In today’s fast-paced and competitive business environment, the ability to build and sustain high-performance teams is more critical than ever. High-performance teams are not just a buzzword but a vital component for any organisation aiming for success.

These teams are characterized by their exceptional high-performance team attributes, which include superior collaboration, strong communication, and a shared commitment to achieving common goals. Understanding the high-performance teams characteristics and implementing effective high-performance team building strategies can significantly enhance productivity and innovation.

Did you know?
High-performance teams often achieve significantly higher productivity due to their clear goals and effective collaboration.

Creating a High-Performance Team Culture

Creating and nurturing a high-performance team culture is essential for fostering an environment where team members thrive and excel. This involves adopting a high-performance teams model that supports continuous development and motivates members to reach their full potential. High-performance team management plays a crucial role in this process, ensuring that the right processes and practices are in place to maintain team efficiency and morale.

Effective High-Performance Team Development

Effective high-performance team development goes beyond just forming a group of skilled individuals. It requires strategic high-performance team coaching and the use of tailored high-performing teams activities designed to strengthen team dynamics and improve performance. By focusing on these elements, organisations can create teams that are not only capable of delivering outstanding results but also adaptable to evolving challenges and opportunities.

Struggles in Building High-Performance Teams

Most companies struggle to build High-Performance Teams – an important attribute where not much focus is given even by great corporations.

“97% of employees and executives surveyed believe a lack of alignment within a team directly impacts the outcome of a task or project” 

(source: salesforce.com)

Operating in a Global Environment

Companies today operate in a global environment, with rapid changes, and need to respond to these new opportunities and new markets with agility. Despite organisation investment in improving productivity and efficiency, we find organisations continuing to have challenges in creating high-performance teams.

Approaches to Team Building

Most of the approaches for creating these teams centre around managing performance and the leader’s approach to building teams without a comprehensive approach that considers the team’s purpose, its culture, the individuals that form a part of it and key underlying processes.

Key Questions for Building a High-Performance Team

Building a high-performance team for an organisation will be concerned with answering 3 key questions:

1) How can our team deliver higher customer impact?
2) How can our team remain motivated and engaged in our strategic goals?
3) How can our team achieve more with less?

Did you know?
Diverse teams are known to outperform their industry counterparts, demonstrating the benefits of varying perspectives and ideas.

Amity’s approach to Building High-Performance teams.

 Amity Institute of Training & Development (AITD) has an approach on creating high performing teams that relies on more than 30 years of research comprising 50+ organisations on what works in creating high performing teams and what does not. We identify key attributes of a high performing team to include:

1) The fullness of mutual accountability
2) Enhanced Clarity and Deeper Sense of Purpose
3) High interaction, knowledge exchange and Dependability
4) Speed and Agility
5) Sense of focus
6) Operating with Creativity

Understanding the Organisation and Team Development

The work with teams starts with understanding the organisation that the teams operate within and the stage of team development. We then work with teams to identify a customized and team-specific approach that acts as a catalyst to create a high performing team.

Importance of Mutual Accountability

Team mutual accountability is a reciprocally authorized behaviour among team members of evaluating one another’s progress on the team’s task. Unlike performance pressure, which is externally enforced accountability on a team, mutual accountability is internal to a team. Teams with mutual accountability are likely to make prompt performance adjustments because team members, by their intimate understanding of the team’s work and impromptu conversations, can actively evaluate team progress and adjust ongoing performance issues.

As teamwork becomes more dynamic and reliant in organisations, the “right” processes and task divisions become difficult to predict in advance. This makes external team accountability insufficient and mutual accountability among team members critical for prompt performance adjustments.

The Role of Purpose in Teams

Having a deeper sense of purpose is not just about having a clear mission that focuses on how a business will generate economic value.

A higher purpose is not about economic exchanges. It reflects something more aspirational. It explains how the people involved with an organisation are making a difference, gives them a sense of meaning, and draws their support. It is only by creating a purpose-driven organisation that creates motivated and engaged employees. They act as change agents and bring their brilliance and creativity to their jobs. They begin to perform up to their potential.

High Interaction and Knowledge Sharing

High interaction and knowledge sharing are positively correlated with team performance. Knowledge has been recognized as a base of power and competitive edge for individuals who hold it. Some people may go as far as to see sharing their knowledge with others as a sign of losing their unique value in the organisation.

Accordingly, people are not often eager to share their knowledge or expertise with others. However, research has endorsed that knowledge sharing is a crucial factor for facilitating optimal team performance. It enables team members to get better ability about the team tasks and objectives. Team members exchange task-relevant knowledge to support other team members and teams in accomplishing their goals.

Speed and Agility in Teams

Speed and agility are not the same. More than simply a single process or methodology, organisational agility is the ability to:

• Adjust strategies continuously.
• Empower employees to make key decisions on challenging projects
• Respond to ambiguity and uncertainty with flexibility and speed.
• View unanticipated change as an opportunity for transformation.

By introducing flexibility and adaptability enterprise-wide, organisations can respond faster to fluctuating market conditions, improve overall organisational efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.

(Source: Teamwork)

Focus in High-Performance Teams

Having a sense of focus is one of the key attributes of a high-performance team. Such a high impact team would comprise of a group of goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate, and produce consistently superior results.

The group relentlessly pursues performance excellence through shared goals, shared leadership, collaboration, open communication, clear role expectations and group operating rules, early conflict resolution, and a keen sense of accountability and trust among its members.

Importance of Creativity and Innovation

Being creative and innovative are the top critical success factors not only for companies but for leaders and their teams. Research has validated these findings, identifying creativity as the top leadership competency for enterprises. Leaders and managers cannot continue to rely on the same ideas that have brought them past success and cannot be effective by surrounding themselves with people who parrot the leader’s ideas.

Teams should be encouraged to take risks in bringing fresh thinking and innovative ideas to the table, even if they are not 100% correct. The complexities of today’s marketplace require innovative solutions, which at times call for disruptive ways of problem-solving that may challenge the status quo: The business environment is too dynamic and the level of change is too complex we can’t rely on the same ideas or same ways to solve problems or expand markets with the same thinking we’ve always fallen back on.

(Source: Quantumworkplace)

Did you know?
Trust within teams can greatly enhance employee satisfaction and job performance, underscoring the importance of a supportive environment.

Interested in Learning more about the topics, here are a few links to relevant researches and studies conducted:

Creating High-Performance Teams in the Modern Workplace

Building High-Performance Teams

High-performing teams: A timeless leadership topic

(Source: Qualtrics)

Conclusion

In conclusion, team building is just not about team productivity and efficiency. The larger objective is to build a team culture that keeps delivering higher customer value repetitively and organisation impact, while productivity and efficiency improvement are just the natural outcomes that such a team can deliver. High-performing teams are unstoppable; they improve your top line and your bottom line.