There are Five Characteristics of High Team Performance

High team-performance can serve to help employees regain the work-life balance they so desperately yearn for.

If you think back to high school, you’ll probably remember working on a group project at some point, maybe in a Social Studies or English class. Everyone had a different part of the project assigned to them, such as doing research, putting presentation materials together, or typing up final documents. Many times one of the people assigned to the project said they were going to do something, but then dragged their feet and didn’t get it done. So the other members of the group had to step in and do that person’s part.

Because of the one person who really wasn’t a high-performing team member, the rest of the group ended up working harder, working longer and taking on more of the load than they needed to.

I think this same thing happens in the workplace as well. Sometimes we are on a team that is not high performing and we end up covering the work of the under-performing team members. Being adults, employees don’t always want to run to their managers or supervisors and say, “Sally isn’t doing what she’s supposed to be doing,” because they don’t want to be seen as tattletales. Instead, a couple of the employees on the team pick up the tasks the under-performers’ were supposed to do and end up:

• Coming in early;
• Staying later;
• Taking work home;
• Getting resentful of the under-performers; and
• Getting stressed out;

All of which affects work-life balance.

There are five characteristics of high team-performance. It doesn’t matter what kind of a team you’re on, all team members need to have all five of these characteristics, otherwise you run into the “high school slacker” situation.

The five characteristics are:

1. Results—This is the number one characteristic of high team-performance. In order to have this characteristic, a team must ask itself: What are we on this team to accomplish? What’s our purpose for being a team? What’s the goal that we have to achieve? What does that goal have to look like in order to say we achieved it? How are we going to achieve it?
   
   In order to achieve results, a team must understand and accept the goal they’re working toward, and get there by doing regular reviews, evaluating how things are going and how each team member is doing. To keep up morale, teams should also celebrate progress toward the results.
   
   
2. Commitment—This means everyone on the team not only understands the goal, but is also committed to achieving it. This includes committing time and attention to what it will take to help the team achieve those results. To support commitment, there may be some ground rules about how the team operates, such as: How do we handle disagreement in process or tools? How do we make decisions? Is it a majority vote? Is it a consensus? If we can’t all come to an agreement, does the team leader have final say?
   
   Also, because everyone will be seeing things from a slightly different perspective, it’s important to share what’s going on with each team member’s part of the project. This helps keep everyone committed to the goal.
   
   
3. Process—Creating a process for getting things done will make everything go a lot smoother. Questions that need to be answered in order to create a process include: Who does what? What role does each person have? What is each team member accountable for? How is the project going to get done? How should each person share their knowledge? How should everyone share the information that’s pertinent to the project? How is the team going to document the progress of the project, especially if the project is going to be an annual occurrence?
   
   When documenting the progress, you’ll want to figure out: How are meetings going to be conducted? Who’s going to chair them? Will there be an agenda? What kinds of items have to be scheduled? Should the team meet face-to-face or are virtual meetings OK? Do all team members need to be at all meetings?
   
   All of these processes will help the team figure out how to stay committed to the project and achieve results. Everyone also needs to be committed to the processes and improving the processes as new insights are discovered along the way.

In my next Insight, I’ll detail the final two characteristics of high team performance and also include some commonly made mistakes. 

High team-performance can serve to help employees regain the work-life balance they so desperately yearn for.