When you successfully create the conditions for superior results, high motivation, and a sustainable approach, we say you have built leadership capacity which is a massive competitive advantage.
The definition of a high performing team is simple: superior results, motivated people, and sustainable strategy. Simple, but not easy. Researchers identify a good or average team as one with clear roles, clear goals, and effective meetings. Most people whish they could just be on an average team.
High performing teams are rare. These teams, according to research, hit a few important wickets. Obviously, they out perform other teams on industry standard metrics while doing similar work. They make more widgets, make customers happier, and provide better services consistently. They also create an environment where team members are both motivated and learning (we call this vitality). Other teams hope to get members from these teams to join their ranks, because the team has likely helped them gain technical and interpersonal skills. Finally these teams have a sustainable approach to people and strategy. These teams don’t win because they buy talent and burn it out. They win because people become talented with them and want to stay. As time goes by, lacking any of these there qualities on your team will either dampen your performance or completely destroy the team.
Three simple questions to identify a high performing team
If you have an average team, meaning you have clear roles, goals, and good meetings, here are three areas to focus on the start moving into high performance territory.
1. Does your team consistently get better outcomes than other similar teams?
2. Does your team have significantly lower turnover compared to other teams?
3. Do people promote on your team (or to other areas in your organization) more quickly than people on other teams?
When you successfully create the conditions for superior results, high motivation, and a sustainable approach, we say you have built leadership capacity which is a massive competitive advantage.
Results require leadership skills and team design
Teams researcher Richard Hackman drives home the need for a compelling mission, and we agree that it might be the most important part of a high performing team. Goals are good, but a compelling mission is great. You need to articulate a clear mission that people want to be part of, but it does not need to be world-saving. You could be helping people save five minutes a day with an optimized dishwasher unloading plan. Read more about crafting a mission here.
When designing your team, pay attention to clear roles and spend time articulating the informal roles people play as well. Someone is consistently lightening the mood or helping keep your meetings on track. Notice and appreciate them.
Hone the communication architecture. When people get the information they need, when they need it, with minimal noise, your communicating will and reducing a lot of the normal friction teams face.
Finally consider the leadership skills that directly contribute to results. Leaders need to make good decisions, manage risk, and manage processes well to drive results.
Want help designing your team? Take this five minute micro course on starting a new team to learn more and get a team charter document to help.
Team emotional intelligence leads to team vitality
Do emotions create friction or fuel on your team? High performing teams notice, manage, and use emotions effectively. First, leaders need to create an environment where people feel like they belong (because they do). Here are tips to build better connections on your team, especially if you are geographically dispersed.
Belonging does not mean inclusion. Including people who are not needed is like putting an extra wheel on the hood of your car – it looks silly and creates drag. People sense when they are integral to the success of the mission and if they are redundant they won’t stay motivated.
Once you create a sense of belonging, make it easy to care for and respect each other. Partly, this means just knowing each other. It also means making it easy to reach out when someone is having a bad day or picking up someone’s kids from school when they have to stay late on a project. Bottom line, facilitate acts of caring as the leader.
Once you build norms of belonging and caring, you’ll need to help your team surface and constructively engage in conflict. When you don’t talk about implicit issues and emotions, people make up stories about their teammates. That’s never pretty. When you do surface assumptions, people begin to create shared perspectives. This drives trust, high-fidelity communication, and psychological safety.
An artful approach to emotions as a team goes a long way to motivate your people, and it also makes results more sustainable. Without emotional intelligence, you cannot create a high performing team.
Sustainability means low burnout and big picture
Teams that get results and have motivated people have a good chance to become high performing teams, but often fail catastrophically due to a lack of sustainability. Leaders drive results and results drive motivation, but eventually the team or organization burns out. Leaders can do a lot to prevent this by focusing on time and energy management from the beginning and setting a sustainable strategy.
Sustainability is not only about your people sticking around for a long time. Leadership needs a sustainable strategy that will stay resilient and competitive over the long term. Part of that strategy needs to include the big picture, or using systems thinking. Systems thinking provides a counter paradigm to reductionism. Most people think of their team as a part in the organization that they can isolate and fix. In reality, your team is a node in a larger system. Resources, trust, and information flow from other stakeholders in and out of your team. High performing teams proactively develop relationships with the teams they serve (directly and indirectly), customers, leadership, and external stakeholders like the community and professional associations in their space. These connections allow them to access resources more often and to shape their contribution to the larger organizational mission. Systems thinkers also consider long-term outcomes, notice patterns more quickly, and understand the levers to make systemic changes. Learn more about teams and systems here.
High Performing Teams take work
Most teams are barely performing, and few are high performing teams. Many teams do some of the above relatively well, but they drop the ball on some of these practices. It takes discipline for a team to create and uphold norms long enough in these areas that they become collective habits. A powerful tool that can help is building team norms to promote results, vitality and sustainability,. If you want to accelerate that process, join us on a mountain or in a canoe and we can help you make it happen!
