HBR Guide to Project Management (HBR Guide Series)

Chapter 12

The Discipline of Teams

A summary of the full-length HBR article by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, highlighting key ideas.

THE IDEA IN BRIEF

The word team gets bandied about so loosely that many managers are oblivious to its real meaning—or its true potential. With a run-of-the-mill working group, performance is a function of what the members do as individuals. A team’s performance, by contrast, calls for both individual and mutual accountability.

Though it may not seem like anything special, mutual accountability can lead to astonishing results. It enables a team to achieve performance levels that are far greater than the individual bests of the team’s members. To achieve these benefits, team members must do more than listen, ...