An Example of Effective High Team Performance

There are five characteristics of high team performance: results, commitment, process, communication and trust. In my last Insight, I discussed the mistakes that managers often make which can reduce his/her team’s performance. 

Here is an example of a company that successfully became a high-performing team: 

For the past 40 years, this family-owned retail store has catered to a niche market and is well-known in the local community. 

One of the goals of this company was to implement a more sophisticated software program that would integrate three things: accounting, inventory and point-of-sale. 

The company had been running separate programs for each task, and none of the programs communicated with the others. Having a fully-integrated system would be the expansion the company needed to move into a more sophisticated arena. 

As you can imagine, this task was pretty massive. It was going to be disruptive to the business. It was going to get in the way of their daily work in terms of sales, managing inventory and making sure that the books were balancing. All of these things still had to happen while the new software implementation was going on. 

Because of the potential for disruption and because the implementation was going to cross so many different functions within the business, there was a huge likelihood for pointing fingers and placing blame on others. 

The company pulled together a planning and implementation team with a manager from each department. The team was more of a task force team, which would be dissolved after the implementation period was complete. 

To start out, the team identified the results they needed to achieve, making sure that everybody was committed to those results. Part of the planning stage was being very clear about the importance of this piece of software to the continued growth of the business. That was key to getting people’s commitment to those goals. 

All of the team’s meetings were focused on results and the overall process. The meetings were also focused on the plan—how were they going to track their progress? What was the deadline? How would they continue the process throughout the project? 

Trust and communication were the underpinning of all of this. 

Before I came to work with the team, there had been a lack of communication because everyone was focused on their own functional areas. The team needed to avoid the potential for finger pointing and placing blame as they planned, tested and implemented the software project. So trust and communication were going to continue to be key. 

I worked with the team to improve communication skills. I taught them how to really listen and develop trustworthy behaviors. Once they had this training, what they accomplished in their meetings was very dynamic. 

As the team began working on the software project, lots of ideas were put on the table. Rather than being defensive, people were responding with, “Tell me more,” and really trying to understand the different ideas that were being put out there. Then once they had an understanding, they’d start analyzing the pros and cons of each idea to determine what was workable and what wasn’t. 

Along the way the team realized that one of the members was very quiet, but you could see his “wheels were turning.” He didn’t contribute much to the meetings, but when he did speak up, his thoughts were profound because he had really analyzed them internally. 

So the team learned that his style was to not speak until he was sure about what he was going to say. He didn’t think out loud; his thought process was completely internal. 

From this the team came to appreciate how different everyone on the team was and they began to value each other’s thoughtfulness and insights. 

It also helped them when it came time to ask questions about each idea, as team members were now less defensive and more open to different ideas and approaches. 

This team then helped increase the trust throughout the entire store by keeping in constant communication with everyone—the management team and the employees. The team included this as part of their process for integrating the new software system, that way there were no surprises and everyone was kept up-to-date. 

This software project team was clear on the results they had to achieve, they were committed to the work it would take to achieve that result and they established team processes to support the project. Their trust in each other, and the open communication among the team and the rest of the store staff, enabled them to be successful.

Here is an example of a company that became a high performing team.