Creating a high performing team is the aspiration of every leader and organisation.
It is easy to assume that if you put a bunch of highly skilled people together and somehow make them get along with each other it will result in a high performing team. Organisations spend millions of dollars every year in team-building activities. These activities could include team outings, offsite meetings or fun events. All of these are helpful in improving bonding between team members. Yet none of these interventions can guarantee that the end result will be a high-performing team.
For a team to be a truly high performing team every team member needs to put in their best efforts. This collective intelligence then needs to convert into business outcomes.
There are three aspects that help teams get to the next level of performance.
- Consistency of behaviour: For high performance to happen the key components are trust and psychological safety. Trust builds when there is a certain level of certainty about how things operate. Human beings are not comfortable with ambiguity. If people are unsure of how things will play out they prefer to take the safer route. For e.g., If a team member is unsure of how their manager will handle criticism they will hold back from expressing themselves. They would rather not speak than risk damaging the relationship or their career. A leader can create trust by laying out clear behaviour guidelines for themselves and the team. If the leader then models these behaviours themselves and holds others accountable to do so as well, safety gets established. This allows people to feel safe enough to participate fully and give their best.
- Encourage diverse thoughts and conflict: There is enough research that shows that organisations with higher diversity have a higher chance of success. Many organisations put policies in place to hire for diversity. Tapping into this diversity and using it productively is however the responsibility of the team and team leader. The essence and richness of diverse thought sometimes get lost in people trying to be polite to each other. In an endeavour to be nice, teams often tend towards consensus or avoidance of conflict. What is needed is not to avoid conflict but be comfortable with each other’s difference of opinion. This enables people to voice differences constructively and objectively to arrive at what is best for the team.
- Mutual Purpose over Individual Purpose: Performance systems are often driven as competitive races between team members. This results in each member trying to do better than the other. While this may mean that sections of the organisation work well it comes at the cost of the low focus of the team on the overall business. For a team to be truly high performing the team needs to have collective goals and purpose where they need to support each other’s success. This encourages people to think broader and in the interest of the entire business rather than just the small area they control.