In 1949, thirteen young men were killed in a forest fire in the mountains of Montana. What at first appeared to be a common and extinguishable forest fire quickly became a death trap. The person leading the group, Wagner Dodge, called out what could have been lifesaving commands, but no one on the team did as they were told. The Harvard Business Review wrote about the tragedy, saying:

Sensing that the crew was in serious danger, Dodge yelled at them to drop their tools. Two minutes later, to everyone’s astonishment, he lit a fire in front of the men and motioned to them to lie down in the area it had burned. No one did. Instead, they ran for the ridge and what they hoped would be safety.

Two firefighters, Robert Sallee and Walter Rumsey, made it through a crevice in the ridge unburned. Dodge survived by lying down in the ashes of his escape fire. The other 13 perished. The fire caught up with them at 5:56—the time at which the hands on Harrison’s watch melted in place. (Weick, 2014).

Why didn’t Dodge’s crew obey his commands? And why is The Harvard Business Review writing about this nearly 50 years later? Norman Maclean, who is famously known for his novel A River Runs Through It, studied this forest fire for decades, interviewing survivors, U.S. Fire Service veterans and even visiting the site of the fire. Maclean’s research on the event has been reviewed and studied by business and organizational communication scholars to better understand crisis management in teams.

---

From sending astronauts to the moon to scoring a goal on the soccer field (and everything in between), one thing is crystal clear: every significant human accomplishment is the result of teamwork and collaboration. Even people who we might think of as visionary leaders in government, business, or religion are only as influential as the people who work with, around, and for them. At a more day-to-day level, working in teams in your classes is preparation for when you will need to work with others in your professional life and community. Although you may dislike teamwork because of your past experiences, we argue that your bad experiences are a product of poor leadership and lack of collaboration rather than an inherent problem in teamwork itself. That is, teamwork is only effective if you have the skills and knowledge to make them so–otherwise, they are more likely to result in boredom, frustration, and failure.

As communication scholars, we know that people have an inherent need for sociability. People need to interact with each other, feel like they belong, and develop a sense of progress toward mutually satisfying goals. When engaging in teamwork, there are actions that can threaten or destabilize team collaboration. Team members who are competitive, controlling, and lazy, or those who do not use effective listening skills, can doom a group’s work before it even begins. This is to say that even when we want to work in a group, or at least recognize that a group is needed to accomplish a task, team member personalities, values, or styles can threaten effectiveness.

To be an effective team member, or leader, you will need to develop the skills, habits, and knowledge needed to collaborate and reach team goals. People–especially people who grew up in highly individualistic societies such as the United States–are not naturally good at being team members. In our experience, students often approach teamwork as simply dividing a project into the number of pieces as there are group members, who will then complete their individual part of the project only to put it all together at the end. This is not effective teamwork and often results in poor outcomes. In this chapter, we detail some of the ways of building high-performing teams and cultivating effective leadership skills.

On August 4, 2014, a section of the Mount Polly copper mine training pond collapsed, releasing 25 million cubic meters of mine tailings and wastewater into pristine Quesnel Lake. Parts of the crystal clear lake filled with thick, gray mining sludge. For Indigenous peoples in our communities and downstream who rely on healthy waters for food and cultural practices, the tailings breach was devastating. We held an emergency meeting for our communities the next day. Our elders, one by one, got up to talk about their love of the land, the waters and all the unique medicines and plants that the area around Quesnel Lake offers. The lake itself provides migration, rearing and spawning habitat for several salmon and non-salmon species. The elders all cried as they talked. To them a death had happened in the family because they know it is all connected. (Sellars, 2021).

There are many different approaches to leadership and teamwork. Indigenous models of leadership do not assume “a compartmentalized world with discrete, individual entities with competing self-interests in which leaders are expected to advance and defend the self-interests of the constituents they lead” (Blume, 2021). Instead, models of Indigenous leadership see the group or team as an interdependent whole. Cooperation and collective interests are valued above self-interests and authority is gained through wisdom, respect, and humility. In the following section, we discuss collaborative teamwork. As you read this section, consider how your own cultural background and experiences have influenced how you engage in teamwork and what you consider important values in team members and leaders.

The most important lesson about teamwork is that a team’s effectiveness will be directly correlated to how much time the members put into creating “a team.” This is to say, your effectiveness will depend on how much effort you and others put toward creating a team culture that encourages excellence, punctuality, collaboration, and vulnerability. If your team is simply a collection of individuals, then you’re going to produce outcomes that do not consider a variety of obstacles, miss opportunities, and result in burnout and failure.

