A team that only looks inward loses what it needs from outside.
No team is self-sufficient. It needs knowledge, resources, backing and people who take up its output. All of this lies outside: with management, neighboring teams, customers, partners and the wider professional field.
The team principle in detail
Four steps through the principle: understand, check, connect, apply. Open any topic to read more.
The explanationThe better a team holds together, the more easily it loses sight of what it needs from outside.
The better a team holds together, the more easily it loses sight of what it needs from outside.
- People understand each other, the routines are second nature, the team’s own solutions have proven themselves.
- Conversations with outsiders then feel like a distraction.
- Outside ideas are quickly judged inferior simply because they don’t come from within the circle.
- That is how isolation sets in without anyone deciding on it.
Read closelyWhat the principle says – and what it doesn’t
“Outside” means two things: other parts of your own organization and the world beyond it. A team needs connections in both directions.
- Strictly speaking
- What counts is not the number of outside contacts but their kind. Merely asking around without coordinating does nothing for performance.
- “The more open, the better” does not follow from the statement. External work takes energy and can overload individual members. There are phases in which a team has to shield itself in order to get its work done.
- The principle is best supported for development, project and knowledge teams. For self-contained routine tasks, the need is smaller.
The signs3 signs that the principle is at work · 3 that it is missing
- The team knows who needs its work and who supports it.
- Outside contacts are shared among several people.
- Ideas from outside are examined before they are rejected.
- The team is caught off guard by decisions.
- Good results find no takers.
- Suggestions from outside are rejected because they did not originate in-house.
The research6 sources: 4 primary studies, 2 meta-analyses · 1982–2025 · with research limitations
- low
- moderate
- high
Moderate to high – a meta-analysis of 85 studies, a meta-analysis on innovation and several classic field studies point in the same direction.
- 1982Ralph Katz & Thomas J. Allen
50 R&D project groups at a US corporation: performance was highest at two to four years of shared membership and markedly lower from five years on. As tenure increases, communication within the project and with the outside declines.
- 1992Deborah G. Ancona & David F. Caldwell
45 product development teams: three kinds of external activity – championing upward, coordinating sideways, scouting the environment. The kind of external communication, not its amount, predicts performance; isolated teams do poorly.
- 1999Morten T. Hansen
120 development projects at an electronics company: weak ties help in finding useful knowledge but hinder the transfer of complex knowledge; that requires strong ties.
- 2007Jennifer A. Marrone, Paul E. Tesluk & Jay B. Carson
Boundary work increases role overload for the individual member, and that harms cohesion. When the whole team shares the external work, the overload decreases.
- What helps is not more outside contact but the right kind, and external work has costs.
- The not-invented-here study is a cross-sectional study from a single laboratory; the often-cited five-year threshold is not a law.
- Nor does the core statement say anything about teams needing to shield themselves at times.
Read more: what the research shows
Research calls the topic boundary management or boundary spanning: everything a team does to shape its relationships with its environment. Studying product development teams, Deborah G. Ancona and David F. Caldwell found that the kind of external communication predicts performance and that isolated teams do poorly. A meta-analysis led by Ulrich Leicht-Deobald confirms a positive relationship between boundary management and team performance. Ralph Katz and Thomas J. Allen described the not-invented-here syndrome: in their study, long-standing project groups talked less with others and performed worse. Ute R. Hülsheger, Neil Anderson and Jesús F. Salgado count external communication among the strongest predictors of team innovation.
The originFrom team research · not from John C. Maxwell
- 1982OriginFrom team research
Earliest source: Ralph Katz & Thomas J. Allen
- 2001For comparison
John C. Maxwell does not cover it: his 17 laws look almost entirely inward and contain no law on a team’s external relationships.
The related team principles17 Identity · 12 Reliability · 15 Dissent · 05 Diversity
The principle adds the outward-facing counterweight to “Identity” and “Reliability” and is related to “Dissent” and “Diversity”.
According to the research, boundary work is above all a task for “Leadership”.
It stands in tension with “Attunement” and “Investment”: long-term stability pays off, but it encourages insularity.
The action steps5 steps: Write down what your team needs from outside
- Write down what your team needs from outside: knowledge, resources, backing, people who will use its results. Assign each item to a person on the team and a contact on the outside.
- Distinguish three kinds of external work and cultivate all three: championing the cause upward, coordinating sideways with neighboring teams, scouting the environment.
- Take boundary work seriously as a leadership task, but share it out within the team. That way, no one is left overloaded with it alone.
- Build close, regular connections with the places you need complex knowledge from. Loose contacts are enough for finding knowledge, not for transferring it.
- In teams that have worked unchanged for a long time, watch especially for signs that conversations with the outside world are becoming less frequent.
The questions for your team3 questions for your team conversation: What do we need from outside – and which of us keeps up the connection?
- What do we need from outside – and which of us keeps up the connection?
- Who needs to know about our work so that it actually gets used in the end?
- What was the last idea from outside that we rejected, and why?
Take time for one question at your next team meeting. Talk about it openly and note down what you take away from it.
The picture to rememberA circle looks inward and fades. A few dots go out as bridges to other circles, gold flows back, and the circle glows.
- A circle looks inward and fades.
- A few dots go out as bridges to other circles, gold flows back, and the circle glows.
What the Team Principle of External Relationships looks like in practice
The Computer Xerox Never Sold
At the Xerox PARC research center, the Alto runs for the first time on March 1, 1973: a computer with a graphical user interface, a mouse and a network connection. Some 2,100 units are built, but the machine never goes on the market – the center is about 4,800 kilometers from corporate headquarters.
When Well-Established Teams Go Deaf
Ralph Katz and Thomas J. Allen of MIT studied 50 project groups at a research and development facility; for fifteen weeks, 345 engineers and scientists recorded whom they talked to about work. Teams that had worked together unchanged for a very long time talked less with the outside world – and performed worse.
Data for Everyone Within 24 Hours
In February 1996, meeting in Bermuda, the heads of the Human Genome Project’s major sequencing centers – who were also competitors for money, fame and publications – agree to deposit their sequences in public databases, if possible within 24 hours. The centers also announce which sections they are working on, so that no one duplicates work.
