How to improve team performance?

TL;DR

To improve team performance, get three things right: the size of the team, the way it meets, and the shared experience it builds over time.

• Keep the team big enough to share the work but small enough to stay coordinated, usually more than three people and fewer than twelve.
• Run shorter, structured meetings that first agree on the real problem and reward each person's unique contribution instead of who talks the most.
• Protect the history a team builds by working together, and bring in new members so fresh thinking keeps coming.

Insights

According to business author Josh Kaufman, it starts with the size of the team. Every person you add brings more hands and more ideas, but they also add communication, because everyone has to stay on the same page. Past a certain point that coordination cost grows faster than the extra output, and the group slows down. The teams that tend to perform best, from surgical teams to specialized response units, land at more than three and fewer than twelve people, where each new member still adds more than they take away in overhead.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant notes that how long a team has worked together matters more than most people expect. Groups that share history build routines and learn each other's strengths, and the research bears it out: surgeons get better results at the hospital where they operate most, with their regular team, than at one where the team is new to them. One flight-simulator study even found that tired crews who had flown together made fewer serious errors than well-rested crews of strangers. The one risk is that too much familiarity can make a team stop questioning itself, so the strongest teams keep that shared experience and still bring in new members for fresh perspective.

Author Shane Parrish draws attention to how the team meets. Long meetings where people take turns restating what everyone already read reward airtime, not thinking. It works better to run shorter, tightly structured sessions that begin by agreeing on what the problem actually is, and to ask each person for the one thing they see that no one else does. That shifts the reward from talking the most to adding something only you can add, and it gives the quieter thinkers on the team a real way in.