You Can't Make a Team Be Great

Collaborative Intelligence: Using Teams to Solve Hard Problems, is an eleven-chapter book written by J. Richard Hackman, the Edgar Pierce Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at Harvard University, and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers in May of 2011. Although based on the latest scholarly research, the book is written for both the experienced and novice team leader, and can be used as well in academic courses that examine groups and teams. The work comprises three sections. The first, "The Challenge and Potential of Teams," explains the general structural components of a team and the benefits and pitfalls of each. The second part, "Six Enabling Conditions," elaborates in detail on six environmental conditions that can help to produce successful team collaboration. The third part, "Implications for Team Leaders and Organizations," discusses specific methods leaders have adopted, or avoided, to foster collaboration and improve the quality of their teams' work, including what the author calls the 60-30-10 rule. Chapter 3 explores the concept of "team effectiveness" by assessing a team's performance based on three dimensions: the productive output of the team, the social processes implemented by the team, and the quality of individual learning and development garnered through the overall group experience. A simple checklist is devised for use in monitoring a team's processes in real time. An emphasis is placed on identifying structural and contextual conditions, as opposed to focusing on the perfect leadership style, in order to enable effective collaboration.

• Fostering collaboration
• Corporate strategy
• Management
• Business communication
• Organizational behavior
• Teams