The ABCs of Teamwork: Identifying What to Train

Practitioners who design team training quickly discover that “good teamwork” is too abstract to train. A team that needs to communicate better, coordinate better, or trust each other more cannot do anything actionable with that diagnosis. To translate vague aspirations into trainable competencies, the field uses a framework known as the ABCs of Teamwork: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Cognitions (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1995; Salas et al., 2008).

The ABCs are not a slogan. They are the working vocabulary that lets a practitioner move from “this team needs help” to “this team needs to learn closed-loop communication and develop a shared mental model of the handoff.” That second statement is trainable. The first is not.

This post walks through each component of the ABC framework, explains why each must be examined at both the individual and team level, and, most importantly, describes how practitioners use the framework to identify the requisite competencies for a specific team before designing a single slide.

What the ABCs Are

Attitudes are the affective dispositions that shape how members approach team work. They include collective orientation (the belief that working as a team is preferable to working alone), trust, psychological safety, team cohesion, and collective efficacy (the team’s shared belief that it can succeed). Attitudes are not feelings in a casual sense; they are stable orientations that predict behavior under stress.

Behaviors are observable actions that members take in concert. The most studied include closed-loop communication (sender transmits, receiver acknowledges, sender confirms), mutual performance monitoring (members track each other’s work without micromanaging), backup behavior (members step in when a teammate is overloaded), adaptability, and leadership behaviors that emerge within the team. Behaviors are the easiest of the three to observe and to train, which is why most validated team training interventions target them directly.

Cognitions are the shared mental structures that allow a team to coordinate without constant explicit communication. The two most important are shared mental models (members have a similar understanding of the task, the equipment, the team, and each other’s roles) and transactive memory (members know who knows what, so the team functions as a distributed memory system). Cognitions are the hardest of the three to measure but often the most consequential; teams with misaligned mental models fail in ways that look like communication problems but are actually shared-understanding problems (Salas et al., 2008).

Why Each Must Be Examined at Two Levels

A common error is to treat the ABCs as individual properties. They are not. Each component has both an individual-level and a team-level expression, and the two levels are not interchangeable (Salas et al., 2015).

At the individual level, a member can hold a collective orientation attitude (a personal belief in the value of teamwork). At the team level, the team has a climate of collective orientation, a shared norm that emerges from how members interact. A team can be staffed entirely with members who individually value teamwork yet still have a poor team-level climate, because the norms that govern day-to-day interaction were never deliberately developed.

The same dual structure applies to behaviors and cognitions. An individual can demonstrate closed-loop communication; a team can have closed-loop communication as a normalized practice. An individual can have an accurate mental model of the task; a team can have an aligned shared mental model. Designing training without distinguishing these levels produces interventions that move individual scores while leaving team-level functioning unchanged.

Identifying the Requisite ABCs Before You Design

This is where the framework becomes a design tool rather than a vocabulary. Before any team training is designed, the practitioner must determine which attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions this specific team needs to develop. Two teams in the same organization may share an industry, a sponsor, and a goal, and still need entirely different ABCs. Identifying the requisite ABCs is the work that turns a generic team-building event into a targeted intervention.

The process has four steps.

Step 1: Map the team’s task interdependencies. Marks et al. (2001) provide a useful task taxonomy that categorizes team work into transition phases (planning, mission analysis), action phases (coordination, monitoring, backup), and interpersonal processes (conflict management, motivation, affect management). The practitioner asks: where is the work concentrated? An execution-heavy team (e.g., an emergency response unit) needs strong action-phase behaviors. A strategic team needs strong transition-phase processes. A long-tenured team in conflict needs interpersonal processes. The taxonomy reveals which behaviors will produce the most leverage.

Step 2: Diagnose where the team is breaking down. Through observation, structured interviews, incident review, and team-level surveys, the practitioner identifies the specific failures the team is currently experiencing. Failure descriptions get translated into ABC language. “We miss things during handoffs” becomes a closed-loop communication behavior gap. “People work around each other” becomes a transactive memory cognition gap. “Members don’t speak up about concerns” becomes a psychological safety attitude gap. The translation step is essential; it makes the gap trainable.

Step 3: Distinguish the requisite few from the desirable many. Most teams could improve on ten or twelve ABC competencies. Effective training targets two or three. The practitioner ranks the diagnosed gaps by impact (how much does this gap affect mission outcomes?) and by leverage (how much improvement is plausible in the available training time?). A short list of two or three requisite ABCs becomes the spine of the curriculum. Trying to train all of them at once is one of the most common ways team training fails.

Step 4: Choose competencies that match the team’s developmental stage. A newly formed team needs different ABCs than a long-running team in maintenance mode. Newly formed teams typically need foundational attitudes (collective orientation, psychological safety) and basic coordination behaviors. Established teams typically need advanced cognitions (refining shared mental models) and adaptive behaviors (handling novel situations). Matching the requisite ABCs to the developmental stage prevents the common error of teaching foundational content to teams that have already mastered it, or advanced content to teams that have not yet built the foundation.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The following composite case is illustrative; it draws on patterns documented across surgical and operating-room team-training studies (Hughes et al., 2016; Weaver et al., 2014).

A surgical team in a community hospital reports that surgeries are running long and that nurses are frustrated with the surgeon’s communication. The practitioner does not start by writing a communication module. Instead, they observe two procedures, interview team members, and review near-miss reports. They find that (a) the nurses’ speaking-up behavior is below threshold (a behavior gap in upward voice), (b) the team’s psychological safety climate is low (an attitude gap), and (c) the team has no shared mental model of who is empowered to call a pause (a cognition gap).

The training that emerges targets these three requisite ABCs specifically: a psychological-safety-building module led by the surgeon, a closed-loop communication practice block with structured speaking-up scripts, and a shared-mental-model exercise that explicitly defines who can call a pause and what happens next. The same hospital, training a different surgical team three months later, may end up with a completely different ABC profile and a completely different curriculum.

That specificity, earned through diagnosis, is the difference between team training that produces measurable behavior change and team training that produces a pleasant afternoon.

A Note on Sequence

Practitioners sometimes wonder which of the three letters to train first. The literature suggests no rigid sequence, but a working heuristic is useful: train the attitude first if it blocks behavior, train the behavior first if the cognition is built on it, and train the cognition explicitly if it is the source of the breakdown. A team with low psychological safety cannot be trained to speak up until the attitude is addressed. A team without basic coordination behaviors cannot develop a shared mental model of complex task work. A team that has the attitudes and behaviors but persistently misunderstands its own task needs cognitive intervention.

The ABC framework gives practitioners a vocabulary, a diagnostic structure, and, used well, a design discipline. Skipping it produces training that is well-meaning but generic. Using it produces training that earns the time the team is asked to spend.