ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors highlight the importance of teams, sets out the foundations of effective teamwork and looks at the different ways people contribute to team success. The legacy of teams is, for good or ill, very long-lived. The authors notice that people seem to mention leadership more often when they are talking about bad teams than when they are talking about good teams. A team planning a new building may have an architect, an engineer, a builder and a project manager. The crucial importance of effective teamwork in the complex area of surgery was very widely recognized. It is important to distinguish between a person’s team role, which is about behaviour, and their functional role, which is about professional or technical skills and knowledge. Organisational teams benefit from having a range of skills appropriate to the task of the team.
