Great teams don’t happen by accident. They need structure, the right conditions, the right behaviors, and a shared purpose. Put a group of talented people under the same manager and you have a group. Whether it becomes a team depends on what happens next.
Here are 10 characteristics that great teams share, and why the first two make the rest possible.
1. They’re invested
On a great team, people like the work, like the people, and want the team to succeed. They’re bought in. The alternative is people who show up and do what they’re told: “All right, whatever you want, I’ll do it.”
Investment covers two things. One is purpose, a shared goal the team is working toward. The other is engagement, which is where many organizations are struggling. Gallup puts US employee engagement at 31%. About half of workers are not engaged, doing just enough, and 17% are actively disengaged. Engagement rose in 2020, when many people started working from home and felt their companies cared about them. It has slid since.
The reasons are not hard to find. Many companies have swung from agency and flexibility back to classic command and control: be in the office four or five days a week, we’re watching. Meanwhile, the workforce is global. Someone in Los Angeles can work for a company in Denver, Germany or Sri Lanka. Crack down, and good people leave.
Layoffs add to it, especially when they arrive with a message that AI will replace whoever is left. People notice. The anxiety is real, and it pushes engagement down further.
2. Psychological safety and trust
Google’s Project Aristotle set out to learn what makes a high-performing team. Psychological safety came out as the foundation for everything else. Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team makes the same point from another angle, with absence of trust at the base of the pyramid.
Whatever you call it, people need to feel safe speaking up, safe challenging ideas, and able to trust their colleagues and the organization. It’s one of the most underrated characteristics of a great team.
It’s also fragile. A team can be wonderful, but if someone feels the company is uncertain about them, they stop enjoying work regardless of what the team does. People are sensitive to what gets said, to new technology arriving, to an unexplained hire. It doesn’t take much for rumors and whisper campaigns to start, and once the base of the pyramid slips, everything above it wobbles.
3. The right size
The old guidance for Scrum Teams was seven plus or minus two. Today’s Scrum Guide says 10 or fewer. Amazon’s two-pizza rule lands in the same place: if two pizzas won’t feed the team, it’s too big.
Small specialist teams of three or four can work well, provided they know how to collaborate with others to get what they need. But somewhere around eight to 10 is a sweet spot, and it holds for teams that don’t use Scrum too. It’s small enough that everyone can keep each other up to date, and a daily sync stays short instead of turning into a long, dull status meeting.
Past 10, time is lost to overhead and decisions get harder. With 8 to 10 people working closely, decisions come more easily and people are more willing to speak up about what affects them. Size also feeds trust. A department of 20 is fine. Two teams of 10 will usually work far better than one team of 20.
4. The right people
Skills matter, but they’re only half the hire. The other half is fit with the team’s core values. Someone can have every skill on the list and still derail the team if they don’t fit.
One good test: would you want to be stuck in an airport with this person? They don’t need to be the most outgoing person in the room. Some of the best colleagues say very little, and are brilliant when they do. But you’ll spend eight hours a day working with them. When people don’t gel, they hold back, and the team loses what they could have offered.
5. They know each other beyond work
High-performing teams know each other outside the work itself. One organization has a poster in its boardroom that simply says, “I have a best friend at work.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean everyone goes out for drinks. It means knowing enough about each other’s lives to notice when someone is stressed, and to know how to help. That’s the point of a team: to be stronger together than anyone is alone. Ten fingers working separately are ten fingers. Put them together as hands and they’re far stronger.
Think back to the best job you ever had. Chances are you’re still friends with some of those people, and you know they would go out of their way for you.
6. Clear roles and accountabilities
A team can be “okay-ish” and still be confused about who does what. When everybody is responsible for something, nobody is. Work gets dropped, work gets duplicated, people step on each other’s toes, and the confusion creates struggles nobody needs.
Clear roles mean everyone knows what they do, what others do, and where the handoffs are. That doesn’t mean never crossing a line. On a good team, someone can make a call while a colleague is out, and the colleague’s response is, “That’s what I would have done. Thanks.”
7. Clear priorities
When someone is out of the office and a critical issue is in their backlog, can someone else pick it up? Only if the whole team knows what the priorities are. “I don’t know what they were working on” is a warning sign. On a great team, nobody’s work is a surprise to the others.
8. Effective communication
Daily huddle, a check-in every couple of days, Slack, email, chat. The tool and the cadence matter less than who chooses them. The team picks what works for the team.
But good communication rests on what came before it. Without purpose, engagement, psychological safety and trust, no tool or cadence will fix it.
9. Continuous improvement
Great teams inspect and adapt regularly. A retrospective, or whatever the team calls its regular look back, is where the team checks how its experiments are going and decides what to try next.
10. Team growth and team building
Now and then, that retrospective time can be used differently. Play a game. Try the M&M activity: everyone picks a candy and answers the question that goes with its color, such as a favorite book or movie. Before a holiday, get everyone online for a game, cameras on.
That isn’t “wasted” time away from the work. Team building makes communication easier. When people feel close, the person you hand work to isn’t a name in a queue, it’s someone you share in-jokes with. That camaraderie is what makes people want to communicate.
A team, not a collection of individuals
Put the 10 together:
- They’re invested, with purpose and engagement.
- They have psychological safety and trust.
- They’re the right size.
- They have the right people, with the right mix of skills and values.
- They know each other beyond work.
- They have clear roles and accountabilities.
- They have clear priorities.
- They communicate effectively.
- They improve continuously.
- They invest in team growth and team building.
The difference between a great team and a group of people who happen to report to the same manager is that feeling of being in it together. Or as one line puts it: great teams aren’t built by putting great individuals together. Great teams are built when individuals choose to be great together!