If your future depends on how well your teams do (and it does), you’ve got to invest in conscious team construction, using every tool and insight you can find. As football reigns and basketballs bounce in the wings, thinking about teams is inescapable. In most all team sports, split-second and intimate interactions are paramount to success. (Baseball is a bit of an exception, with more room for the freewheeling cavorting of superstars and misfits—not mutually exclusive categories.) In our supply chain world, opportunities and needs for team effort and collaborative solutions abound—even overwhelm: Corporate implementation of an ERP. Installation of a new warehouse management system. A process redesign in the facility’s pick/pack/ship operations. A move to a new DC. Integration of automated equipment into material handling operations. And on and on. Teams have been a fact of life in our organizations for a couple of generations now. The once-vaunted cross-functional team approach has been around long enough to become a cliché. This approach, now an anachronism, was a useful beginning in assembling a variety of functional skills for complex problem solving. But cross-functional presence alone falls far short of what it takes to make truly effective teams—and can actually create seriously suboptimized solutions. Without denigrating the importance of having competency resident in teams, there are a few levels of planning, selection, and leadership without which teams risk falling off the edge of a cliff into an abyss of failure. TEAM FUNCTIONS, ROLES, AND BEHAVIORS Classical team research shows that, while the nomenclature may vary, all teams must have embedded within them specific roles that are critical to success. For instance, in management consultant Glenn Parker’s work, we find: Contributors: Those who typically provide the nuts-and-bolts-type functional skills and expertise Communicators: Those who, along with useful functional skills, work to […]