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Taking Your Team From Good to Great
Posted on 10/17/2011 at 08:00 am
If you’ve built strong team fundamentals, you can take your team to new levels of peak performance by implementing advanced team development strategies.
But, first, let me issue a HUGE DISCLAIMER!
Do NOT try to do these strategies without first making sure your team has the fundamentals in place (goals, roles, processes, and operating agreements).
In short, they will backfire. Employees who face real structural problems in their day-to-day-work will view the following interventions with cynicism at best and possibly even outright hostility.
On the other hand, teams that have a solid base and generally operate well can kick it into high-gear with the following strategies.
(Link: If you want to review the team fundamentals, click here)
Know Thy Strengths
When a team has a high degree of trust, they can talk about individual and team strengths in a genuine and productive way. Specifically, when individuals trust each other enough to share candidly their strengths and weaknesses, the team can begin to organize work around these strengths and weaknesses. Just as companies specialize to harness comparative advantages, team members can specialize to elevate team performance to a whole new level. In addition, when new work arises, the question of delegation can be decided, in part, by asking, “Whose strengths does this align with?” For more on Strengths, check out Strengthsfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath and Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham.
(Follow up Disclaimer: Don’t try this if your team doesn’t trust each other. Talking about strengths in teams with low trust and unclear goals, roles, and processes leads to accusations of narcissism (“he’s not really good at that”) and accusations of laziness (“she only wants to work on what she’s good at, and won’t help us out”) To improve trust on a team, skip the typical “trust building” exercises. Go back to fundamentals and focus on making clear commitments and keeping them. More than anything, keeping commitments builds trust.)
Use Advanced Personality Assessments
You can find a plethora of insight-provoking personality assessments on the market. In fact, there are over 2000 of them available. Most people have heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, although other prominent ones include the Hogan, the Workplace Big 5 Profile, the Conflict Dynamics Profile, the Emotional Intelligence Inventory (EQi), and many more. When delivered by a trained facilitator, these assessments can help an average team get better by applying insights about personality to work results.
(Huge Follow-Up Disclaimer: Attempting to use a personality assessment to fix poor team performance is the classic team “band aid.” Understanding each other better can improve team performance, but it will not help the team long term if there are fundamental team structures that aren’t working. Fix those first.)
Action Learning
Action Learning involves having your team tackle a real work problem AND deliberately build leadership skills in the process. Here’s how this might work: Your team meets every week to work a problem. With the help of a facilitator, at the beginning of the session each team member clarifies the leadership skill they want to work on during the session (listening, asking good questions, problem solving, etc). During the session, the facilitator stops the meeting to ask participants, “How are you doing individually? How are you doing as a group?” The facilitator then coaches the participants in real-time. The benefit of this is that by debriefing during the process, teams can generate amazing amounts of out-of-the-box thinking. And, by learning in real-time, leaders build leadership skills and get feedback much more quickly than in traditional classroom settings.
Empowerment
The word empowerment gets thrown around in fad management books all the time, but what does it actually mean? In short, it means helping employees take ownership for results. The first step is having the team fundamentals in place – goals, roles, processes, and operating agreements. Once you have those clearly defined, articulate your philosophy of empowerment to employees. When doing so, it’s helpful to also clarify the boundaries. This might seem counter-intuitive and may seem to prevent “out-of-the-box thinking.” But, when you clarify general parameters but make it clear employees can get creative within them, employees feel like they have room to be creative – without the anxiety that comes with total uncertainty of what you’re looking for (i.e. “I might waste my time doing something the boss isn’t going to like or doesn’t care about.”)
Give them the parameters of what you’re looking for, and give them room to run within that.
As you seek to empower your employees it’s also helpful to push all decision making authority down to the lowest possible levels. And, train your employees to make decisions. If you can learn to coach your employees when they come to you asking for a decision, instead of simply making a decision yourself, you can help them grow their sphere of accountability. A great resource for learning to coach employees is Quiet Leadership by David Rock.
Other Team Activities and Adventures
Outdoor adventures, ropes courses, and other team building initiatives get a bad reputation. People frequently complain they “don’t work” or are a “waste of time.” And, they are – if your team does not have the fundamentals in place. If the goals, roles, processes, or interpersonal operating agreements aren’t clear, your team will quickly return to its old problems after an outdoor or out-of-the-box adventure
But, with a solid foundation, getting out of the office for a little fun and adventure is worth the time and money. It helps team members achieve an even greater level of coordination, celebrate together, and, if you’re working with a skilled facilitator, generate insights about team performance that can help take you to the next level.
In sum, taking a team from “good to great” is where it really gets fun. Performance can improve dramatically, and the interventions used to do that are the more “sexy” type of interventions. However, be careful, attempting these in the absence of solid fundamentals will waste time, money, and good will from your team members.
So, be deliberate. First get your team to good. Then, and only then, work to take them from good to great.
- Adam Chalker, Senior Consultant
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