During World War II, Lt. Col. Evans F. Carlson handpicked a group of Marines and used intense training to weld them into an incredibly efficient combat team whose motto became gung ho, Chinese for "work in harmony." His team achieved a daring early victory in the Pacific, capturing Makin Island in 1942 with only 210 men.

Increasingly, business is placing a similar reliance on elite teams. In the age of Internet time, companies have found that command-and-control structures can make them too slow to react to changes in the market. So, much as start-ups have done, established businesses are often forming small teams to attack opportunities such as e-commerce. In fact, an increased emphasis on teamwork is permeating businesses these days as they become less hierarchical and focus more on getting greater results from a pared-down work force. As the saying goes, nobody is as smart as everybody.

But it’s not so easy to get teams to work in harmony effectively. It’s hard enough just to get individuals to work to their full potential, and interpersonal dynamics make teams far more complex than any individual. Even Carlson ran into problems. He became so famous that he was ostracized in the Marine Corps. Colleagues decided he was too much of an individualist. His rallying cry, gung ho, became a cynical term applied to naive or overeager team members.

In our consulting work we’ve focused on helping companies develop teams that can be relied on to produce results in particularly challenging situations. Success in such endeavors depends on three factors: accepting a team mind-set, accepting higher standards of team responsibility, and practice. Given the Inner Game’s earliest focus on tennis and golf, it strikes us as odd that, while athletes practice all the time, businesses rarely do. Businesses just play the game.

So, we’re going to lay out the four main problems that we’ve observed as teams work together. Typically, teams run into difficulties because:

INDIVIDUALS ABDICATE RESPONSIBILITY. Teams usually have a leader, whether that person is appointed, is elected by the group, or simply emerges as the dominant force. What many people fail to notice is that when a team accepts a leader, it tacitly authorizes everyone else not to have leadership qualities.

Those who aren’t the leader may tune out. Predictably, we can count on three or four people in a group of 10 to not listen closely. They think that others will understand and that they’ll just follow those who paid attention.

TEAMS JUMP TO CONCLUSIONS WHEN FACED WITH AMBIGUITY. Individuals don’t typically act this way. They are usually more willing to take risks and to explore something fully before making a decision. But groups are happy to leap to an assumption. It is easier. However, this "shortcut" undermines team effectiveness and ultimately consumes greater time and resources to get the right answer.

MEMBERS JUDGE THEMSELVES AND OTHERS. From coaching golf and tennis, we know that there are two selves involved in learning. Self Two is the part of the brain that does the actual learning by watching how the tennis ball bounces or developing a feel for the different parts of a golf swing. Self One does the running negative commentary—"You moron, how’d you miss that ball? Uh-oh, here comes another one to your backhand. You’re probably going to miss this one, too, and make us look stupid." Much of coaching is about how to distract Self One so that the more-competent Self Two can go about its business of learning and performing without interference from Self One.

That’s even more challenging in a team situation because individuals aren’t just judging themselves and trying to appear smart or avoid appearing stupid; they’re also judging others and jockeying for position so that they appear smarter than everyone else.

We observe again and again that the clearest, most effective approach to solving a team task emerges in the first four minutes of discussion. But the debate may continue for hours, as if the hidden agenda of team members is to prove they deserve respect as individuals.

PEOPLE CLING TO THEIR OWN POINTS OF VIEW. Perhaps the most difficult thing to learn as a team member is that your individual point of view does not need to become the team point of view. In a trivial but telling example from our training, we ask the team to decide when it’s time for a break. When people respond, they almost always look to their own needs instead of considering the needs of the rest of the team.

To develop a functional team mind-set, we’ve adopted a form of practice that involves taking a team out of the office for three to five days. We give the team a series of simple tasks that can be successfully completed only by practicing a team point of view. Initial failure is pretty much guaranteed by one simple rule: We tell them that all decisions have to be unanimous. The idea is to ensure that the team has no individual decision-makers. The buck stops everywhere.

Faced with the unfamiliar requirement of unanimity, groups may initially find themselves debating how they know whether a decision is unanimous. Should they take a vote? Should they just ask for objections? The groups, which can number as many as 100 people, are told that they can’t proceed with any action until they’re sure they are in complete accord.

When team members realize there’s no other way to get things done, they start to re-examine what it means to be a team and begin to develop guidelines. We ask that each rule be stated in a single word for ease of memory. Respect is often the first named, followed by honesty or integrity. Most teams come up with the same list. What’s important is that by the time the list is agreed upon, everybody has experienced what happens without team rules. We then help the group think about how they can help each other adhere to those rules in a cooperative, nonconfrontational way.

The egalitarian nature of the process can upset some hierarchies, which can be disruptive. What really got Carlson in trouble in the Marine Corps wasn’t any individualistic tendencies; it was his decision to urge his men to critique their officers’ performance, jeopardizing the code of unquestioned obedience.

The training can also make people uncomfortable. "There’s a whole lot of unlearning people have to go through," says Ken deLaski, president and chief executive of Deltek Systems, which creates software for the professional-services industry and which recently sent 120 people through our training. But he adds that "I think the results are profound. Because of the new habits of honesty, integrity, awareness, and a positive outlook, [training teams] makes you a better company....Everyone is on the hook for the team’s success."

Sounds gung ho.

Gallwey is the author of the Inner Game series of books and founder of Inner Game Corporation. Pascotto is the founder of Effective Organizational Systems. They can be reached at www.theinnergame.com.