3 Key Elements of Top Performing Teams
Andreas Obel ??
B2B Marketing Leader ?? | Mentor ?? | Father | Follow for Marketing, Leadership & Strategy
Intro: Reflect, Deconstruct, Distill.
In my years of building and scaling high-performing teams in rapid growth businesses, as well as helping other companies build and scale their own revenue-driving teams, I have had the fortunate opportunity to take part in many learning experiences.
And being the curious person I am, I always try to reflect on these opportunities. When deconstructed, you can almost always reverse-engineer the processes and distill them into actionable insights. Small nuggets of learnings if you will, accumulated from many trials and errors.
This “reflect, deconstruct, distill” approach makes it possible to extract learnings from most scenarios and over time, you begin building up a repertoire of these small cubes of distilled learnings that can be used in multiple scenarios.
This post is the results of some of those moments. Me pouring my thoughts on the key elements that make top performing teams in businesses onto a blank page.
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Patterns & The 3 elements
This post starts with an often-heard proverb:
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"
But adapted to fit high performing teams in businesses today:
"If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far AND fast, build trust.”
One of the most powerful things I’ve learned when working with these distilled elements, is to look for patterns of elements and see if certain ones are present in multiple different places or situations.
There are 3 of these that constantly show across every high performing team I’ve encountered and in varying degrees.
Teams that are built from individual high-performers but aren't encouraged to develop trust in each others’ skills and in understanding the personalities of their team-members perform VERY highly in their own specialized areas.
However, these teams are extremely volatile, have a high risk of employee churn and ultimately, are quickly outperformed by teams that master these 3 elements.
On the other hand, the teams that crush their goals and continuously raise the bar for their own work, have 3 things in common: They are all built on a foundation of trust, an open feedback culture to help them become better and a desire to grow as individuals as well as a unit.
Building a team on a foundation of open feedback and trust means that exceptional performance often comes naturally or can be achieved with very little effort.
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Defining the 3 elements:
Professional Trust is the knowledge that other people have good intentions with what they do and say. That they deliver quality work, meet deadlines and will follow through on their promises.
Fx. that they will deliver their parts of a shared project, on time and in excellent condition. You also know that if they have anything during the process that they need help with or clarification on, they will actively seek it out.
Personal Trust is the knowledge that you can share things that means something to you, both happy and sad occasions without boring people or be judged. They care.
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Fx. sharing a happy occasion like your child’s birthday, is something that lifts the mood for everyone. People might even know already and congratulate you. While on “a bad day” others will give you a little space ?and help pick up what would otherwise fall behind.
A safe space where everyone feels comfortable with getting feedback and actively seeks it out to become better in both their work and their team. This includes the manager(s). They are an essential part of making this work.
A person that feels like they are in a culturally safe environment and has trust in their team, will have a much larger comfort zone than those without and won’t be scared to step outside it. This is key for explosive growth in people as well as a step change in business.
Your next million dollar A/B test could be in the mind of the one who is afraid to speak up.
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Think Sliding Scales, Not Binary.
These elements are highly interlinked and have a compounding effect. They are also not binary in the sense of “either you have it, or you don’t” rather, they exist on a sliding scale.
The more trust there is, the less the sliding scale moves around in general, but as we are dealing with individual people with different beliefs and personal lives, the scales will always be moving a little no matter what.
An exceptionally strong team with high levels of trust, will often balance the scales by themselves very quickly and be comfortable with seeking help from a manager if needed. More importantly, they do this without any expectations or hidden agenda.
They are simply a team.
What about teams that aren’t there yet?
While "trust" is one of the most important elements of any high performing team it is also very often the one given the least thought.
I’ve seen many teams that are stuck on the 2nd step of Tuckman’s ladder (storming / conflicts), try to take control themselves, build trust and give feedback. If this is led by employees but not anchored in the managers mindset it rarely succeeds as the trust don’t get the support it needs to build.
However, if the manager prioritizes it, helps keep the team accountable and drives it WITH the team it will have a near 100% chance of success. It’s important to emphasize, that the manager should not force anything on the team but rather take part in the process themselves and lead from the front.
Your team will quickly begin to see innovation, teamwork, and challenges as exciting learning opportunities.
- This is the tipping point. The mental pivot where the magic begins to happen.
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?That proverb from before:
"If you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far AND fast, build trust.”
Trust is the foundation for the Open Feedback Culture which enables professional growth to have a compounding effect, with continuous improvement on ideas, thoughts, and experiments. Combined with a Desire for Growth people take the feedback, apply it and rapidly become more and more skilled.