If you are able to choose group members, then you should think about the type of people you want to surround yourself with on a project. Are they fun to be around, but not a good contributor? Are they shy, but smart? Maybe they are argumentative, but respectful? Peoples’ personalities and communication styles can lead to a variety of outcomes. On one hand, people often pick members who they like or feel are similar to and produce a group that acts and thinks in ways that are familiar or comfortable. This process can lead them into groupthink, and lead them away from important conversations because they focus on being nice or friendly with each other more than producing the best results. On the other hand, group members can have an authoritarian culture, where team members view each other as rivals who are either higher or lower on status and who try to control or exclude others. Neither approach to group work is effective.

To ensure your groups are able to collaboratively reach goals, we offer five key processes to keep in mind: contribute, develop, decide, implement, and evaluate.

Contribute

What rules do you have for interaction and discussion? In large groups, it might be helpful to have formal rules, such as Robert’s Rules of Order, which prescribes very specific criteria for how to run a meeting. In smaller groups, these rules may be less formal, but are just as important. For example, when developing ideas or brainstorming, it is important that ideas are noted and affirmed in a judgment free setting before then winnowing them down to the idea the group will adopt. If groups are too quick to judge, then they may discard good ideas out of hand due to groupthink or authoritarian culture. Make sure your group is clear about rules of interaction: Will each member have a formal time to contribute or will you implement an informal turn-taking process? If the latter, how will you make sure that all members feel comfortable contributing? Developing clear guidelines for how to contribute can ensure people are not talked over, talked down to, or ignored either intentionally or unintentionally.

Develop

In addition to rules for contribution, your group will need to create ways for you to develop ideas. This process might include instances such as reducing the ideas developed from brainstorming to the option that your team will pursue or taking an idea and probing it for its strengths and weaknesses. In both cases, it is easy for members to feel emotionally invested in their ideas and resistant to it either being discarded or critiqued. Your group will need to agree on ways to pursue these processes or it risks team members getting frustrated or alienated when their ideas are not adopted. For example, after you have completed your brainstorming, your group may rank the ideas and discuss everyone’s top three. From there, you can all decide which idea seems the most feasible given your time and resources.

Decide

Some of the most frustrating experiences in teamwork are when the group makes a decision, but a group member continues to advocate for a different idea; when a group member tries to force a particular decision by being interpersonally aggressive; or when a group member attempts to sabotage a decision through stalling tactics (e.g., asking too many questions, taking overly long to explain their position, or using procedural rules to stall processes). To combat these problems, your group will need to develop processes for decision making. Will the decision be made by the team leader? Will it be voted on by team members? Or will it be made by a superior, such as a manager? Developing and affirming the process of decision making will reduce the likelihood of conflict and improve your teams’ chances for reaching its goals.

Implement

Once a plan is developed and decided, it is time to implement it. Here, you will need to ascertain who is willing to do a specific task and who has the abilities best suited to completing the task (these are not always the same person). A good team member recognizes that they cannot do all the work on their own, and that tasks must be shared (even if unevenly). Make sure all team members understand their role, agree to its completion, and are willing to be held accountable if they do not complete their tasks.

Evaluate

After implementing the plan, your team will need to evaluate whether it was successful or not, and how to improve in the future. This final component is probably the step that is most overlooked in teamwork situations in classrooms, but it is one of the most vital. That is, most teamwork in classes is deemed successful if: A) the project is turned in on time; and B) it receives a certain grade. However, these are poor metrics to evaluate your success. If you reach these goals, but none of your team members contributed and you did all the work, then that was not a successful team! Doing an inventory on your team communication will ensure that you can adjust and improve in subsequent teams.

Team communication–often set within a larger organization such as a job–is an inescapable part of life. However, by being a knowledgeable and skillful team member, you can ensure that your group is able to achieve goals that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Teamwork, at its best, is more than just the sum of its individual parts. Rather, it is a communicative process, by which people are able to develop new technologies, better solutions, and identify root causes of problems. Recognizing the importance of team communication, and developing your skills for it, will enhance your potential for success.

Serene was the owner of a print company where she led a team of five people. The small company was struggling to stay afloat and needed to switch to using more affordable and contemporary design software. Serene believed the company also needed to invest in social media marketing.

One of her team members, Cheryl, was resistant to these changes. Cheryl was frustrated that she would have to learn a new program and believed that social media marketing would cheapen the company. Serene explained that extensive market research showed this change was not only what the company needed, it was necessary if they were going to stay open. Cheryl had been a committed member of the company and Serene did not want to lose her. So, Serene found alternative work for Cheryl to take on as the rest of the company learned the new software and developed social media ad campaigns.

Three months later, their company was seeing substantial growth. Cheryl went to Serene’s office and expressed how impressed she was that the plan had actually worked. Serene looked at Cheryl and asked, “Great! Are you ready to learn the new software now?” Cheryl enthusiastically agreed.

