Six Steps for Improving Team Performance

Most so-called teams do not really function as teams. Instead, they are a group of people working on a project or, perhaps, even leading an organization, who operate fairly autonomously. They do their work, staying in their swim lanes and making sure to contribute to regular team meetings and status updates. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. If you’ve ever observed a really great team at work, you can see the difference from what I’ve just described. Members of great teams work together. They share ideas and they confront issues openly and honestly. They encourage dissent and empower members to express diverse points of view. Most important, they build on each others’ thoughts and actions, achieving results far greater than the sum of their individual contributions. Here are six critical steps that can make your teams perform to this vision:
Develop strong team coaching capability. You can do this internally or by using external coaching resources. Either way, this step is a must. Team dynamics is a sub-specialty within talent management. It takes experienced team coaches to drive this change, and most companies don’t have them today.
Get top leadership commitment. Leadership commitment and expectations need to be clear, so start with the CEO. You will be asking for major behavior change. Your people will not take the risks required unless they know the top leaders are really expecting change. So get commitment at the right level. This will make your people feel safe in changing their team behaviors.
Use assessments to help team members understand their relationships with each other. Even if they want to change, it will not always be easy. Lots of personality assessment experience has taught us that we relate differently to some people than to others. The ease or difficulty of relationships among team members can be predicted using the Four Groups 4G Assessment. Then, specific coaching points can help team members think appropriately about what to expect from each other so behaviors are predictable and less threatening.
Develop a baseline of current team performance and specific goals and measures for change. Team members need to see how they have been behaving, acknowledge the past with its limitations and own the future vision. The goals and measures need to be clear and demonstrable. For the sake of objectivity, the team coaches should assign baseline scores to team performance. Then, with the help of the coaches, the team members can collectively track progress toward goals.
Reward success. What gets measured gets done. Members of high performing teams should be highly rewarded — pay, recognition, promotion, high potential designation, etc. When this happens, word will travel fast and others will want to change. In fact, a whole organization can be transformed faster than you might imagine!
Make the program part of your internal brand. Doing this will be a big recruiting advantage. People love to contribute to important work on high performing teams — especially Millennials! So talk it up publicly. You will have a big competitive advantage about which you can really be proud!