safety is centrally tied to learning behavior, while trust lowers transaction costs and reduces the need to monitor behavior. This paper proposes a model of antecedents and consequences of psychological safety in work teams and emphasizes the centrality of psychological safety for learning behavior. Drawing from field research in a variety of organizational settings, the author describes different approaches to studying and measuring psychological safety in teams. The author concludes with implications of this work including limitations of psychological safety in practice and suggestions areas for future research.