Tools for High-Performance Teams

What are the tools we should prescribe or seek for when we coach the team members?

We need to be ready and identify and recommend all these tools which can make the team better.

Every high-performance team coaching, whenever we come across for such assignment, list down, and validate if the tools we are building/”known to you” are also aligning or anything we require to add or delete in our list.

Every great doctor or engineers require to identify the tools which can enhance their performance & productivity by employing those tools based on the situation. All these tools are enablers for the professionals. The coach needs to recommend such tools for the team to ensure high-performance ambient created and sustained.

Every high-performance team will have below areas to be highly polished and developed.

For these areas to be developed we need to have tools ( Soft or hard)

a) Shared Purpose

b) Motivated individuals

c) Trust

d) Empathy

e) Committed team members

f) Accountability

g) Winning attitude

h) Diversity

i) Leadership style

j) Required Skills and Knowledge

k) Role clarity

l) Respect for each other

There are many more, these are vital few. To strengthen all these areas, what are the tools which can empower the team members? We require to look after it.

List of tools (Hard and Soft)

1. Guidelines for everything ( Working agreement ): Team members need to know what to be done, by whom at various circumstances. And continuously refine these guideline documents. If there is any ambiguity, the same should be clarified by the mentors. The wisdom needs to mature every iteration.

2. Open communication - All team members should be able to express everything with any team members. All the concerns, feeling, need to be communicated, and sort out any issues by open discussion. Leaders need to oblige people to share a discussion on many platforms. All communication should be as transparent as possible.

3. Questioning: All the team members should be trained to ask better questions. Should be granted to ask questions. Ensure there are psychological safety has been maintained at the team level where team members can able to ask the legitimate questions and coach the team members to assure they are bringing their heart and mind out.

4. Pride & Shared Identity: Create and ensure the team feels pride by working in the present setup. Every individual from team members should be able to recognize those proud feelings. Use all possible social media tools to express your team and team members within the organization and outside of the organization. Use a great branding mechanism to whatever good duty team members are exercising.

5. Check your team biases: All the team members to reflect different biases exhibited during a time frame. Please alter if require. Train the team members for unconscious biases and help them to combat those.

6. Go out for a formal important meeting outside of the office or informal team discussion outing and get together team activity: These are the platforms where we appreciate each other at a deeper level. We understand each other better. Most of the time, team members calculate financial aspects, but such meeting has long-lasting impacts.

7. Use all the tools to ensure visual management practices are applied. All team members should able to discover what is going on in the product and solution development. Decision-making happening based on the data and facts. All team members are on top of everything. All team members can visually see who is doing what, and how well all the team members are engaged.

8. Clear Organizational Goal and Clear Team goal capture, communicated, and understood by the team members. This goal is written in the tool and revised, reviewed, and refined based on the changing needs and demands. It will help all the team members to be on top of clarity. The goal should inspire team members to find their purpose.

9. Employee reward and recognition policy: Ensure at the organization level and team level there is a healthy competition to become better. To enable each other to become better. There is a competition in the system for excellence. And leadership acknowledging that development. Acknowledge team members who have demonstrated continuous improvement traits. Acknowledge teams demonstrated continuous improvement traits.

10: Feedback collection system and platform; There are platforms established for all the team members to exchange feedback for the improvement. There is a connection among employees where they can exchange their concern, improvement points and all these are formally or informally capture in the system.

11. Leadership: A strong modern leadership that ensures all these carbon bonds are connected properly for the common purpose where team members are continuously raising high to contribute to the bigger value generation.

12: Organizational Support system: There is a constant support system into the ecosystem which harmonizes all the forces, positive and negative through continuous inspection and adaptation mechanism. All the team members get all the assistance required to raise a high performance. There are constant inspection and evaluation mechanism to bring out the best from all the individuals.

I am sure all of us most of these, and most of the organizations have such a system! Then, what is missing? The rigor needs to be there to ensure, all these cogs in the system are well greased and running synchronously for forwarding directions...