Introduction

The 6 Team Conditions framework–a leading, empirically validated and highly predictive framework based on the seminal work of Drs. Richard Hackman, Ruth Wageman and other teams scholars at Harvard University–helps team leaders, team members and team coaches/facilitators foster team effectiveness.
The 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness framework identifies the 6 Conditions that can be deliberately designed into a team and that together create an environment where great teamwork will emerge. In our research, the 6 Conditions account for up to 80% of a team’s effectiveness.

…you can’t make a team be great what you can do is put in place healthy conditions that together stack the deck in favour of a team growing into a superb collaboration. – Ruth Wageman

The 3 Essentials

The Essentials are the fundamental building blocks of great teams.

A team with the right people has the range of perspectives needed to do the work, and the skills–including teamwork skills–to bring those perspectives to the work.

To have a great team, first and foremost you have to create a real team: one that is bounded so that members know who is on the team (and who is not), they need to work together to accomplish their work, and they are stable in membership long enough to accomplish something meaningful together.

Teams need a purpose that engages their commitment and orients them in a shared direction.

The 3 Enablers

The Enablers accelerate a team’s development into a brilliant collaboration.

Every team benefits from a few elements of healthy structure: keeping the team small enough, tackling tasks together that make sense to be done as a team, and identifying a handful of explicit norms about what they should and should not do when they work together.

Well-designed teams benefit from an expert coach who can help the team make excellent use of its resources.

Every team operates in a larger context, and the structures and systems in that context (such as rewards and information) can either promote great teamwork, or create obstacles to excellent collaboration.

The Research

The 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness Framework comes from decades of research by leading teams scholars at Harvard University. Richard Hackman, Ruth Wageman, and their students and colleagues have studied thousands of teams around the world, in a wide range of industries, sectors, and cultural contexts. Their work identified 6 Conditions that are all actionable, designable elements of teams and together they foster great teamwork and significant accomplishment over time. The research about these 6 fundamental conditions has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and books. (See Publications)