imagine that you are an HR specialist and you have been called in as an expert to talk to an organization about what makes teams effective and what you could do (generally speaking) to make them more effective. Utilizing knowledge that you have gained from your textbook, PowerPoint presentations, class videos, and other material you might find, what would you tell the organization if they were to ask you for two or three key factors that can make any team more effective? Keep in mind what the question is - and what it is not? This is NOT asking you to "design" an effective team, but make existing teams more effective. In other words, you'll need to focus on what things you can reasonably change (the organization wants this to be practical and usable so that people can use this information right away). After you have done this, read the posts from your other Group Discussion Forum members and see which factors/mechanisms/things they identified. Could you come up with a group "top 5" list? Why are these the most important/relevant? Have you seen any of these factors being critical in your own experiences working in teams or in your organization? Is there anything you have learned about 'common misconceptions' regarding making teams more effective - in other words, do you see things that most people think would work or things that others might think are 'common sense' about team effectiveness but that is wrong?

Here are two articles to get you started:

• The first is an article summarizing a few key factors that Google has identified as being important to teams: https://rework.withgoogle.com/jp/subjects/teams. This is one example, from one company, and based on only their data (other research has used many other organizations). So do not, by any means, limit yourself to this information or treat this as "Google said it, therefore it must be the full story". Note: for some reason this page now displays in Japanese first -- most browsers can automatically translate this for you, which you'll need to do. Unless of course any of you can read Japanese. :) If anyone finds the English-first site (which seems to have disappeared), please let me know. https://rework.withgoogle.com/jp/subjects/teams
• The second article is about building great teams and summarizes various interesting and important findings from research conducted on teams. https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/building-leading-great-teams-research?utm_source=subscriber&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pianomailer112019&pnespid=0LJy8OMIWQqNTUAf5xVBJyB6DLKV.Do7blyr4iJe