It’s easy speak about the benefits of teamwork, but it is rare a group evolves into a high performance team. The reason lies in their managers focus on building the most effective relationships they can with each individual who works for them on a person by person basis. They spend their time managing individuals, instead of focusing on collective performance. In taking this approach, managers are overlooking an important management tool: the powerful influence that social dynamics in a high performance team can exert on the behaviour of its members.
What is a high performance team and what makes it potentially such a valuable tool for leadership? A team is a group of people who do collective work and are mutually committed to a common team purpose and challenging goals related to that purpose.
Collective work and mutual commitment are the key characteristics. By going beyond just cooperation and coordination, collective work produces more innovative and productive outcomes that exceed the simple sum of individual efforts. Mutual commitment means members hold themselves and each other jointly accountable for the team’s performance. They not only think and act collectively, but the social bonds among them are compelling. They share a belief that “we” (as a unit of measurement) will succeed or fail together, and that no individual can succeed while the team fails.
The powerful ties among members come first, from purpose and goals. A compelling purpose that creates a sense of doing something important together, and specific, challenging team goals based on that purpose create a sense of going someplace important together. Without purpose and goals, no group will become a team.
Team members also need clarity; about roles, about how the work is done, and about how members interact through defining their ‘rules of the game’. When all of these crucial elements are in place, groups can become high performance teams. That’s why the ability to transform a group of people into a high performance team can make you a more influential and effective manager.
