PM Guide

Teams

Why this matters

Most projects fail because of how the team works together, not because of the work itself. That's the consistent finding from decades of organisational research, and it matters more in a small organisation than a large one. In a 200-person enterprise, a poorly functioning team is a problem. In a 6-person charity, it's existential.

The good news is that most of what we know about high-performing teams was originally researched on small groups, typically four to twelve people trying to get something done. That makes the research unusually applicable to the world most Irish SMEs and charities operate in.

This page covers the four ideas worth knowing well: how groups actually become teams, what makes them perform, the roles every team needs to fill, and the dysfunctions that quietly kill them. Then we turn it into something you can use this week.

How groups become teams

Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model, forming, storming, norming, performing, remains the most cited framework in team development research, and for good reason: it predicts what teams actually go through. People start polite. They run into disagreement. They work out how they actually operate. Eventually the work flows. Tuckman and Mary Ann Jensen later added a fifth stage, adjourning, for when the team disbands.

The interesting bit for small organisations is the storming stage. Most small teams skip it, usually because the founder or director avoids conflict, or because everyone's too polite to challenge each other. It feels nicer, but it traps the group. Without working through real disagreement, the team never actually agrees how it operates, and nothing improves.

So if your team has been together for three months and there's been no friction at all, that's not a healthy sign. Surface it deliberately, in a retrospective, a one-to-one, or a structured "what's not working" conversation. Storming is necessary, not a sign of failure.

What makes teams actually perform

Two strands of research dominate this question, and they fit together rather than competing.

Richard Hackman, after decades of studying teams ranging from airline cockpit crews to symphony orchestras, concluded in Leading Teams (2002) that team performance is mostly a function of how the team is set up, not how it's managed day to day. He identified five conditions: a real team with stable, bounded membership; a compelling direction worth doing; an enabling structure with the right people in the right roles; a supportive context that provides resources and information; and expert coaching to help the team work on how it works. Most teams fail on the first and the last. People drift in and out, so the team never really gels, and nobody ever steps back to look at how the team is operating.

Amy Edmondson's research adds the human layer. In her landmark 1999 study and her 2018 book The Fearless Organization, she found that the single biggest differentiator of high-performing teams is psychological safety, the shared belief that you can speak up, ask a question, admit a mistake, or push back, without being humiliated. Without it, people don't flag risks. They don't raise the awkward question. They don't admit when they're lost. In a small organisation, where one missed risk can derail the whole project, that's enormous. Google's two-year Project Aristotle study landed on exactly the same finding: psychological safety beat skill, seniority, and who was on the team as the strongest predictor of performance (Duhigg, 2016).

Building it is mostly about how leaders behave. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Acknowledge when you're unsure. Ask real questions, not leading ones. And when someone does speak up, especially with bad news, respond constructively even if they're wrong. People are watching what happens to the first person who pushes back. That single moment sets the team's norm.

The roles teams need to fill

Meredith Belbin's research at Henley Management College, originally published in Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail (1981), found that effective teams cover nine distinct roles between them. You don't need nine people, most people naturally cover two or three, but you do need the roles covered.

The nine fall into three groups. Action-oriented: Shaper, Implementer, Completer-Finisher. People-oriented: Coordinator, Teamworker, Resource Investigator. Thought-oriented: Plant, Monitor-Evaluator, Specialist.

The most common gap in small teams is the Completer-Finisher, the person who notices the small errors before launch, who chases the loose ends, who reads the contract one more time. Founders are often Plants and Shapers, full of ideas and drive. Volunteers gravitate toward Teamworker. The Completer-Finisher role frequently goes unfilled, which is why launches in small organisations often go out with avoidable mistakes that someone, somewhere, would have caught.

The practical implication is straightforward: when you're forming a project team, don't just ask who's available. Ask who covers each role and where the gap is. Belbin Ireland (belbin.ie) hosts the formal assessment, but for most small projects a 30-minute conversation with the team will surface the gaps without anyone needing to fill in a questionnaire.

What goes wrong, and how to spot it early

Patrick Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002) names the failure modes precisely. They stack, each one enables the next.

It starts with absence of trust. Without trust, team members don't show vulnerability, so nothing real gets said. Without honest exchange, fear of conflict takes over: disagreements stay underground and meetings turn artificial. Without real debate, lack of commitment follows, because nobody truly buys into decisions made in those quiet meetings. Without commitment, accountability slips, nobody feels bound to anything they didn't actually agree to. And without accountability, inattention to results kicks in: individual goals (status, ego, comfort) quietly win over team goals.

If your team meetings are quiet and polite but nothing changes afterwards, you're seeing the first three dysfunctions in action. If decisions are made but never executed, you're at stages three and four. The fix always starts at the bottom: build trust first, by being the first person to admit you don't know something or might be wrong.

