How to build our own High Performing Team!
Is there a set of Golden Rules that makes a team 'High Performing'. Or is it all a fad?
What is a High Performing Team?
As long as I have been in business, the companies I worked for (either as an employee or as a consultant) have been talking about team work and what makes teams High Performing. Indeed, a near-endless amount of books, courses, TED-talks, conferences, you name it, have been devoted to the subject.
Pseudo-scientific approaches like Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI), Belbin Profiles, Whole Brain Thinking, and the like, have greatly distorted the conversations, with their tools that promise miracles. Snake oil, says I! I will not dwell on those here, because they are not my cup of tea, so to say. If you are interested in them, of course, look them up (and open your wallet).
Just a few weeks ago, the Harvard Business Review (HBR), known and loved by many business leaders, published yet another article on team building, this time by David Burkus on What Makes Teams High Performing. I am not going to reproduce his article here, so I would suggest you read the blissfully short article, to understand Burkus’ three key themes (in his words):
Achieve a Common Understanding
Provide Psychological Safety, and
Create a Prosocial Purpose
He comes to those 3 themes from comparing masses of research. I have to declare here that I am naturally suspicious of buzzwords like Prosocial Purpose, but I will ignore this for now. These themes seem to make sense, although his (respectfully) simplistic way to create Common Understanding is a tad underwhelming. Since Burkus is the self-styled Team Building Guru, perhaps I should start with these three to learn about how to create our high performing team. I will have to return to them later, though, because something is missing from his article, and it is missing from much that I read about High Performing Teams.
It is a very basic thing.
What actually is high performing in the first place? By whose definition will we work? The manager’s? The one from the team itself? Some, yet undefined, external benchmark? If that, how do we do that?
I was mostly disappointed by what I ran into in the background reading I did on this. Just a small sample of the sources I looked at here:
HBR, of course, had the 5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently (paywall).
Forbes had 14 Characteristics Of High-Performing Teams in Sep 2020 or 5 Key Characteristics Of High Performing Teams in Jan 2021, take your pick.
Wikipedia is always a great source (that’s why I pay monthly contributions to it) and their listing is very comprehensive.
McKinsey, as you would expect, helps senior leaders (like start-up CEOs) with its guidance in the area.
My disappointment is not in the content itself, because they all make some sense and have their merit, but -for one thing- none of them help me with a consistent definition of what High Performing is.
Then I ran into an article from Oxford Review from February 2019, and it started to make sense to me.
Put simply, a high-performance team is one that exceeds all reasonable expectations and produces extraordinary results. - Dr. David Wilkinson, Oxford Review, February 2019
But what did it for me was his following comment (my emphasis):
Studies have found that the problem with having a tighter definition of a high-performance team is that it is highly contextual. Using a measure, like achieving goals or outcomes, only works where those goals and outcomes are achievable and where they stay static. For instance, a team working through a disaster may need to change their goals and expectations. And yet, in the circumstances, if they exceed all reasonable expectations, even though they failed to meet the original (outdated) goals, they will still be a high performing team.- Again, Dr. David Wilkinson, Oxford Review, February 2019
That is what resonates with me.
But, I would like to extend the meaning of this context. What are reasonable expectations that need exceeding?
Example - A good friend worked for a large Dutch multinational straight after University (where he and I became friends). His first posting was in Singapore. My friend is extremely bright, and scored only top marks at Uni, as well as outside his studies. His outputs, in terms of work products, were excellent in Singapore. But, despite his line manager admitting that, he nevertheless received a relatively bad review. He did not meet expectations! It appeared that my friend worked less than 11 hours a day. His boss’ reasonable expectation was that 11 working hours a day was the minimum, regardless of the produced output. In my friend’s and my culture, that is an unreasonable expectation.
So, was my friend high performing? In my world he was, in his boss’ world he wasn’t.
Using this example, allow me to restate Wilkinson’s definition here.
A high-performance team is one that exceeds all reasonable expectations and produces extraordinary results in the cultural and operational environment we operate in.
And in today’s high connected and very diverse work environment, it seems imperative to accept that, therefore, high performance must be both from the outside in (the manager’s view if you like) and the inside out (how the team itself perceives its performance).
Both… and…
What about capabilities and leadership?
Famously, the performances of the British RAF’s Red Arrows are an amazing display of team work. The coordination between these aircraft flying at extraordinary speeds is an amazing thing to see. If you ever have the chance (and can overcome any anxiety about the environmental impact their displays have), I would recommend seeing them perform. The pilots must work in such tremendous coordination to make all the preplanned figures in the sky. There can be no doubt that these men and women are a high performing team. But, there is a crux here. The pilots all have had operational tasks for the RAF prior to joining the team. They have high levels of experience to develop their incredible skills. But also, the Red Arrows displays can only succeed with many hundreds of hours of training to create these figures. So, to make the Red Arrows perform as a team requires key basic skills but also extensive joint training on what our team’s current purpose is (in the Red Arrows’ case this is creating these impressive displays). Indeed, at a client’s corporate event in St Andrews, Scotland (yes, at the R&A’s famous golf resort), listening to them as key note speakers highlighted this clearly.
IMPLICATION 1 - High Performance for a team requires high levels of basic skills and capabilities for all team members in the roles they perform, combined with creating joint experiences and skills by collaborating closely.
The image I chose at the top of this article, is of a group of elephants that I observed in the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania last year. Just outside the picture there are two bull elephants squaring up by running fast towards each other (at this point they were still around 750 meters apart). A very dangerous situation (and a frightening sight, even from a distance and from the relative safety of a safari vehicle), because a fight between 2 rival bulls can be very vicious, and they can easily trample young baby elephants. So the matriarch of the group leads the other females (and young males) in a protective circle around the youngsters. She is the one facing right in the photo, towards where the rival bull was fast approaching. Nor surprisingly, this was also a theme that was clear in the Red Arrows key note speech I referred to above.
