What would effective team development actually look like?

And does anyone really know?

Team development seems like it should be a topic less prone to buzzwords and generic consultant-speak. After all, most businesses these days are organized into teams — and effective team development means those teams hit their goals, position the company in a better way, and maybe get some individual results for themselves. (Someone please explain to me why we want people to work in teams but still promote individuals, though. It confounds me.)

Anyway, most articles and books I’ve ever read or seen on team development are mostly fluff and BS. You can look at the NBA Finals right now and see a little of the team development aspect — Steph Curry was an undersized guard at Davidson, Klay Thompson was mostly semi-known at best at Wazzu, etc. They just won the first two games of the Finals by a combined 48 points, which is the most in the modern era — and that’s against a team with arguably the best player on the planet playing for it.

Team > individual most of the time, so team development would seem important. But how do we actually create effective teams?

Team development and psychology

One of the hallmarks of most business discussions is that we tend to set them in an utopia and…