high-performing team
(noun)
groups that are highly focused on their goals and that achieve superior business results.
Examples of high-performing team in the following topics:
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Building a Culture of High Performance
- An effective way to achieve high-performing culture is to create high-performing teams.
- High-performance teams are a central building block of high-performance culture, and they thrive in innovative and empowering environments.
- Leadership in any team environment is critical to success, but leadership within a high-performance culture is often complex.
- While leadership is normally static in a hierarchical environment, high-performance teams benefit from shared leadership by utilizing the different talents and perspectives of each team member in the decision-making process.
- There are ten elements in particular that are important to successfully integrating high-performance teams within an organizational culture:
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Team Roles
- Team roles define how each member of the group relates to the others and contributes to the team's performance.
- Team roles establish expectations about who will do what to help the team succeed.
- The consultant Meredith Belbin studied high-performing teams and devised a typology based on how members contributed to the group's success.
- When a role is missing because there is no one available to fill it, team performance can suffer.
- Identify types of team roles and how they contribute to team performance
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Stages of Team Development
- Bruce Tuckman identified four distinct phases of team development: forming, storming, norming, and performing.
- Once norms are established and the team is functioning as a unit, it enters the performing stage.
- For this reason, motivation is usually high and team members have confidence in their ability to attain goals.
- A team may also need to return to an earlier stage if its performance declines.
- All teams go through a life-cycle of stages, identified by Bruce Tuckman as: forming, storming, norming, and performing.
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Preparing for Team Presentations
- In team and group presentations, these processes can serve to:
- Determine what the team is trying to achieve, and what steps will lead there.
- Team members within groups must:
- Another approach to the dynamics of a team presentation involves looking specifically at the strategies that guide interactions between group members throughout the team effort .
- Managing team cooperation: This strategy applies to group meetings.
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Constructive Team Conflict
- Teams may use conflict as a strategy for continuous improvement and learning.
- Recognizing the benefits of conflict and using them as part of the team's process can enhance team performance.
- Team members may feel more valued when they know they are contributing to something vital to the team's success.
- First, they can start by explicitly calling for it as something that will help improve the team's performance.
- Explain how conflict can be used as a strategy for improving team performance
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Team Building
- Team building is an approach to helping a team become an effective performing unit.
- Team building refers to a wide range of activities intended to help a team become an effective performing unit.
- Team-building activities require the participation of all team members.
- A team can also benefit from team building after its work has begun.
- After people have been working together for a while, social norms can develop that interfere with a team's performance.
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Choosing Team Size and Team Members
- Team size and composition affect team processes and outcomes.
- The optimal size and composition of teams depends on the scope of the team's goals.
- Too many members can make communication and coordination difficult and lead to poor team performance.
- Research shows that teams perform best with between five and nine members.
- Meredith Belbin did extensive research on teams prior to 1990 in the UK that suggested that the optimum team size is eight roles plus a specialist as needed.
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Setting Team Goals and Providing Team Feedback
- Periodic performance assessments help a team identify areas for improvement so it can better achieve its goals.
- Periodic self-assessments that consider the team's progress, how it has gotten there, and where it is headed allow the team to gauge its effectiveness and take steps to improve its performance.
- To assess its performance, a team seeks feedback from group members to identify its strengths and its weaknesses.
- Feedback from the team assessment can be used to identify gaps between what it needs to do to perform effectively and where it is currently.
- Poor communication and conflict can disrupt a team's performance, and sometimes these disruptions are caused by personality clashes between members.
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Leading Teams
- The members of Bob's team think that he is a great team leader.
- The team lead reports to a project manager (overseeing several teams).
- Manage performance as described When Teams Work Best by LaFasto and Larson.
- Therefore, an effective team leader must be both a component to the team and also a leader to manage the team's progress.
- One cannot lead a team without knowing the purpose and goal of the team.
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Virtual Teams
- Similar to task forces and cross-functional teams, networked teams frequently bring together people with different expertise to bring broad perspectives to discussing an issue or problem.
- The geographic dispersion of team members and the lack of regular face-to-face meetings present three challenges to the success of virtual teams.
- Coordination of tasks: A virtual team needs a clear set of objectives and a plan for how to achieve them in order to focus and direct collaboration among team members.
- Team-member skills: Beyond their functional expertise and experience, virtual team members need to be effective users of technologies such as video conferencing and other collaboration tools.
- When these are missing, team members can lose focus and collaboration can suffer, leading to delays, conflict, and other performance issues.