All my life I have managed many small and large teams to provide high-quality outcomes for our customers and ensure that we continually add value to them. As the relationship with Customer grows, their expectations would also grow, especially when they received high value from teams. Customer expectations are always increasing, which needs high-performance teams to continuously exceed their expectations.

As I evolved from a manager to a leader, I learned to enable my team to perform at their maximum by adjusting strategies, being aware of team members' needs, holding them accountable, and so on.

I have engaged the Training department and external consultants to enable my team to learn how to handle conflicts, manage emotions, negotiate, and give feedback to become a “High Performing Team.” While these sessions were useful, I always ended up questioning the return on investment of these sessions.

It is natural for teams and individuals to go through periods of highs and lows. World-class sports people/teams, musicians, actors, etc. all go through periods of “high performance” or “low performance”.

So, I started wondering if it is fair to expect high performance consistently from individuals and teams.   While I would like to say why not, I do recognize that there would be moments of “Lows” and those are the times when teams would expect support from leadership and system. Hence the first thing I would like to highlight is:

High performance is an outcome, in a context and not an attribute of an individual or team.

What it means is that high-performing teams may end up not performing so high with a change in the context and configuration of the team. Teams are highly dynamic in nature; membership changes, the environment changes, and even the expectations of the external environment from the team change. Now if the teams are dynamic, so would their performance. Take the example of cricket teams around the world, the “high performing team” baton has been changing across England, Australia, New Zealand, West Indies, India, and so on.

If we google “high performing teams” one would find many models around it, talking about having shared purpose, vision, clarity of, goals, roles and responsibilities, safe environment, etc. Each one of these models has merit and they help to enhance the performance of the team, by applying these models whether the performance remains consistent is doubtful.

The aspects of team performance get impacted over a period.  For example, Patrick Lencioni’s model is about Trust, Conflicts, Commitment, Accountability, and Results as important aspects of team performance. Each one of these aspects goes through the test of time.

Trust and safety are dynamic in nature, a single statement from someone and safety goes for a toss. Trust, being the fundamental of the five, has an impact on all of the above. Similarly, Situational Leadership research tells us that Commitment varies over a period based on the monotonicity of the work or too much challenging work. As the relationship develops, the ability to hold each other accountable tends to reduce, due to fear of denting relationships.

Similarly, roles of team members change over a period without it being consciously recognized, Leadership style being dynamic also changes. With the dynamism of team membership, it becomes difficult to maintain high levels of collaboration.  The formation of subgroups of the old team members and new team members could lead to many challenges in the team.   So, attributing teams as high performing does not sound fair.

Dynamic market conditions and the great resignation only emphasize that Dynamism in teams is only increasing and will increase as we move forward.

Does it mean that an intervention is required at a regular frequency with the team to help them reflect on the aspects of these models? Yes, that could be one solution.

However, I can’t help but wonder, what if there is a way for teams to become self-managed? What if teams can adjust to the dynamicity, to the changes that come from market forces and environment within and outside? What if teams build the capacity to become resilient to the forces (external & internal) and make changes as required to continually provide the outcome expected?

Wouldn’t it be wise to focus on building teams that continuously learn, instead of focusing on teams performing high? If we focus on learning, wouldn’t performance be a consequence? Even if the performance is not best/high at a given point in time, when the team is continuously learning, the graph of performance is likely to be upward.

So how do we do it? In the next part, we will explore some aspects of a future-ready and sales-sustaining team and how to get there.

Author

Nitin Goyal

Systems and team coach.