What Makes Teams Work?

Michael Schrage

Codirector
MIT Media Labs eMarkets Initiative
Executive director
Merrill Lynch's Innovation Grants Competition
Cambridge, Massachusetts

I view teams skeptically, because so many organizations treat them cynically. Teamwork has become a euphemism for organizational politics. Guess what? People sense the dishonesty there. People aren't stupid. They know when they're being used.

The tough question that managers need to answer isn't, "How do we build better teams?" The question is "What kind of conversations and interactions do we want to create?" Innovative managers understand that they must do more than manage people. They need to manage the interactions between people. That's not a subtle distinction. The best managers get their people to interact in creative ways.

How do they do that? It takes shared space to create shared understandings. Shared space could be a model or a prototype of a proposed new product.

It could be the mock-up of a Web site. What gives a conversation weight, dimension, and relevance is having a shared space where people's ideas can play out in front of one another. The Net is the greatest medium for shared space ever invented!

The point is that new kinds of shared space allow new kinds of collaboration and creativity to take place. These spaces let people seriously play. Isn't that what teams and teamwork should really be about?

Michael Schrage (schrage@media.mit.edu), codirector of the MIT Media Labs eMarkets Initiative and executive director of Merrill Lynch's Innovation Grants Competition, is the author of Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), and No More Teams: Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration (Currency/Doubleday, 1995).

H. David Aycock

Former chairman, CEO, and president
Nucor Corp.
Charlotte, North Carolina

There are seven key ingredients to building a successful team. Number one, the mission must be clearly defined and articulated, and everybody has to understand it. That includes an understanding of the project's purpose, the strategy for getting the work accomplished, the ultimate goal, the benefits people will receive if the goal is met, the measurement system that's going to be used, and how differences of opinion (or other conflicts) are going to be handled.

Number two, all team members have to be positive thinkers. A team just can't function with an excuse-driven, "no-can-do" member on board.

Number three, selfish people spell doom for a team effort.

Number four, each team member must have enough self-confidence and self-respect to respect other team members.

Number five, the team leader must always be on the lookout for distractions, tangents, and unproductive or ancillary issues. If the leader spots the project going astray, it's his or her responsibility to get it back on track -- fast.

Number six, each member must trust the motives of the other members.

Number seven, the team has to be as small as possible. If you have more people than are absolutely necessary on a team, members will start functioning like a committee.

We do a lot of team-based work at Nucor: Teams put steel joists together; teams work on the rolling mill; teams work in the corporate area. None of these teams would work without those seven ingredients.

H. David Aycock is the former chairman, CEO, and president of Nucor Corp., a company that manufactures steel products, has 7,500 employees, and owns operating facilities in eight states. Nucor's products include carbon and alloy steel, steel joists and joist girders, steel deck, and cold-finished steel. Nucor's sales are in excess of $4 billion per year. Aycock joined Nucor in 1962, when the company (then known as the Nuclear Corporation of America) bought the Vulcraft plant in Florence, South Carolina, where he was a sales manager.

Millard Fuller

Founder and president
Habitat for Humanity International
Americus, Georgia

The most essential ingredient of a successful team is a cause that everyone agrees on. In our case, it's providing housing for low-income families -- people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford a home. We operate with what we call the "theology of the hammer." People may differ religiously or politically, but we can all agree on a hammer as a way to help people in need.

The second essential ingredient is preparation. In our case, that means doing all of the background work: having all of the materials, plumbers, electricians, and so forth scheduled to be on-site. That way, the work goes smoothly, because as soon as the volunteers arrive, they have something productive to do and someone there who is qualified to show them how to do it.