5 core KPI's of high performance teams

The concept of "high performance" is used to refer to the highest individual or collective performance, in a sports, professional, business or organizational context, where the people involved are in continuous search of excellence, of the highest potential, deploying their talents and putting them at the service of the team.

Everyone has read and the bibliography speaks fundamentally of the clarity of goals, the quality of the skills and knowledge of these members and fundamentally the sense or purpose that aligns them. But I believe that the concept of high performance teams today transcends these definitions.

I recommend three excellent books for those who want to investigate, study and learn about these new concepts, being the one by Giesenow Carlos the best for me:

·???????No Rules, Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Reed Hasting & Erin Meyer).

·???????Extreme Teams (Robert Bruce Shaw)

·???????Psychology of Sports Teams (Carlos Giesenow)

But what really interests me is to share my appreciations and attributes of high performance teams based on my experience playing basketball for 25 years integrating many high performance teams, working for 7 years as a sports psychologist in high performance teams and professional teams in soccer, basketball, field hockey and motorsports among other sports, and finally based on my experience advising companies, teams and managers since 2016 to date.

For me a high performance team and of course its members have beyond their talents put at the service of a goals, objectives, desires and purposes, 5 key skills that make them belong to the much applauded concept of High Performance Teams. These elements are:

1.?????Challenge to talent

2.?????Humility in learning

3.?????Pursuit of excellence from enjoyment

4.?????Honesty and role identity

5.?????Mental strength

"high-performing teams combine these elements by naturally interrelating them in a continuum of collective experience and intelligence in a systemic and dynamic way."

Challenging talent: the members are so demanding and humble that they can challenge both their own talent and that of their colleagues without reaching the point of conflict or difference with the other. And if there is such a difference, they resolve it in a natural and healthy way. The demand is self to then be directed to the rest. Without self-demand there is no true and sustainable genuine collective demand. The challenge to talent leads to a continuum of improvement, preparation, performance and results that when achieved in a collective there is no ceiling for that team, when the members have understood that if they challenge themselves while their peers are in the same movie, they achieve such a powerful demand as a team that they stop depending on the external demand or challenge. They are members and teams that manage to focus and control what is controllable, that is, to manage all the resources that depend on them for their improvement aspects.

Humility in learning: I know of no wiser person than a talented person who wants to continue learning, creating a permeable layer between his skin and that of the people around him to continue absorbing learning, experiences and materialization of those mastery skills that can always be perfected. The capacity of a person to grow, to know and to do from humility has no limits. High-performance athletes and entrepreneurs who practice humility in learning are grateful, silent, learn and use everything they perceive from effectiveness, but they are also supportive of knowledge. They undress and show their talent as they are. They hold nothing back. Do you believe that Messi plays better soccer in his backyard or do you believe that Steve Jobs was a genius and shared his ideas with his mirror when he was at home? High performing people and teams are prepared and programmed to share talent, challenge talent and SHARE talent by learning from each other and others.

Search for excellence from enjoyment: enjoyment is the greatest experience and satisfaction that, for me, exists in high performance. The face of effort, suffering, pain, fatigue, stress, wear and tear, confusion, joy, calm, satisfaction, and many other emotions that we can observe in a high performance sports or business team at key moments is impressive. Some people and authors believe that enjoyment is "happiness", having a good time, being relaxed and throwing papers in the air. But excellence from enjoyment is to LOVE THE COMPETITION. To love the competition is to feel the body that is tense, to feel the privilege of pressure, to know that the stomach is closing and to know that all these and some others are manifestations of a state of alertness but of active enjoyment. No professional soccer game or any high performance sport shows the players laughing all the time as if they were at a picnic. No person who works in a company that aims at high performance would say that in their company they are laughing, jumping and partying all day long as if it were New Year's every day. Excellence is enjoyed with the three elements mentioned above: challenging talent, learning from humility and demanding from enjoyment. High performers ENJOY the road to excellence, which is a great DEMAND.

