Overcoming Poor Leadership & Transforming Groups into Teams

What are the organisational impacts of low employee engagement? How is organisational success effected by lack of true team behaviour? This is a topic in this week's Gallup newsletter, which highlights that disengaged employees outnumber engaged employees by 2 to 1.

The cause? Poor leadership.

There is more than a semantic difference between 'teams' and 'groups'. In organisations, optimal teams perform better than high-functioning groups, and true teams consist of skilled leaders and more engaged employees, ensuring that talent turnover within companies is statistically lower.

High-performance mandates consistent, authentic leaders with a broad set of interpersonal as well as managerial skills. The era of the transactional leaders is gone.

The truth is that most people have never been on a team, however, every elite performer - from scientist to sportsperson - understands just how functionally superior a team is from a group - often by virtue of being beaten by one. 

Being able to recognise the group/team difference and understand how to play one's part in building a team dynamic is a mark of an elite player. As a leader, the ability to examine the unique attributes of your people and transform them from a group of elite individuals into high-functioning team is a near Jedi-level of expertise - as rare as it is powerful.

High-performance mandates consistent, authentic leaders with a broad set of interpersonal as well as managerial skills. The era of the transactional leaders is gone.

Contemporary leaders need an ability to articulate and role model what authentic leadership looks like and without the insecurity of autocracy. They must be able to explain how each person within an organisation plays a part in attaining shared goals and create a sense of individual agency where each person feels responsible - by virtue of membership, not title - for leadership of their organisation at every level.

There is science-lead methodology available for helping leaders improve, and for converting groups into teams. This is what we do with our Anatomy of a Team workshop. It forms part of our High-Performance Ecosystem suite of interventions.

Engagement and high performance are the outcomes that result when people achieve optimal functioning at work, both individually and in collaborations that may be ad hoc or ongoing. However high performance, like all energetic activities, relies on catalysts to spark progress and a substrate to allow success to flourish.

This isn't about 'trust falls' and New Age-style team building. It's about performance and organisational success.

To find out more about the array of leadership development services offered by Amaechi Performance Systems, visit our website.