Building High-Performing Teams

A high-performance team is a group of goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate, and produce consistently superior results.?

High-performing teams showcase certain characteristics, and leaders need to be aware of such qualities and try to instill them in their teams.?

The 7 characteristics of high-performing teams are:

• Purpose and values
• Empowerment
• Relationship and communication
• Flexibility
• Optimal productivity
• Recognition and appreciation
• Morale

An organization needs to make all the employees understand the ”why” and “how” of their organization so that everyone shares a common goal.

A high-performing team is highly dependent on the leader that leads them. The leader not only needs to make sure that tasks are delegated properly, and completed within deadlines, but they also need to understand, motivate, and train their team to create a high-performing team.?

A leader must observe various elements in their team. Only through observation can the leader engage in proper feedback with the team members which is necessary for any team to emerge as a high-performing team. A leader must observe the following in a team:

• Participants: Who are low or high performing and if there’s a change in participation
• Influencer: Which team member is listened to or ignored or interrupts
• Group climate: tone of the meeting, did it change at any point in a meeting, how and when
• Membership: who’s an outsider, is there a subgroup, are there any physically present but mentally absent members
• Task functions: initiative, information seeking, clarifying, consensus testing

The leader must also engage in SMART — Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound goal setting.

Once these parameters are in check, their team will grow significantly.?

The leader then has to engage in certain responsibilities to convert the well-geared team into a high-performing team. These include:

• Having regular one-on-one sessions with members
• Conducting performance reviews throughout the year
• Avoiding surprises
• Focusing performance development on development
• Listening to the team members
• Adhering to timelines
• Encouraging reverse feedback
• Scheduling formal feedback sessions

After fulfilling these responsibilities, they must ask the team members questions that should be further considered for the team’s overall growth.?

This could include questions regarding what values the leader can provide to the team member’s growth or, what did the team member look forward to in the next 3 months, etc. These questions could be asked as part of the one-on-one sessions and the objective here is to initiate independent thinking in the team members which helps establish trust in the relationship between leaders and team members.

In most corporate structures, performance reviews are a must. The focus of such reviews should always be the achievement of goals — as in did the team member achieve the goal or not or did they exceeded the goal. Another important aspect should be to understand the potential of the employee and whether they can align with the organization’s goals and values. There are certain parameters to measure the potential of a person and to measure their performance and then review the employee based on these parameters.

The 9 Box Model fits this purpose perfectly.?

The advantages of 9 Box Model -?

• It helps the leader identify his/her successor
• Allows easy assessment on two dimensions — performance and potential
• Encourages multiple perspectives for a better assessment of team members

Here are some example behaviors of how to identify team members and the box they fit in!

According to Gopalakrishnan Subramanian, a leading life coach at Enabling Ventures Private Limited, another key requirement for creating a high-performance team is an environment where the team members collaborate freely, ideate ideally, and can work holistically.?

At 2gethr, our priority of creating workspaces that cater to the end-to-end user experience throughout the day, allows us to build workspaces that promote highly motivated and productive teams.?