What High-Performing Teams Have In Common
Takeaways
Explore the key traits of high-performing teams and how these elements contribute to a team's success
What sets the great teams apart from the good? Here is a collection of observations over the years on the things the best teams have held in common:
Informal Atmosphere – Most people do not perform at their best in formal atmospheres that place a lot of focus on dress codes, high-end furnishings, and formal protocols. Stuffy environments cause people to be more self-conscious and being focused on ourselves is the opposite of how a high-performing team functions. Lower these distractions by making the atmosphere relaxed, informal, comfortable, and active. You want no signs of boredom with your teammates. Boards are often the worst offenders, preferring a formal hotel conference room for meetings instead of a living room or low-key meeting space.
Discussion-Based Meetings - When planning meeting agendas, the best teams structure around discussions and decisions instead of around reports. If you engage your team’s mind they will follow your dreams. Spending an hour on financial statements usually won’t do that. Sharing your vision for an hour probably won’t do that. Be thinking about one big question at each meeting that would get your team thinking and interacting together about how you can achieve some aspect of your mission. They will probably come up with ideas that improve the vision.
The objective is well-understood - Great teams know what they are there to do. Not only are they crystal clear on the larger objective, when they get together in a team meeting, they also understand the purpose of that meeting as well. There are no meetings for the sake of meeting.
Most teams within an organization fit into three categories, and every team member should know the category of the team they are on. Boards and senior leadership teams are focused on management and strategy. They are asking questions like, “Should we do this? Are we healthy? Is this working?” Second-layer teams are focused on creativity. These teams focus on making the strategy come alive. They are asking questions that usually focus on “how” to make the strategy work. Third-layer teams meet about implementation and are focused entirely on “what we do”. They are thinking of the tasks to get the strategy to work. Does each team in your organization know what category they are in? If not, they are wasting a lot of energy asking the wrong kinds of questions, wasting time and money.
Clear decision involvement – When people are invited to participate in a decision, they need to know what level of authority their input will carry. When this is not clear at the front end, there is often frustration or confusion and it is easily avoidable. Before inviting input on a decision great teams make it clear if that team member’s input is voice (we want to hear your opinion), vote (we want you to have a say in this decision), or veto (you have the final say in this decision).
Members listen to each other – This is modeled by the team leader and on the best teams, the whole team adopts this habit. Watch closely to see if a team member brings up an idea and then five minutes later someone else will say roughly the same thing and the team will adopt it. As the leader, it is important to call out the team’s failure to listen to some voices as the dysfunction that it is. I have seen a lot of teams miss the best ideas coming to the table because they are listening for the quality of the communication, not the quality of the idea.
Criticism is frequent, frank, and comfortable – On great teams, criticism is not an uncomfortable concept because it is both common and handled well. Feedback is never done in a group setting. It is focused on something recent, giving clear examples. The person offering feedback is not emotional, and is not creating a personal attack but is focused on behavior. The person bringing feedback owns that this is entirely their concern. There is no use of the “me and my invisible army” techniques that usually take the form of “the whole team is disappointed in you” which is nothing shy of manipulation. If the rest of the team has a concern, they will each raise it with this person.
One of the biggest challenges a leader faces in helping the team get better is that you have to allow yourself to do conflict poorly to learn to do it well. This isn't the kind of thing that you just read about, tell your team about, and then expect to do it well. It takes practice, sometimes painful practice. But you can’t avoid it. Conflict is energy, and when it is not dealt with directly, it goes somewhere else. The unaired conflict goes behind closed doors and results in artificial harmony, not deep community. Insist on Conflict.
Most decisions are reached by consensus - Consensus requires unity but not unanimity. I’ve watched leaders say that they make decisions by consensus but what they mean is every decision must be unanimous. Meetings drag on as they try to get everyone to agree instead of a sense that we are unified even though we may not all agree.
Consensus means that everyone has been heard. It doesn’t mean we all agree. Unity is not based on uniformity, it’s based on love. Unity is not all of us being the same. It is all of us choosing to focus on the best in each other, and that takes love. There are disagreements in any organization, we have to be OK with that. When leading a team towards consensus you are looking for potential instead of problems.
Have you noticed in the game of tug of war that often when a team starts to win, they seem to get a surge of momentum? When a team senses that they are winning, something happens psychologically and they start to pull harder. The same is true in organizations. The leader’s job is to help them see where they are winning.
People feel free to express ideas - If you have a team of six and only one or two people bring up ideas, you don’t yet have a team. There are always people on a team with better ideas, the question is if they will ever surface. When someone dares to say “I have an idea but it is different.” Treat that like a fragile gift. Nurture that comment and bring it to life and other great ideas will start to show up as well.
When action is taken clear assignments are given and received - Some teams exhibit a lot of talk but not much action. There is plenty of discussion but no decisions and no assignments. Wrestling through to a decision and then not generating any next steps feels like buying a car and never getting the keys. Some people like teams because they are relational people and they enjoy the interaction that the group provides but don’t have much interest in getting anything done. If you hear yourself saying frequently "Let's put this item off for now and discuss it later” you should have an alarm going off in your head. Indecision is contagious. Too often an organization says: "Ready, aim, aim, aim, aim." If you are going to hit anything you have to pull the trigger. Decisions mean you have to act on it.
Think of team pace and decision-making rhythms like riding a bicycle. You have to keep pedaling and moving or you’ll lose your balance and fall over. We find our balance through movement. We keep our team pedaling by making decisions. You don’t need to be moving fast, but you do want to keep moving.
The opposite of indecision is equally dangerous. Some team leaders push their organization to move quickly but if it is faster than the leader’s ability to steer, it only creates the illusion of progress. You can recognize these organizations because they are going in circles but are self-congratulatory about how fast they are going. Their exhaustion blinds them to the fact that they aren’t going anywhere, they are just busy.
Speed kills. Momentum brings life. Don’t let indecision creep in, but don’t let busyness masquerade as progress either.
The team is self-conscious about its operations - When was the last time your team sat down and considered, “How do we think we are doing as a team?” It is healthy to take a hard look at how the team is really doing every three months. Evaluating yourself creates trust if the evaluation generates change. The biggest step to creating trust is vulnerability. As a leader, if you put on a façade of being perfect at everything, you are telling your team that they are not needed. But when you open up and say, “I’m not great at this. I made a mess over here. I’m weak at this and I could use your help.” When you do that as the leader, you will have people step into those areas as a peer and lead. And that is a team.
It is hard to both lead and honestly assess a team at the same time. This is one of the areas that a good advisor will be a tremendous asset to you. If you want some help unlocking the full potential of your team and help you level up your team leadership, let’s start a conversation. This is the third article in this series. Understanding a team’s life cycle is the foundation and then how to lead at each stage is equally important.