Honesty and role identity: High-performing individuals and teams identify with their roles, they are honest with themselves, they do not play at being something else. A high performing physician is so humble, skilled and demanding that he focuses on being so capable at being a physician that he is not worried about being the best hospital director or the best anesthesiologist in the operating room, he TRUSTS and IDENTIFIES with his role and has an efficient humility because in the best of cases he has created or is part of a high performance team in healthcare. A high performance basketball player does not worry about being the coach, or whether the team's kinesiologist is doing his job well. This player identifies with his role, he knows that he is important for his team, and if the team is a high performance team EVERYONE will know that their roles are fundamental and by putting their talents at the service of the team and occupying their positions RESPONSIBLY (ability to respond to internal and external demands) they will be able to achieve high performance results. In high performance teams, honesty and role identity is the fundamental piece to achieve important things. It is the glue and it is what makes team members really COMMIT. More than 80% of high-performance teams have members who are very clear and practice this identity based on honesty.

Mental Strength: the skill that I most admire and observe in teams and their members, and I think it is the one that is least worked. I humbly believe that it is not worked for two reasons: one because to work it you have to be a psychologist or know a lot about the psychology of the human being, and the second reason is because you have to invest time, and generally companies or sports teams want immediate results (fantasy). Here is the success of some superficial practices with no sustainability. Mental toughness is the skill that I have worked on the most throughout my experience with high performance athletes, high performance coaches and teams, high performance companies and teams and some other institutions or people that pretend or pretend to achieve high performance.

To work on mental toughness you must first work on the previous points and prepare the team. The preparation is NEVER linear, it is rather circular or in the form of an ascending loop, when you think you are falling you are actually going up. Mental toughness is trained but first you must know its elements so that each member knows where and how he/she is. Then go to the team to train the mental strength of the same looking to be a high performance team. Imagine the work to be done when you want to create a high performance company. It is to apply all this process but to the whole company, whether it is 15 or 1000 employees. It is all within a mental toughness training plan. How do you train?

Later I will write another specific article on mental toughness, but you should know that mental toughness is composed of 5 fundamental elements and you have to pull them for a professional, team or company to be really high performance, without a correct training of mental toughness there will be no sustainability of performance. There will be performance peaks or mainly talent leaks... sounds familiar, doesn't it? Companies today are realizing that the leakage is not because of the money, the offices or their business models. The leakage is because they have failed to align organizational strengths with people's mental/personal strengths. You should know that when we work on strengths we also work on their polarity, the weaknesses. That is why you have to be a psychologist and have a lot of experience in working with people and mental strengths/weaknesses.

The elements of mental toughness are:

·???????SELF-KNOWLEDGE

·???????SELF-CONTROL

·???????SELF-MOTIVATION

·???????SELF-CONFIDENCE

·???????COPING STRATEGIES TO CHALLENGES

Undoubtedly one of the most interesting and important skills for individuals, teams and companies to be High Performance. For some totally unknown or for others totally known, but the most relevant thing is that there is a training method for mental toughness and the other points for teams to really become HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAMS.

To say goodbye, I leave you with the question and game for you to self-assess yourselves on the elements of High Performance. If your scores are above 80% you are excellent and stay that way, if they are between 60% and 80% you need to reinforce the skills training, and if they are below 60% you need to start a plan right now to turn the company or the teams into high performance.

·???????Challenge to talent 2 points

·???????Humility in learning 2 points

·???????Pursuit of excellence through enjoyment 2 points

·???????Honesty and role identity 2 points

·???????Mental strength 2 points

Total score: ...................(according to your score you will know what to do)

"making the decision is not about thinking, it is about taking action and enjoying the process..."

What are you going to do with your company or team?

Diego Scaraffia: Expert in High Performance Teams | Business Psychologist | Builder of High Performance Business Teams | Strategic HR Business Partner