A note on mixed teams in Irish charities

Irish charities frequently run teams that mix three groups: paid staff, volunteers, and board members. CSO Census 2022 data shows that 711,379 people, 14% of the population, engaged in voluntary activity that year, with around 198,000 of them active specifically in social and charity organisations (CSO, 2024). The volunteering economy is enormous, but it's also fragile.

The most common failure in these mixed teams is treating everyone as one homogenous group. The volunteer doing four hours a week shouldn't be expected to operate like the staff member on 35; the board member providing oversight isn't there to do delivery work. Volunteer Ireland's CEO Nina Arwitz has noted that signing volunteers up is straightforward, it's retaining them that organisations get wrong, largely because volunteers don't feel valued or properly involved (Irish Examiner, 2024).

For practical guidance, the Charities Regulator's Charities Governance Code draws clear principles around the line between governance and management, covered in detail on the Governance topic page. Volunteer Ireland (volunteer.ie) and The Wheel (wheel.ie) both publish free, plain-language resources on volunteer management that are worth bookmarking.

A 1-page team charter

Most PM textbooks recommend a team charter. Most teams never write one because the templates are bloated. The version that actually gets used fits on one page, takes 45 minutes to complete with the team, and covers five things:

  1. Why this team exists, in one sentence. Not what it does. Why.
  2. Who's on it, names, what each person is responsible for, and roughly which Belbin role they lean into.
  3. How decisions get made, pick one model and write it down. Most disputes in small teams come from unclear decision rights, not from the actual decision.
  4. How you'll communicate, async tool, sync rhythm, what gets escalated to whom.
  5. Four to six norms the team commits to. "We start meetings on time. Disagreement is welcome; sulking isn't. If you can't make a deadline, you tell us at least 48 hours ahead."

Print it. Stick it on the wall, or pin it in your Slack channel. Revisit it at the first retrospective.

Common pitfalls to watch for

  • Hero culture. One person carries the team, then burns out. Distribute critical knowledge deliberately, even when slower.
  • Decision drift. Decisions get made in hallway conversations and never recorded. Keep a one-line decision log in a shared doc.
  • Founder overload (SMEs). Founder is in every meeting, every decision; team becomes passive. Step deliberately out of one project as a forcing function for delegation.
  • Volunteer churn (charities). People leave faster than you can onboard them. Clear roles, real induction, regular thanks, covered in detail in The Wheel's volunteer-management resources.

Watch, listen, read

Watch. Amy Edmondson's TEDxHGSE talk Building a psychologically safe workplace is the clearest eleven-minute introduction to the concept, delivered by the researcher who coined the term. Simon Sinek's twelve-minute TED talk Why good leaders make you feel safe makes a good companion piece.

Listen. The Project Management Institute's Projectified and Manage This podcasts both run regular episodes on team dynamics, remote teams, and conflict, search the back catalogues for any of the topics on this page. The Wheel's webinar archive (wheel.ie) hosts Irish-context conversations on managing community and voluntary teams that are particularly useful for charity contexts.

Read. Edmondson's The Fearless Organization (2018) is the readable, modern version of her academic work. Lencioni's The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002) is a two-hundred-page parable, you can finish it on a flight to London. For the academic foundations, Alex Pentland's Harvard Business Review article The new science of building great teams (2012) summarises a lot of the empirical work, and Charles Duhigg's New York Times Magazine piece on Google's Project Aristotle is freely available online.

Quick test

Three questions to take to the quiz:

  1. Your team has been working together for three months and has had no significant disagreements. Is this a good sign?
  2. Which Belbin team role is most often missing in small organisations?
  3. Which of Hackman's five conditions for team effectiveness is least likely to be in place in a small charity?

References

Belbin, R. M. (1981). Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail. Heinemann.

Belbin, R. M. (2010). Team Roles at Work (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Central Statistics Office. (2024). Census of Population 2022 Spotlight Series: Volunteering in Ireland. CSO. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-cpsv/censusofpopulation2022spotlightseriesvolunteeringinireland/

Charities Regulator. (2018, updated 2024). Charities Governance Code. https://www.charitiesregulator.ie/en/information-for-charities/charities-governance-code

Duhigg, C. (2016, February 25). What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team. The New York Times Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383.

Edmondson, A. C. (2018). The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley.

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Irish Examiner. (2024, August 14). Volunteers leave charities when they do not feel valued or involved, organisation says. https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41455435.html

Lencioni, P. (2002). The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Jossey-Bass.

Pentland, A. (2012). The new science of building great teams. Harvard Business Review, 90(4), 60-69.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384-399.

Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small-group development revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419-427.

Volunteer Ireland. (2024). https://www.volunteer.ie

The Wheel. (2024). https://www.wheel.ie