[MUSIC] We will get started with our discussion around the design of the team, or what my team should look like. Before we do that, I would like to pose you a question, so think about it. A good leader can make every team to perform well. Do you agree? Or do you disagree? How do you see that? Think for a moment and reflect upon whether you agree or disagree with this statement and also, try to formulate or maybe even to write down some arguments of why you think so. How you have come to your opinion. Ready? Let's continue. I want to quote a very famous professor in teamwork here. This is the late Richard Hackman who said, no leader can make a team perform well. But all leaders can create conditions that increase the likelihood that it will. So do you see how this relate to the prior question asking, do you think a team leader can always make a team perform well? Is this always possible? Well, I won't be very much in line with Richard Hackman, saying probably not. Probably I would disagree with this statement because a team is a very complex setting. There's. People with their opinions, with their ideas, with their background, with their experiences. Then there's relationships with one person to every one of the other persons in the team. And if you just think for a moment, what can happen in a relationship in the cooperation with only one person. And then multiply it by the number of people that are working together in a team. So a team as you see is very complex. And what we see here if you think back all the way to when I introduced the course and we were at reflecting on people have this tendency to behave as people. Well, if we think about the implication of this for teams, it means people maybe sometimes irrational. They maybe over emotional. They may have different interest. People may want to achieve very different things in a team. If you add up all of these, a team is really a very complex set of relations to manage. And even when you have a very good team leader, it's going to be hard to have a direct influence at every moment. But does that mean that there's nothing you can do? No, of course. On the contrary, there's many things that you can do as a team leader, especially with regards to the design of the team. And this is something that happens before the team even exists. This is about when, let's say you get asked a question to put together a team to achieve a certain objective, where are you going to be starting? How do you start thinking about the group of people that you put together for working in your team? So Richard Hackman formulated a set of conditions where he says this is what you should you take into account. If you do that, you have no guarantee whatsoever, but at least you will increase the chances that your team will work well. First of all, create a real team. Doesn't this sound obvious? Aren't teams real teams automatically? No, for sure not. Especially here we should consider who is on the team and who is not on the team. What Richard Hackman calls clarifying the team boundaries. This sounds obvious, or doesn't it. For some teams, yes. If you're put together in a study group where there are five members, you know exactly who is there. Your team maybe perfectly bounded. And may have the qualities of being a real team in that respect. But sometimes in our organizations, the boundaries are more blurry. Because sometimes a person comes in every now and then as some sort of external adviser. Then there may be the team leader but there may also be a more informal team leader, so all of these aspects make it not necessarily clear that people know exactly who is on the team and who is not. Yet, you want to make sure that this is explicitly clear. Who is on the team and who is not in order to create a real team. Second, articulate a compelling direction. Why is the team there? What are these people trying to achieve together? What is the vision? What do you want to achieve? Do you remember when we discussed last week in leadership about the neo-charismatic theories? And I told you about the importance of having a vision, about moving people in the same direction? Well, this is the same. If you want to have people orchestrating their efforts, their actions and aligning their individual interests into a common theme objective. As a team leader, you need to make it very clear and explicit what it is, where are you heading to, what is your direction, what is your vision, what do you want to achieve together? [MUSIC]