The secrets of high-performing teams
When thinking of high-performing teams, elite sports people like Australian Rules footballers or soccer players usually spring to mind.
However, high performance is equally important to teams within corporations if these businesses are to thrive in complex operating environments.
Unfortunately, there are key factors holding many teams back and preventing them from performing at their best. So, what are the main stumbling blocks?
Based on its work with hundreds of teams across the globe, software platform Squadify has identified the following top challenges facing teams today:
- Pressure to perform in economically-challenging times
- Workplace loneliness
- Disruption caused by restructures, downsizing and job insecurity
- A shift for many to hybrid working conditions.
“Generally, more is expected to be delivered with fewer resources and often in a shorter time frame,” says Squadify Co-Founder and CEO and Monash Business School Associate Pia Lee.
“These challenges are felt across the breadth and depth of organisations, from executive teams to the frontline,” Ms Lee says.
Squadify combines data, dialogue and development to help teams better connect and perform. It continuously pinpoints conditions within a team to focus on and improve performance.
Ms Lee says another key aspect that holds many teams back is the act of “masquerading as a team”.
“They operate more as a group of individuals, often focused on delivering individual, not collective, KPIs,” she says
“This is particularly prevalent within senior and executive leadership teams, where being a ‘functional-first’ leader inhibits proactive collaboration at an enterprise level. The team hasn’t defined its common purpose or goal, as team meetings are often ‘reporting sessions’ on functional outputs, and there is little interaction outside of meetings between team members.”
This can cause a breakdown in communication, trust and collaboration, Ms Lee says, that is further exacerbated by external factors such as economic downturns, pressure to perform and restructuring. The results can be low engagement, ‘quiet quitting’ or even burnout.”
“The potential to leverage the collective capacity, known often as collective intelligence, of the team to innovate, adapt and execute together is lost,” Ms Lee says.
So in today’s challenging operating landscape, what are the secrets of high-performing teams? And how do the best teams set themselves apart?
Squadify began its work in this space five years ago, through a research partnership with the London School of Economics that sought to academically validate the key conditions that drive success in teams.
These conditions are:
- Clarity: How well a team understands what it is trying to achieve and why, and how it will deliver the outcomes and the interdependencies across team members to achieve it.
- Climate: Team processes, resources, collaboration, culture and managing stakeholder relationships.
- Competence: Collaborative behaviours, constructive mindset and skills within the team.
“Clarity and climate were identified as the key drivers of team success, more so than competence,” Ms Lee says.
“Importantly too, the collective process to deliver as a star team is more effective for performance than relying on individual star players.”
Squadify later conducted a statistical analysis of its data to identify which conditions were the most highly correlated with their key performance measures (quality of work; responsiveness to customer needs; and meeting budgets and deadlines).
The following six were found to be the top drivers of performance:
- Understanding how to work together (Clarity)
- Including the customer voice in team plans (Clarity)
- Proactively supporting others in the business (Climate)
- The team reflecting together to learn (Climate)
- Effective team execution (Climate)
- Delivering against commitments (Competence).
How can you turn a poorly-performing team around?
If you know your team isn’t functioning well, Ms Lee says there key steps teams can take to achieve a turnaround are:
- Get continuous data on team health, so that everyone has a say and can focus on the ‘main thing’ together.
- Create a common goal – one that will be achieved together.
- Create interdependencies between team members in achieving the goal through personal interconnections.
- Build psychological safety through reflecting together and hearing all voices, and through all members demonstrating their openness to learning.
A case study
A senior leadership team in a multinational manufacturer was struggling with deep trust issues and low performance. They used Squadify’s Team Tracker tool three times over five months to gain data, as well as coaching to support improvement.
Ms Lee says Squadify pinpointed clarity as the true issue within the team, and its members began working toward clarifying their vision (goals and purpose) together, developing strong intra-team dynamics to build collective performance.
After five months, the key gaps between what the team considered was important versus what was present in the team were reduced by 49 per cent. Tension resolution, goal achievability, delivery of commitments, clear measures of success, trust and psychological safety all improved.
As Ms Lee concludes: “Being able to diagnose where the biggest gaps are between what is important and what is present in the team is critically important.”
As the team’s goals and challenges change over time, Squadify is at their side to help them efficiently target the areas that will have the most impact.
Did you know that Squadify is a service we can integrate into Monash Corporate Education’s tailored and customised learning programs? Squadify helps us support our clients’ desired outcomes by providing valuable data insights.