Is Your Team Performing At Their Highest Potential?

It’s rare that leaders get to form their leadership team from scratch. More often than not, leaders inherit a team, with all of its history and habits. The team may already work quite well together. They may not be a high performing team, however, and that’s what leaders want.  Often an outside consultant can help make the transition or assist in defining areas to increase performance.

There are two key steps to improve performance:

1. Diagnose the current performance and assess whether the performance is a result of team or individual dynamics and/or how they accomplish tasks together, and,

2. Develop the capacity of the team to work together effectively, and perform the tasks required of the team.

Here is an example of how this approach works. I had been called in to help a new leader who had come into the senior position in his company. His leadership team was not performing at the level he felt was necessary to lead the organization. It was critical the team improve because the organization was going through a significant change. Each member of his leadership team came to the meeting as the head of their respective department, rather than as co-leaders of the organization. The discussions were bogged down with the particular interests of each part of the business, rather than with the business as a whole. They needed to be working on the strategic direction of the company, not just on how the organization was functioning in their silo.

So he explained what he needed and resolved to get there. This meant bringing the team on board to help define what exactly that meant, and discussing what behaviours would help reach that goal. Over the course of 6 months they improved their performance significantly, and, more critically, they became self-correcting. At the end of every meeting the team would assess whether they had the right conversations, whether they were operating at the right level, and whether everyone was taking co-responsibility for the outcome.

Diagnosis

When a leader first takes over a team it’s important to observe it with fresh eyes. The leader has to analyze how the team performs, and discover what the root cause of any problem is. Under performance can come from problems in the team dynamic, the tasks they execute, or both.

Problems in the team dynamic might be members who dominate, keeping other members from contributing. Conflict is a common problem that harms the team’s ability to work together. Task dysfunction refers to problems with the way the team accomplishes normal tasks that are not a result of dynamic problems. A task level problem might be the way the team makes decisions. They might lack a means of making a decision, or they could have a single decision-making model they use for every decision, whether appropriate or not. Consensus can be an effective decision-making model, but it can be overused.

Develop Capability

Once the leader has a firm grasp what’s holding the team back, he or she can step in to help improve the team’s performance. The four steps necessary are as follows:

• Clearly Articulate Expectations. The leader has to declare what is expected of the team both in terms of expectations for output and how it conducts itself. The leader explains the behaviours that are required for the team to succeed. The leader may also specify the kind of behaviour he or she does not want to see.

• Get A Commitment From Everyone. Every individual team member must accept their role in affecting change, and acknowledge the purpose of the team is to work together to be successful. If team members are unwilling to work for the success of the organization, they shouldn’t be in the organization.

• Address Dynamic Issues. Where there are problems with the dynamic, the leader has to decide to address them as a team, as a smaller group, or with an individual. Bringing the whole team on board to help address problems brings them into the process and lets them learn to self-correct. If some team members are dominating the team, bringing it to the attention of the team and discussing it can help everyone see how it is hurting productivity. Sometimes, individuals who are in conflict, dominating meetings, or being too quiet, can be taken aside. At other times, it may be necessary to work with an individual who is initiating conflict, or refusing to work with others.

• Address Task Issues. Task issues are usually a matter of educating the team in alternate means of accomplishing a task. For a team having trouble making decisions, they may need to learn new ways of making decisions, and learn when it is appropriate to use a model like consensus, and when that model is not appropriate.