Over the years, as teams have grown more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic, collaboration has become more complex. But though teams face new challenges, their success still depends on a core set of fundamentals. As J. Richard Hackman, who began researching teams in the 1970s, discovered, what matters most isn't the personalities or behavior of the team members; it's whether a team has a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context. In their own research, Haas and Mortensen have found that teams need those three "enabling conditions" now more than ever. But their work also revealed that today's teams are especially prone to two corrosive problems: "us versus them" thinking and incomplete information. Overcoming those pitfalls requires a new enabling condition: a shared mindset. This article details what team leaders should do to establish the four foundations for success. For instance, to promote a shared mindset, leaders should foster a common identity and common understanding among team members, with techniques such as "structured unstructured time." The authors also describe how to evaluate a team's effectiveness, providing an assessment leaders can take to see what's working and where there's room for improvement.

Although many companies claim to embrace failure as an integral part of the innovation process, near-zero tolerance for it blocks them from pursuing new ideas. Corporate budgeting, resource allocation, and risk control are all designed to promote predictability and efficiency, and even when people understand that they can and should fail, they do everything possible to avoid missteps. There's a way to resolve this conundrum, however: Increase your return on unsuccessful projects by rigorously extracting value from them, boosting their benefits while minimizing their downsides. In this article, two business school professors outline three steps you can take to improve your firm's return on failure. First, study projects that didn't pan out and document all the insights they offer about customers, markets, future trends, your organization, your operations, your team, and yourself. Second, magnify the impact of those lessons by spreading them across your company. Senior leaders should gather frequently to discuss their failures, and efforts to share lessons with all employees will build trust and goodwill and encourage future initiatives. Third, step back and do a corporatewide review of your pattern of failure, to ensure your overall approach is yielding all the benefits it should. If failure rates are too high, you may need to tighten up your systems, but low rates may signal a need to encourage more openness to risks. Mistakes are the inevitable consequence of trying something new. But they can also be a source of tremendous value in the form of learning if your firm has the right mindset.