Book Review of “Leading Teams” by Richard Hackman

Several readers of my trilogy, How To Build Winning Teams Again And Again, have asked me what I think of Richard Hackman’s “Five Conditions” team building model.

I wasn’t familiar with it. I knew all about the models introduced by Jon Katzenbach & Douglas Smith (co-authors of The Wisdom of Teams in the 1990s) and Patrick Lencioni (of Five Dysfunctions fame). But Hackman’s thinking had passed me by.

In case you didn’t know, Hackman published his ideas in 2002, in a book titled Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. He formed his conclusions after studying symphony orchestras, airline cockpit crews, economic analyst groups and manufacturing teams. What surprised me was how few reviews of his model I could find. It’s not difficult to find summaries of it on the internet, but reviews are rarer than hens’ teeth. So here’s my review of “Leading Teams” by Richard Hackman:

Summary Of Hackman’s Model

Hackman’s model describes five conditions that a team must meet for it to be genuinely effective. To be “genuinely effective” it must meet three criteria in his view. (1) It achieves or exceeds its customers’ expectations. (2) It is becoming increasingly capable. (3) It gives its individual members a learning experience, bringing feelings of fulfilment and personal growth.

Here’s a quick outline of his five conditions:

1. Real team: a “real team” is more than just a group of people working together. For a team to be “real”, you must know who is and isn’t in the team. Also, its membership must be reasonably stable over time. Finally, its members must be interdependent when it comes to fulfilling its main task – they cannot work as independent contributors.
2. Compelling direction: an effective team must have a clear, motivating, common goal.
3. Enabling structure: this refers to the team’s internal state. It centres on the design of tasks, the team’s composition, and creation of behavioural norms. Ideally, the structure should encourage diverse views, accountability, role clarity and honest conversations.
4. Supportive context: successful teams need an organisational backdrop that delivers the tools, money, equipment, rewards and information needed for success.
5. Expert coaching: to help teams interpret early lessons, refine working methods on the run, and extract learning insights from results. Access to coaches or mentors helps minimise wasted time, tackle obstacles, and harness the team’s collective potential.

The first three conditions are what he describes as “core”. They provide a reliable foundational design. The fourth and fifth are the supporting conditions. Hackman believes these five conditions make it more likely that a team will succeed, but can’t guarantee that it will succeed.

What’s Good About Hackman’s Model

• His five conditions all make sense and they’re pretty easy to remember.
• I like his systems perspective. He’s kept his eye on the big picture when it comes to team building. He hasn’t got lost in the nitty-gritty; he’s adopted a useful bird’s-eye view with great success.
• On the five conditions, there’s little to disagree with, in my view. Anyone familiar with my model knows I also use the term “real team” and the way I define it is similar to Hackman. I also agree with his second condition because my own second action principle is Motivating Purpose. Continuing the theme, there’s nothing in his third principle to argue with. Here he calls for a “balanced” blend of members and the right conduct norms. I wouldn’t disagree with his fourth (Supportive Context) condition either – who wouldn’t want a backdrop that supports rather than hinders teams and teamwork? And finally, on the point about coaching, being a coach, I would applaud this idea, wouldn’t I?
• I also agree with his distinction between “the leader” and “leadership”.
• Finally, I agree wholeheartedly with his three criteria for judging the “effectiveness” of a team.

Overall, conceptually, it’s a clear model, no doubt about it, and it looks well researched. In all, for me, it’s “on the money” with no great surprises.

Any Misgivings About It?

Well, yes.

• There’s plenty of high-level “You need to achieve this” or “You need to get to this position” style advice. But for me, the model is too short on “how to” guidance. And maybe that’s why I’ve never heard executives mention Hackman’s five conditions. They sometimes talk about Lencioni’s model, but not Hackman’s. Yes, it’s practical at a high conceptual level but it’s short on crucial how-to detail.
  • As an example, take the second condition, Compelling Direction. Yes sure, the team needs a motivating purpose, but how many teams have you seen with a genuinely engaging goal? In my corporate and coaching experience, hardly any. In my view, the model fails to go beyond stating the obvious to offer guidance on how teams can craft compelling directions for themselves.
  • I have a similar view on the third condition, Enabling Structure. This condition conceals some seriously tricky challenges. I’ll list just four here but I could easily double that number. One, what roles do we need playing here, who should play them, and what does a balanced team look like? Two, how to resolve the challenge of reaching decisions that “stick”? (This is a problem that in my experience trips up all senior teams.) Three, how to bake “joint accountability” into the team’s ethos and behaviour? Four, how to learn how to handle team conflict? I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. For me, it’s not enough to say you “must learn how to handle conflict” and “ensure that everyone feels accountable” and “bring the right people on board”. That’s true, but it’s also obvious, and I find people in business are crying out for more guidance than that.
  • And consider the fourth condition, Supportive Organisational Context. Same problem. What’s a team supposed to do if it doesn’t have this benign backdrop? How does it build a bubble around itself to succeed in a difficult environment?
• Just as important, reading Hackman’s book, I feel he puts too much emphasis on the leader providing the direction, which is not how I see a real team working. Ironically, having stated that anyone who provides leadership behaviour is effectively leading (which I agree with), he goes on to place too much onus on official leaders, in my view. For me, leaders must make sure their teams define and agree a compelling purpose, but they don’t have to be the ones who provide it. Thus, in my opinion, precision advice is lacking here.
• Finally, I think it lacks an understanding of the hidden psychology of teams. I’ve found that teams’ subterranean psychological forces make it difficult – sometimes impossible – for teams to form, even when they’re sorely needed. For me, this takes us back to the need for how-to advice – a good model needs to address these psychological challenges head on.

So overall, I think it’s a worthy addition to the academic literature on team building. But if I was 25 years younger and still in a corporate CEO job, I don’t think this is a book I’d have used to grow myself as a team builder.

Note for those who have come to this review after finding it on the internet, who don’t know who I am, and haven’t already browsed this website:

I’m an ex-CEO who’s been acting as a professional executive coach to leaders and their teams for 21 years in my own practice, The Scouller Partnership. I’ve been accredited by two respected professional coaching associations and have trained in applied psychology for four years. In between coaching assignments I’ve authored four books. The first is The Three Levels of Leadership: How To Develop Your Leadership Presence, Knowhow and Skill (1^st ed. 2011, 2^nd ed. 2016, Management Books 2000) and the other three form a trilogy titled How To Build Winning Teams Again and Again (2024, Hawkhurst Publishing).