Need your team to work closer, differently or better?
Develop your team
The way your team members collaborate, relate and work together can significantly impact their performance and, ultimately, results. Effective teams at all levels work together to achieve an outcome beyond the individuals’ self interests. This is especialy challenging in hybrid teams, which can place even more pressure on relationships, trust and collaboration.
We work with teams to improve their performance by developing leaders’:
alignment to organisation vision, goals, strategy, values and culture
the ability to think enterprise wide when working
emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills
trust and relationships
constructive conversation and conflict skills
commitment to a common purpose
High performing teams
Do you really have a high performing team?
Before you answer that, is your team really even a team?
Foundational research in this area by Katzenbach and Smith identified key attributes of high performing teams. They defined high performing teams as:
“a small group of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they are mutually accountable”
Their research also described different types of groups based on team effectivess and performance impact, as shown in the chart.
Working Group
•Team members come together to share information, best practices and make decisions
•No common purpose or performance goals that require mutual accountability.
•The purpose of this group is only to specify the roles of its members and to delegate tasks.
•Members only take responsibility for their own results – focus is on individual performance
•The key here is there is no significant, incremental performance need or opportunity that requires the group to become a team.
Pseudo Team
•Members may believe they are part of a team but not yet acting like one.
•There’s a potential for significant, incremental gain here; the team has not, however, focused on collective performance.
•Members don’t want to take the risk of committing to a common purpose and the mutual accountability that this entails.
•What is especially dangerous about the pseudo team is that the members believe that they are a real team, yet they produce inferior results.
Potential Team
•There is a significant, incremental gain in performance with this type of team.
•Team members are working hard toward achieving higher levels of performance.
•Team members must work on developing a clear purpose, goals and common approach to achieving it.
•Members must agree on accountability.
Real Team
•A small group of people share a common purpose and approach.
•They have complementary skills.
•They hold themselves mutually accountable for their results.
•The performance impact and results of the real team are much greater than the potential team and working group.
High Performance Team
•The difference between a real team and a high performing team is the relationships between the team members.
•The members form powerful relationships.
•High performance results from the members being committed to one another’s personal growth and development.
•They far out-perform all other teams. Moving from a real team to a high performance team requires a very strong personal commitment.
*Adapated from the work of Katzenbach and Smith