What High-Performing Teams will do Differently in 2024
Managers and Leaders have a mission - to create a team capable of working in the flow - creating amazing solutions for their customers. To do that, managers must focus on building skills and capabilities and the next generation of leaders along the way.
Google and Harvard Business Review have studied what high-performing teams do differently. In this article, we will review what these studies say and, more importantly, how managers can put these ideas into practice in the rapidly changing landscape of 2023.
We know that teams and what is expected of them have gone through highs and lows of management, isolation, and revolution of technology enablement. Now we see that diverse and remote work along with changes to demographics and intergenerational teams, will continue to push the boundaries in our ways of working. But more than that, Project Managers are being asked to learn more, do more, and understand interpersonal skills more than ever before.
How can you have the skills you need to build or be a member of a team that is in the flow and sees the benefit of their efforts in promotions and raises?
Google's Insights into Team Performance
Google's People Operations department has scrutinized everything about how teams are formed and performed. Google management has had several ideas about how teams become high performing over the years - but it was just guesswork - not proven. For the past several years, Google has invested in understanding high-performing team dynamics and coming up with 5 aspects of what makes teams work.
They used data to drill down on years of academic research and their own in-house questions to discover the magic bullet.
What they found surprised them. It was not the smartest teams that did the best. It was the teams that treated each other the best.
Google conducted a two-year study and concluded that high-performing teams have five specific traits:
Psychological safety: The willingness to take risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed.
Dependability: Delivering high-quality work on time.
Structure & clarity: Clarity of goals, roles, and execution plans.
Meaning of work: The purpose of their work is important to team members.
Impact of work: Making a positive difference in the lives of others.
The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the "good" teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another.
NY Times, What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
HBR's 3 key Research Findings
1. Leaders can increase employee engagement.
It does not take a expert to see that engaged employees do better, but the question remains, how to provide the right environment that will engage your team members in a way that resonates with them.
Recognizing employees for the good work they do is a critical leadership skill – and has an impact on morale, productivity, performance, retention, and even customer satisfaction.
2. Teams that feel safe do better.
When team members feel they can ask, question, try and even fail without fear of penalties, they flourish. When people are allowed to be their authentic selves at work, they are at their best. When personal and psychological safety are protected, people can focus on what makes them great at their jobs. Managers need to do better to provide this kind of safety to their teams. Even when it means standing between their team and the corporate bullies, unreasonable customers and senior management that has no idea what it is like to be on the front lines of a project.
Psychological safety appears to help teams realize the potential of diversity for both performance and well-being.
3. Trust Matters.
Team members need to learn to have each other backs. Managers should encourage team members that help others. Learning to support each other can have long lasting impact to the teams ability to work with stress and forgive each other for mistakes. Trust is about being human at work. Managers can lead by example through trusting others and showing vulnerability, not hiding it.
The cost of inauthenticity of team members impacts the performance of diverse teams.HBR, Begin with Trust
So we may understand the secret of success in the finding from Google, HBR and others. But how, can Managers, practically, learn to build stronger teams?
The Managers Workbook to High-Performing Teams
This 18 page Workbook is free for your use. Here I will take you through some of the basics, but there is more content available on this channel to help you with other aspects of these points. Links to that content is included in the summary below.
Good managers share the message with their team and foster a sense of ownership for each team member. But great managers go one step further: they connect individual team member's contributions to the end product.
Using the Team Vision Board helps to make that connection. It also keeps focusing on the outcome of the teams within the project. And it creates a narrative so the team, customers, and visitors can see how the parts fit into the whole.
A key way to communicate purpose is storytelling, see this link for more information about how to tell a compelling business story.
When working to ensure you have set your people up for success, use the Workbook to assess:
Are the needs of the group and individuals being met?
What is the optimum approach to your way of working to get the best from everyone and let each person feel safe and have the freedom to work in a way that suits them?
What is the culture of the team, project, and organization? How is the project leveraging the diversity of the team as a strength? This is more obvious when multiple countries or cultures are involved, but think about the culture of types of people and work as well. Also, consider the impact of multi-generational teams and gender diversity. Diversity is a strength when managed well and a weakness when managed poorly.
Provide templates and strawman models to save time, but ask the team for feedback to fine-tune the details of project meetings, formats, and status collection processes. Have various team members act as advocates for parts of the process during the review so that the Project Manager can coach and advise, versus command and control. This will build on the 'people' work you have done earlier with the team.
Project Kick-offs or onboarding is key to engagement. But you can also use similar approaches during milestone meetings. Get more details on team alignment here.
Google, EuroFound, and Harvard Business Review findings all show in studies based on data that high-performing prima donnas are less valuable than teams of mid-level performers who are truly collaborative, helpful, and respectful. Use the Workbook to ensure you share the results of the team's and individual performance.
Coaching is one of the things that should be done for team members who need performance improvement and those who are high performing. This can be combined by allowing future leaders to coach others and build their leadership skills.
The Workbook has some samples of the coaching content I like to use on my projects. However, you can get my full Mentoring Workbook here.
Sometimes project staff has high visibility within their team but low visibility within the broader organization. Savvy managers know when the salary rounds are reviewed within your organization and meet with the right people to ensure their team is given a fair chance at salary increase ranking and promotion consideration.
To ensure they are coaching those that need to improve their skills or capabilities. And also coach the high-performing team members that show.
In conclusion
High Performing teams are formed with intention and insight. Managers can start to work with new teams from launch to create a path to optimum performance, but the inflight project team can also use a workshop as a reset to build a better project approach and improve personal connections.
Are you looking to launch or restart your project? What are you focusing on to enable your team? I look forward to hearing your insights and lessons learned.