Characteristics of High Performing Teams

The CEO of the small startup tech company was visibly frustrated and upset. Once again the company had missed the profit targets for the month and the downward trend was getting steeper every month. They had a great technical solution needed by the market and adequate funding to implement their strategies. They had hired very smart people with great compensation and benefits, plus they provided a first class working environment. As she analyzed the data it became clear the issue was the common human element – lack of teamwork.

Personal leadership charisma and skills are indispensable to becoming a successful leader but who the leader leads is even more important. Selection of team members for individual job fit is a familiar topic for regular readers of the Employee Whisperer. When all the team members are assembled and begin performing, the leader, much as an orchestra conductor, needs to develop coherence and harmony among all the individual performers. Strategies, policies and processes provide basic direction. Supplementing those with regular feedback and relentless communication, the team is positioned to succeed but the remaining constant challenge is to produce results and consistently increase performance. The stress of the challenge to keep growing and improving will undo average teams, however high performing teams have characteristics that enable them to excel in similar conditions.

Developing the characteristics of high performing teams was described in detail by Patrick Lencioni in his book Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Field Guide for Leaders, Managers, and Facilitators. Those five characteristics are quite simply: trust; conflict; commitment; accountability and results. In our work with leaders and their teams we use the analogy of a pyramid with trust as the foundation. If team members do not have trust and confidence in themselves, each other, the leader, their strategy, the organization and its vision the structure will eventually crumble. However with trust firmly established the team can begin to work through inherent conflicts of individual perspectives. Communication skills, personalities, and positive attitudes about collaboration often need to be developed to productively identify and address conflicts. Once the conflicts are resolved the team can advance to the level of commitment and define goals, objectives, mutual expectations, directions and culture. When commitments are made accountability naturally follows. If the team members are not mutually accountable to their commitments performance will erode and falter. The results, the top of the pyramid, is of course why the team exists. Everyone needs to know the score and understand if the team is winning or losing as well as be clear on what they need to do to increase performance and contribute to the teams results.

If a team is not producing the expected results a basic diagnostic process is to drill down through each layer of the pyramid to reveal the defective characteristic. It isn’t easy to drill to the lowest layer so average leaders don’t do it, but solidifying every level of the pyramid is what every great leader does.

Make it a PEAK day!