How To Build a High-Performance Team

Stores are full of books on teams, teambuilding and leadership and new books are published every year. Although, each author offers a somewhat different approach and a different language, everyone seems to agree high-performance organizations produce accelerated business growth through extraordinary teamwork, independent of market and competitive circumstances.

With so much information available, what really does it take to develop a high-performance team?

Developing a high-performance organization requires transforming the way team members think and act to create action focused, commitment based teamwork. How a team thinks and acts impacts the team’s ability to collaborate, build relationships and trust, innovate, align, and manage the commitments necessary to achieve breakthrough results. How a team thinks and acts also impacts the team’s ability to achieve these results in light of the inevitable breakdowns.

So, the question becomes which is the predominant mode operating in your company, and how is it working for you? If it’s not working, here is what is needed to create a highly collaborative, innovative organization capable of producing breakthrough results.

1. Create a Vision, Build Alignment and Commitment – The creation of a team occurs when the leader declares a vision and the team is brought into existence to bring that vision into reality. Teams have to learn to interact effectively to create, speak and act on genuine commitments in order to fulfill the vision. These commitments become the basis for building alignment and powerful team relationships.

2. Focus on Producing Powerful Action – Teams learn to increase the velocity with which ideas and projects are translated into reality. High-performance teams are able to mobilize quickly, innovate faster than their competitors and execute flawlessly in pursuit of their vision.

3. Build and Manage Relationships and Trust– High-performance teams achieve higher levels of creativity, innovation, and commitment by learning to increase the level of relationship and trust among the team members. In the absence of complete trust, people have a tendency to withhold their ideas, observations or questions for fear of some negative consequence resulting from their honesty. This withholding of ideas and observations significantly impacts creative thinking, creative resolution of breakdowns, and over time, results in a significant loss of intellectual capital.

High-performance teams learn that relationships live within the context of the conversations people have, or do not have with one another. Deep trusting relationships, coupled with powerful authentic conversations, create the collaboration, commitments and the coordination of action necessary to build competitive excellence. When team members do not have a strong relationship with one another, they do not develop deep levels of trust, and they will not make the risk taking commitments necessary to truly accelerate business performance.

4. Produce Commitment Based Teamwork – High-performance teams understand and embody the specific set of commitments that are the foundation for an authentic team.

Simply stated, the basis for a solid team is not a set of techniques you can get from a book; but a set of commitments that come from the heart. These commitments generate the actions and practices that generate extraordinary teamwork and produce extraordinary results.

The commitments consistently manifested by high-performance teams include shared ownership of the vision which includes the purpose, mission and values of the team, a commitment to relationship and trust, a commitment to 100% responsibility and a commitment to full accountability for the promises each team member makes. The sense of ownership for the company, department or project will replace the automatic reaction to blame someone, and the negative mood blame creates.

5. Hold Review Meetings – High-performance teams will learn new ways of participating in review meetings to produce highly collaborative results more productively. They have to learn how to set the mood of the meeting, make overall assessments against the mission, assess the status of the promises made by the individual team members, declare and manage breakdowns, and reassess the coherence of the plan and its consistency with the mission.

6. Challenge the Creation of Breakthroughs – High-performance teams have to learn to look beyond ordinary, business as usual, performance improvements to a commitment to generate breakthroughs. When breakthroughs are seen as possible, they will begin to occur.

7. Effectively Manage Breakdowns – High-performance teams have to learn to shift problems from an occasion for complaint or distress to an opportunity to regenerate commitments and create new pathways to accomplish them. This results in a quicker return to action with renewed energy for the work, and ultimately produces accelerated rates of project fulfillment, and decreased in cycle time.

Gregg Swanson is a sales performance consultant and business coach and has authored several books and numerous articles on peak performance and creator of “Sales Strong.” Gregg specializes helping sales professionals develop mental strength for optimum sales performance. You can pick-up your complementary report, “The Most Critical Step in Sales” by going HERE. Also, pick up a copy of “The 6 Essential Factors For Business Growth” by going HERE