As a leader, we achieve our organizational goals through the work of our people. But that is easier said than done. To achieve your vision, your people will have to work together, which involves a great number of challenges.

Irrespective of your people’s individual expertise, motivation, and emotional intelligence, the sum of their parts is usually smaller than the whole, unless you as the leader have carefully created the required conditions for them to work effectively together.

That is the topic of this class: We will together explore what the 7 conditions are that you as a leader need to create to help your people to come together as a team and enable them to work together successfully.

Building and sustaining a successful team is like making a soufflé: it requires careful attention to many details – omit one and your soufflé will fail.

Similarly, the 7 aspects of successful team management, which we will discuss in this class are not a list from which to choose some and ignore others. They are interdependent. Together these 7 conditions provide the framework for your team to succeed. Omit one of them and your team may not outright fail, but will likely trip or falter at some point.

We have broken these 7 conditions for building and sustaining a successful team into 2 parts. The first 3 conditions show you how to enable a group to become a team. The next 4 conditions focus on what you need to do to enable a team to operate successfully.