Team Lifecycle (a Transformation Made Easy toolkit)

Team Lifecycle (a Transformation made Easy toolkit)

What distinguishes a high performing team?

A high performing team knows:

1. Its purpose (why it has come together, what it needs to deliver and why that matters)
2. Who its members are (forming)
3. What its members bring to each other, their capabilities (storming)
4. What members can expect of each other, their roles and responsibilities (norming)
5. How to measure, monitor and evaluate its outputs (performing)
6. How to learn and continuously improve

The point of the team life cycle is that the forming, storming, norming and performing happens in a linear sequence. Like ground hog day, the sequence begins again from the start every time a member leaves or joins the team. Failure to realise this is why some teams find they get stuck in dysfunctional behaviour when the team membership changes -  they simply get locked into storming or norming without realising it and so fail to ever get back to the level of performance they enjoyed back in the day before the team changed and things got spoiled.

Simply recognising where a team is at in the lifecycle can be enough to help move through the lifecycle phasing – 1,2,3, 4 – in to performance (5).

Do high performing team have issues?

All teams have issues. What distinguishes teams from one another is how they deal with those issues, the attitudes and toolkits they bring to bear to problem solving.

My experience suggests that many teams who reach high performance tend to slip into steady-state performance teams. They get locked into a way of thinking that says they can only deliver with a certain set of resources, a certain size of team and a prescribed set of individual role descriptions, competencies and expertise. In essence, these team improve their output incrementally through continuous performance improvement. This means they tend to look to efficiency of output rather than effectiveness of impact to judge their performance. They tend to fight to maintain resources (including an identikit team member set) rather than to question how to release resources for other use. Somehow an assumption creeps in that their way of doing things works so can be the only way of doing things that works. They tend to fall in love with their outputs, processes and products rather than the root cause of problems. This means they may have resistances to any feedback they perceive as not validating their outputs, processes or products. They tend to say things like ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. 

What distinguishes Quantum Teams from high performance teams?

Quantum Teams share many characteristics with high performance teams. The differences occur in how they think and feel about each other, In how they approach problem solving. In their willingness to probe root causes to discover solutions that may challenge their previous ways of doing things. They use their purpose to evaluate effectiveness by impact, rather than output. This framing drives a relentless quest to raise impact for less resource. Because releasing resources in this way meets the team’s underlying sense of deeper purpose – the why are we doing this? outlook on the world.

Together, the Quantum Team holds a mindset that questions the environment or market in which the team operates in a way that allows them to change that environment or market on terms they make their own. In short, the Quantum Team does not follow the market but makes it. These are the innovating, system jumping, game changing, out-of-the-box teams. Quantum teams see thru-the-blindspot opportunities that are hidden to others. They are the teams that achieve success in conditions that construe others to failure.

But how do they do this?

The simple answer to this lies in precisely the leadership literacies they bring to bear around:        

1.  Their sense of Purpose and why this brings them together so they know:
2. Who they are (forming)
3. How they think together using their full range of diversity (storming)
4. How they behave and create trust and inclusion together (norming)
5. Why they do what they do and how it matters to them (performing)
6. How they feel about what they do and why each other matters to them, realised through anticipating how it will feel when the team disbands (mourning)
7. How to rebalance immediately through every team reset (morning! to mourning)  

This is really basic, fundamental stuff with nothing new in any particular part of it. My only contribution is to say there is an approach to processing the team lifecycle to make a Quantum outcome reliably Easy. In summary this is about using the leadership toolkits and literacies of:

• Trust building (Johari)
• Dialogue (Sharma)
• Storytelling (Downing)
• Emotion (Kemp – derived from my own observation)

I explore these process steps, toolkits and literacies in detail elsewhere.

Please let me know any feedback you may have and if you wish me to publish more Transformation Made Easy here.

[email protected]; [email protected]; www.leadershipquantum.com; www.23degreesn.com