Teams often develop, informally or formally, a leader or multiple leaders. Leadership is a set of qualities that promote team cohesion, problem-solving, collaboration, and motivation while transcending their own personal stake or self-interest. Leaders do not necessarily have a position or designation (e.g., manager) and, in fact, people in those roles are sometimes the worst at fulfilling leader role qualities. Rather, leaders are those people in a group who are able to be communicatively flexible, recognize their limitations, and inspire others toward innovation and success. Leaders are member focused and results driven. The sign of a successful leadership is when they are able to obtain results without sacrificing member relationships.

Team activities are often disorganized and based on the experiences, knowledge, or interests of each individual team member. Leaders are able to organize these disparate activities/knowledges and recognize the various task, social, and procedural goals that animate teamwork. For example, knowing which members of a group work well together (and which do not), the strengths/weaknesses of each member, and reorganizing team members’ potential for development and promotion are all integral parts of good leadership. One of the most important components of good leadership is to help define the team’s focus and process.

As such, we offer four key areas that leaders should develop to have an effective team: goal setting, climate check, resolve conflict, and address performance.

Goal Setting

Good leaders encourage the team to set short- and long-term goals, develop plans for obtaining those goals, assess whether goals are being achieved, and provide support when members fall short of goals. Note that, unlike managers, leaders do not impose goals or assessment on their team members. Rather, leaders empower team members to make plans and provide resources to help others reach their goals. Leaders can do this by agenda-setting at the beginning of meetings; that is, they can develop a schedule of what tasks, conversations, or brainstorms a group may need to execute and ensure that team members adhere to those processes. Good leaders strive to ensure that goals, and the processes for identifying and achieving them, are transparent to group members.

Climate Check

Throughout the process of pursuing goals, good leaders take formal and informal measurements of team members’ feelings and socio-emotional health. Sometimes this takes the form of giving explicit praise or rewards for accomplishments, being a shoulder to cry on, or allowing a member to vent about an issue. Regardless of the situation, a good leader withholds judgment and seeks to listen to team members deeply and sensitively. Sometimes issues call for interventions and solutions, other times they necessitate new communication channels and outlets, and in some cases require interventions from authorities (e.g., contacting human resources if a team member feels they have been discriminated against or harassed). Climate checks are crucial because the old adage “silence means consent” can be deeply harmful. Sometimes people are silent about their problems or needs because of a toxic culture or they feel depressed or threatened. Good leaders make intentional efforts to climate check so there are no surprises–good or bad–only opportunities for growth.

Resolve Conflict

Sometimes, team members have disputes, and it is up to the leader to ensure that it does not threaten team collaboration. Importantly, conflict is not (in and of itself) a problem. Team members can disagree, sometimes vigorously, and still be able to function well and meet goals. However, when conflict begins to affect team performance, a leader may be called on to intervene. Leaders should strive to follow the following process: 1) Deescalate disputes; 2) Identify common ground; 3) Affirm team’s culture and commitments; and 4) Develop solutions. Importantly, developing solutions does not necessarily mean that compromises between the parties are always possible or even desirable–sometimes one person may be clearly in the right and the other in the wrong. However, by bringing the team members back to the idea that the team’s culture and commitments are paramount, a leader is able to facilitate a shared vision where everyone is welcome.

Address Performance

Perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for a leader is to address team members’ poor performance or lack of performance. Sometimes leaders (especially those who informally emerge rather than those who have a position or title) may feel that it isn’t their role or responsibility to address performance issues. Others may feel intimidated by the idea that they have to be the “bad guy” or “kill joy” to team members. However, when well performing team members see that poor performance is not addressed, it demotivates them to strive to meet goals. In other words, by not addressing a poor performing team member, you risk creating other poor performing team members. To address performance, a good leader will first ask the team member if they feel they have barriers to success. Maybe the team member’s skill sets are being mismatched, maybe they have life problems (e.g., illness), or maybe they have interpersonal disputes with other members. Any of these issues and more can affect performance and a good leader will strive to learn from their team members before rushing to judgment. Depending on the nature of the issue, a leader may adopt a wide array of solutions such as reassignment, counseling, or reward structure.

People who overly monitor, micro-manage, or surround themselves with “yes men” will quickly find themselves unable to achieve team goals. A quote that is often attributed to U.S. business leader John Welch is, “If you’re a leader and you’re the smartest guy…in the room, you’ve got real problems.” In other words, leaders should not believe they are above scrutiny, cannot make mistakes, or are better than those who work with them. Instead, good leaders surround themselves with people who will challenge and question them while trusting them to do their jobs.

Being an effective team member, or leader, requires a wide range of communicative skills, habits, and knowledge. Although you may sometimes feel like teamwork is one of the most difficult or frustrating experiences, we argue that this is often because people do not develop good team and leadership skills. In this chapter, we have offered some insights into developing your potential as a team member and leader and hope you continue cultivating these ethics and developing your skills. Doing so will be invaluable as you navigate college, career, and community life.