In Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances, published by what was then Harvard Business Press (2002), J. Richard Hackman sets out five basic conditions that leaders of companies and other organizations must fulfill in order to create and maintain effective teams:

1. Teams must be real. People have to know who is on the team, who is nit, and why. It’s the leader’s job to make that crystal clear.

2. Teams need a compelling direction. Members need to know, and agree on, what they’re supposed to be doing together. Unless a leader articulates a clear direction, there is a real risk that different members will pursue different agendas.

3. Teams need enabling structures. Teams that have poorly designed tasks, the wrong number or mix of members, and/or fuzzy and unenforced norms of conduct invariably get into trouble.

4. Teams need a supportive organization. The organizational context – including the reward system, the human resource system, and the information system – must facilitate teamwork as well as a team’s work.

5. Teams need expert coaching. Most executive coaches focus on individual performance, which does nit significantly improve teamwork. Teams need coaching as a group in team processes – especially at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a team project.

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J. Richard Hackman is Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University. He taught at Yale for twenty years and then moved to his present position at Harvard. His published works include Leading Teams, Senior Leadership Teams: What It Takes to Make Them Great (with Ruth Wageman, Debra Nunes, and James Burruss), and most recently, Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems (2011).