This leads me to another suggested implication.
IMPLICATION 2 - In order for a team to be high performing, a leader needs to organise the team around a common purpose.
This is not just about the common purpose as such (many people will point at the necessity of it) but expressly also about the role of leadership to find this common purpose. Because good leadership can break down hierarchies that often inhibit a compelling common purpose to emerge in many organisations.
Another Example - In the work I was fortunate enough to do with RN Knowles & Associates on workplace safety in the early 2000s, Dick Knowles would always point at the situation when (say) a chemical plant is on fire. It is amazing how instantaneously leaders stand up everywhere, irrespective of their hierarchical position, to help organise the people to fight the danger, and where therefore barriers implied by organisational hierarchies break down. After all, staying alive during a fire on a chemical plant, is quite a compelling common purpose! The definition of high performing shifts (see also Wilkinson above). And, afterwards, people feel pretty good about themselves about how well their team performed to tackle the emergency. To then, disappointingly, revert to the old hierachical, power dynamics when the whole situation is resolved. But, in Dick’s words, we can’t keep burning the plant down to feel good about ourselves! So, in order to be high performing, not just in emergency or other special situations, we need to hone that leadership to work as a matter of course. Leaders will draw attention to what needs to happen in situations, in ways that bring others with them toward the compelling common purpose.
IMPLICATION 3 - Build leadership capabilities through-out the organisation when operations are calm and in control, learning from experiences where things have gone wrong, to ensure that in most situations key activities are undertaken in a way that works for the team.
What do these suggested Implications teach us?
These are just three suggested implications to think about team performance. I am sure we can derive many more from our own experience. But the purpose of this substack is to see what we can pick up from our own experiences, so let’s return to Burkus’ three themes and see how we can apply them.
Achieve a common understanding.
Burkus comes up with the suggestion to poll the team members individually, and use that to understand their skills, capabilities (etc) (like the Red Arrows) and what they are expecting from the rest in his branded Manual of Me. Eventually, he suggests to jointly discuss these documents and the understanding emerges. Or so he suggests. I would personally ditch the document and encourage real, open, conversations about subjects that matter, are compelling, to the team. We don’t need a (static or not) manual for that. After all, we act as individuals in context, and a manual, however well intended, presupposes that my ways of interacting can be isolated from the group I am in. As I posted many times before, leaders (sic!) can much better create that common understanding and purpose (Implication 2) that via wicked questions, see also in my recent article about ways of seeing.
What we pick up in those conversations, applied to our joint work, builds on Implication 1 above.
Provide Psychological Safety
Burkus means with this jargon that people feel free to communicate what they think is important in any situation. That, indeed, seems imperative to me. Open and honest communication creates trust and the will to collaborate. Burkus solution for this is for managers to lead by example. It is hard to disagree with this, but he rightly calls out that the power dynamics in many organisations may work against people accepting their manager’s good intentions. I suggest that that happens when you see management as steering a team from the outside in. I would point at Implication 3, instead. With leadership being seen as separate from management, the team can -over time!- have the confidence that the correct action will emerge. The leadership intervention will include, by its very nature, the real, existing power dynamics in the organisation because it comes from within the team.
Create a Prosocial Purpose
I must humbly admit I had to look the word ‘prosocial1’ up. But the implication is that when we can find a compelling common purpose that creates meaningful work. Whatever meaningful means, of course, but it seems to include making a valuable contribution to the world and producing work that positively impacts others (Burkus). He proposes to start sharing stories on how our joint work impacts society, and about those who benefit from our work. I like that as a suggestion, but there is a real risk that we start to look for things that simply are not there, or are so contrived that they don’t resonate with people’s day-to-day experiences. My thinking is that, following Implication 2, we keep the conversations open until our team feels comfortable that what we do together is meaningful to us in the context of what we are doing.
My conclusion and recommendation
Having gone through the gymnastics to try and get a solid understanding of what makes up a High Performing Team, I have been strenghtened in my belief that high performing is a complex notion. And complex issues never have easy, straightforward answers.
This means, answering the question that I posted at the very top of the article (Is there a set of Golden Rules that makes a team 'High Performing'. Or is it all a fad?), that I cannot see a set of Golden Rules. The ‘five things that make a high performing team’ or such like are gross simplifications. They make the reader feel they can get to grips with the complex issue, but the reality of the actual world we live in, our own team’s context, needs to be continously adapted to. They do have their uses, as long as the reader realises that inherent flaw. So, perhaps not 100% a fad (like perhaps the pseudo-science I referred to in the beginning), but most certainly not the silver bullet people would seek (despite Burkus, HBR and other sources telling us otherwise).
So, what then, you ask?
For those who know my way of thinking, it should come as no surprise that my recommendation is to see organisations as ongoing, ever changing conversations.
By continuously, and actively, participating in these conversations, it is the key leadership skill to draw attention to emerging themes, ideas and thoughts that have the potential to greatly improve a team’s performance. It is the interplay between management’s requirements, and the teams evolving performance that will define whether we exceed expectations or not. Whether we are a high performing team.
Arguably, though, if there is a continous and open dialogue between management and team members, the expectations are always realistic. No target performance that will be met, not met, or exceeded. They will always be just right.
Goldilocks expectations to ensure we are always a high performing team.
I would sign up for that, wouldn’t you?
Contributing to a beneficial outcome by negotiation, problem-solving, problem analysis, clarification, or respectful behaviours - definitions.net