Teams go awry because leaders have focused on the wrong things (such as leadership style) when designing, managing, and supporting teams. Hackman explains why team effectiveness is best measured by the three criteria of a team product acceptable to clients, growth in team capability, and a group experience that is meaningful and satisfying for its members. Team members and leaders alike will benefit from fully appreciating the five conditions that Hackman has found to foster work team effectiveness: having a real team, a compelling direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context, and expert team coaching - the first three of which are the core conditions.
Contrary to "cause-effect" models of team leadership in which all the emphasis is placed on leadership behaviors and styles, in Hackman's view the central role of leaders is to create and maintain these five conditions. Leaders should not attempt to continually manage a team to *push* it to perform well. They will do better to establish a clear purpose and then make small adjustments at the right times. Consistent with this approach, Hackman warns against the pervasive tendency to assign credit or blame to specific individuals. Taking that perspective blinds those trying to "fix" or improve team performance to dynamics only evident at a group level of analysis.
Commendably, Hackman does *not* present his findings as a *universal* model for teams. His Authority Matrix (p.52) sets out four levels of team self-management. He does not address "manager-led teams" which have the lowest level of self-management since they are invariably disastrous for well-understood reasons. Nor does he look in depth at self-governing groups which take on all four levels of setting overall direction, designing the team and its organizational context, monitoring and managing work process and progress, and executing the team task. Hackman's model revolves around the most heavily populated middle categories of self-managing and self-designing teams.
Don't mistake this group level of analysis for any kind of fuzziness. You will find the book outstanding in the author's ability to combine compelling narrative with a finely-carved explanatory structure. The first condition of having a "real team" may appear fuzzy, but only until you read chapter 2 in which Hackman analyzes real work teams into four components, each with its own subtleties. As you read the examples and reflect on your own experiences participating in or observing teams, you will see how commonly teams fail to have a real team task (rather than being merely a "co-acting group"), to suffer from being "underbounded" or "overbounded", or to lack clearly delimited authority or inadequate stability over time. On the last element of real teams, Hackman strongly disputes the notion that long-lasting teams tend to deteriorate in performance. The only except appears to be research and development teams who becoming uniquely stale after about three years of stable membership.
Despite pushing back against over-managing teams, Hackman finds a crucial role for leadership in setting a compelling direction - the second core element of effective teams. Even here, direction must be carefully limited to ends rather than means. In the very worst teams, a leader sets highly specific means but leaves the purpose completely unspecified. Hackman's example of such a team at a bank will make some of us wince in painful remembrance. This understates the subtleties of Hackman's account, which unfolds in his discussion of the trade-offs involved in setting direction for a team.
If this were an infomercial rather than a review, I would say "And there's more! Much more!" The last section of the book examines imperatives for leaders, including 7 execution skills of team leaders, and how to think differently about teams - the obstacles to improving teams, what it takes, and what it costs those who would attempt the task. If you prefer to test drive some of Hackman's ideas, you might first read his articles "The Five Keys to Successful Teams" (which covers some of the material in the last two chapters), and "New Rules for Team Building". You may want to abandon such caution however. Unlike so many books where 80 percent of the text acts as filler, adding little if anything to the initial points, every one of Hackman's chapters will yield an excellent returning on your reading investment.