Characteristics of Effective Teams

To identify whether you are truly a team or what you have to achieve to be a team - here are some characteristics to keep in mind.

• Shared Leadership roles
• Team discusses, decides and does real work together
• Individual and mutual team accountability
• Collective work products
• Measures performance directly by assessing collective work products
• Encourages open ended discussion and active problem solving meetings.

If you were to look at the characteristics of a work group, as opposed to a team, there are definitive differences:

• Strong, clearly focused leader / solo leader
• The leader discusses, decides and delegates
• The group's purpose is the same as the organisational mission.
• Individual accountability
• Individual work products
• Measure effectiveness indirectly
• Runs efficient meetings with information sharing main activity

Looking at these characteristics, you can see that to be effective in a team environment there needs to be less focus on the me and more on the we - purely through mutual accountability and interdependence.

You can also take into consideration these 10 characteristics of Effective Teams from Sharon Feltham and Excellerate:

1. Clear Purpose - members understand and are fully committed to the vision, mission and objectives of the team. Ineffective teams lack clarity of purpose, a plan and specific goals. Members wonder, wander and pull in different directions.
2. Open Communication - effective teams pride themselves on open, participatory communication and vigorous discussions. Ineffective teams are marked by gossip, hidden agendas and guarded communication.
3. Constructive Conflict - in effective teams there is disagreement but members are comfortable with this and deal with it openly. There are very few signs of avoiding or suppressing conflict. Ineffective teams lack trust and are often undermined by personal disagreements and their inability to resolve conflict constructively.
4. Effective Problem Solving and Decision Making - approaches to problem solving and decision making are well established in effective teams. Ineffective teams lack problem solving strategies and are stymied by inefficient decision making processes and low quality decisions.
5. Defined Roles, Responsibilities and Accountability - roles, responsibilities, expectations and authorities are well defined, understood and accepted. Work is fairly distributed and skills are well represented with team members' abilities recognised and fully utilised. Team members are fully accountable for individual and team performance. Ineffective teams struggle with role conflict, unclear boundaries, confused expectations and poor accountability.
6. Strong Relationships - effective teams work on building and maintaining internal relationships. Team members are supportive; trust one another and have a lot of fun together. Members also invest in developing relationships and building credibility with the rest of the organisation.
7. Systems and Procedures - effective teams implement and support procedures to guide and regulate team functioning. Ineffective teams rarely invest in developing their systems or improving work processes.
8. Experimentation and Creativity - well functioning teams encourage creativity and risk-taking and experiment with different ways of doing things. Ineffective teams are often bureaucratic, low risk and rigid.
9. Measurement and Self-assessment - effective teams have clear shared measures. They schedule time to regularly assess their progress and performance, identifying achievements and areas for improvement. Ineffective teams tend to focus on individual measurement and rarely review their collective performance. 
10. Shared Leadership - effective teams share leadership roles depending upon the circumstances, needs of the group and expertise of the members. The formal leader co-ordinates the integration of effective team functions and models appropriate behaviour to help establish positive norms. Ineffective teams often have one person dominating. 

In essence, the key elements of a team are:

• Small number of people - teams by their very nature can't be big and so real teams have a definable membership.
• Complimentary skills - teams bring together complimentary skills and experience that exceed those of any individual on the team. The different perspectives, knowledge, skills and strengths of each member are identified and used. By comparison, most groups are extremely rigid, members usually have assigned roles and tasks that don't change. Teams however, are flexible, performing different task and maintenance functions as required. Roles and tasks may change depending on the expertise and experience most pertinent to the work being performed.
• Performance goals - members share the common task and have clearly defined objectives for which members are individually and collectively accountable.
• Common approach - a team has a shared sense of purpose with a clear understanding of what constitutes the team mission. They can describe a vivid picture of what the team needs to achieve, and the norms and values that will guide them. The actions of members are interdependent and coordinated. Members have a shared sense of unity and consciously identify with the team and each other. Individuals use 'we' rather than 'me'.
• Mutual accountability - a group typically produces products that are the sum of individual member contributions. Whereas a team develops products that are a result of the team's collective effort. In groups, members are individually accountable for their efforts where in real teams, members need the help of one another to accomplish the purpose for which they joined the group. They are individually and collectively accountable for the timeliness and quality of the teams products. If members answer to the boss instead of one another, then you have a work group, not a real team.
• Leadership - typically a work group has a strong leader, in a traditional management role, who directs activities, assigns tasks and establishes schedules. Where the team leader makes all the critical decisions it's a single leader unit, not a team. By contrast, teams share or rotate leadership among individual members. They will also rotate less desired tasks so that no one member is permanently assigned to a less challenging or interesting activity.