high-performing team

Examples of high-performing team in the following topics:

• 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:

• 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

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Shared Leadership

  • Rather than having a single designated leader, two or more members of a team with shared leadership influence the others and help drive the team's performance toward its goals.
  • Team members must be willing to extend their feedback to the team in a way that aims to influence and motivate the direction of the group.
  • Shared purpose means team members have a similar understanding of the team's objective and collective goals.
  • Voice refers to the degree to which team members believe they have input into how the team carries out its activities.
  • Coaching can also nurture collective commitment to the team and its objectives, increasing the possibility that team members will demonstrate personal initiative.

• Key Behaviors of Transactional Leaders

  • Respond to deviations from expected outcomes and identify corrective actions to improve performance
  • Transactional leadership satisfies lower-level needs but addresses those at a high level only to a limited degree.
  • Coaches of sports teams are a good example of appropriate transactional leadership.
  • The rules for a sports team allow for little flexibility, and adherence to organizational norms is key; even so, effective coaches can motivate their team members to play and win, even at risk to themselves.
  • Performance ratings can be used to measure results.