We all love teams because at their best they represent some of the most important values we have, like self-sacrifice and working hard for a common purpose. When we think about teams, what usually comes to mind is top performers like sports legends, inspirational business leaders, or elite military units. But the unfortunate truth is most teams aren't like the Miracle on Ice or Mission Impossible. Most teams underperform. In fact, the research tells us that no matter how many talented individual people you have, as a group, they will often fail to reach their potential. The late teamwork scholar J. Richard Hackman summarized this with a simple, powerful formula, AP equals PP minus PL. What that means is, a team's actual productivity equals its potential productivity minus process losses. What are process losses, social loafing is one example where the larger team gets, the less each person contributes. Groupthink is another common problem where teams make decisions based on wrong assumptions without even realizing it. There are plenty other hidden ways that groups get on the wrong track. Their commitment to their shared goals fades, and their performance suffers. That's the bad news. The good news is that there are steps you can take to tackle these problems and create what we call a high performing team, an HPT. In this course, we'll give you the tools for getting the most out of any group, whether it's at work, or a sports team you play on, or a club, or a committee that you're a member of. But first I should introduce myself. I'm Derek Newberry, and I'm a business anthropologist. Now, what this means is that I study the human factors driving organizational effectiveness. At the University of Pennsylvania, I teach students and executives, on how to be more effective collaborators and on how to manage organizational culture. I'm one of the authors of the book Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance, which is all about how to build HPTs. In this course I'll share with you what the research and my own experience tells us about HPTs. We'll look at cases of real life teams so you can understand what separates the best teams from the rest. Let's take a look at the breakdown of the modules. In this first module, we'll talk about how to get your team started off on the right foot with a process called team chartering. This is where you lay out the rules that your group will follow to give them the best chance for success. In particular, we'll talk about how to create the right goals, team roles, and group norms to get the most out of each person. In the next module, we'll look at why good teams go bad. We'll focus on those process losses I mentioned and dig into the different problems that can derail your group from its goals. Since it can be hard to really pinpoint team problems and even harder to talk about them, we'll look at some methods that will actually help you do both. In the third module, we move from discussion to action. After getting a sense of what's going wrong with your group, we'll give you the tools for making effective behavioral changes so that you can close the gap between how your team says it wants to work together and what they actually do. In the last module, we'll look at common types of teams like startups and global teams. We'll look at the challenges that each one is most likely to face and give you some tips for how to get rid of them. Bottomline, by the end of this course, you'll be able to do three things, create the ground rules that set your team up for success, identify problems that hurt team morale and productivity, and create the behavioral changes that get your team back on track and performing at their best. Remember that the insights you'll get in this course aren't just for a formal team. They're all about helping you get better at working with others to get things done. These are important skills for being successful in a changing workplace. As we'll see later, technological advancement and globalization are making us more connected and also more fragmented than ever. The collaboration skills you'll learn here are your toolbox for navigating this new world of work. So let's get started.
