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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm talking today with Mary

Shapiro, professor at the Simmons School of Management and author of the HBR guide to

leading teams. Mary, thank you so much for talking with us today.

Great to be here.

So I'm excited to get a chance to talk to you today about teams because this is something that I think is so

influential on how happy we are at work, whether we're part of a team or leading a team, and it's one of those

things that I think can also be a source of endless concern and frustration for us if it's not going

well.

And I thought I would just start by asking you, I know very few of us actually get to design

our own teams from scratch. You know, we're entering an existing team or taking over an existing

team often, but if you could design the ideal

team from scratch, what would it look like? Well I would say kind of a couple things

you need to keep in mind when you're designing your own team. One is trying

to make it as small as possible because everyone who has ever tried to get a meeting plan

knows that if you have five people's calendars you're juggling is just much easier

than trying to juggle ten people's calendars.

But in terms of who those people are, you really need to think about what is the task, what are the task skills or competencies or knowledge or expertise that's needed, but also what kind of skills and competencies are needed for working

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