Effective Team Collaboration – Cultivating High-Performance Teamwork
Effective Team Collaboration – Cultivating High-Performance Teamwork
Let me ask you… how would you describe a high-performance culture or team? Better yet, how would you go about creating one? And, if you’ve followed all the usual best practices out there, but feel your team still isn’t reaching its fullest potential, what else is possible?
A high-performance culture or team is one that works exceptionally well together, is highly focused, achieves results, easily overcomes challenges, adapts with ease, and has a profoundly positive impact on the overall organization.
It’s the kind of team or culture that organizations dream of having. Yet, it isn’t that common for people to experience, and it can be incredibly challenging to cultivate one. Why is that? What can you do differently? How can you shift your organizational culture so that high-performing teams are the norm for your organization?
In this article, we’ll explore:
- 4 basic elements of high-performance teams
- The 7 (+1) C’s of successful team collaboration
- 8 practices for developing and sustaining high-performance work teams
4 Basic Elements of High-Performance Teams
There’s so much involved in the makeup of a really strong team, and each one will be different because every project, organization and industry is different. At a very high level, we can identify 4 basic, or foundational elements that high-performance teams have:
- The necessary skills and expertise for the project
- A goal-focused mindset
- The skills to work well together
- Full support of leadership
Those last two aren’t talked about enough, yet they are core to making high-performance possible on a wide scale. It’s because of those last two that conversations around high-performance teams must include organizational culture, and must include an honest assessment of your leadership and/or executive team.
The 7 (+1) C’s of Successful Team Collaboration
In Teams That Work: The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness (on Amazon), authors Scott Tannenbaum and Eduardo Salas outline seven research-backed elements of successful teams. These 7 elements have been widely adopted as a blueprint for high-performing teams and are commonly referred to as “the 7 C’s.”
Those elements are:
- Capability – The unique and diverse set of skills, talents, knowledge bases, and experiences that make up the team.
- Cooperation – Supporting each other in achieving individual goals, in order to achieve shared goals and objectives.
- Coordination – Management of tasks, time and resources.
- Communication – Knowing how to communicate WELL, and the ability to put that knowledge into action.
- Cognition – The ability to use capability collectively – i.e. using the collective knowledge and experience of the group to problem-solve and make decisions.
- Coaching – The ability of leadership to bring out the best in individual team members, nurture growth, set the right tone and cultivate a supportive team environment.
- Conditions – The overall working conditions including the physical space, access to technology and other resources, supportive teams such as HR, employee wellbeing, overall culture, etc.
We’re also going to add a bonus element, which isn’t a C, but we’re going to take function over form:
BONUS: Psychological safety – How safe it is for people to drop their self-protective masks and bring their full strength and potential forward.
You could argue that psychological safety is an element of conditions and you wouldn’t be wrong. However…
- Given what we know about people’s experiences navigating the world;
- Knowing that so many people still do not have this in their workplaces;
- Knowing the undeniable benefits of psychological safety, diversity and inclusion in teamwork;
- As well as the negative impacts of an unsafe workplace…
We feel strongly that this needs to be a standout element when discussing how to make high-performing teams and culture possible within an organization. No matter what other elements you work on, without psychological safety, people can’t be their best, or be their best for those around them.
These 7 + 1 elements provide the ideal setting for people to recognize and embrace their fullest potential, and to drop any self-limiting behaviors or beliefs that may be holding them back. When you achieve that on an individual level, and combine it with supportive and co-creative leadership, magic happens.
Cultivating all 8 elements may seem daunting. Thankfully, there are practices you can put into place that touch on multiple elements at a time.
Let’s say you’ve worked on developing all of these elements. Most importantly, you’ve also worked on yourself and the impact you’re having. You feel you’ve made good strides as an executive or organization, but… those high-performing teams just aren’t happening!
What else can you do? What else might be possible? What can you do differently to achieve different results?
8 Practices for Developing and Sustaining High-Performance Work Teams
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Get the wrong people off the bus.
Rarely do we kick things off with something negative, but as this article discusses, the impact of just one toxic employee can be far reaching, and has the potential to derail an otherwise awesome team. If you have someone who is truly and consistently toxic, regardless of their expertise, remove them from the team. That doesn’t always mean termination, but do your best to get them out of the impacted team, and ideally into a role or situation where they will have the support and resources to turn their toxicity around.
To ensure you’re making the best possible hires and promotions in the future, you may consider a tool like Hogan assessments.
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Have a company-wide nutrition strategy.
Sometimes bringing out people’s highest functions means supporting their most basic functions! As this article from Psychology Today discusses, how we eat impacts how our brains function.
It takes a lot of brain-power to bring your best to your work. And we’re asking this of people who have lives outside of work where they also want to bring their best. You can support that very basic need for good energy by having a strategy that makes nutritious eating easier for people. That could mean providing nutrient-rich snacks in the office, always having a pot of herbal tea ready at the start of meetings, providing protein-rich in-office breakfast, or even providing financial support for groceries.
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Invest in the individual.
Sometimes we can focus so much on the team that we neglect the individual development needed to form that team.
Switching your focus to individual strengths and needs can be a powerful investment in team development. This can mean coaching, an internal mentorship program, skills workshops, and so on. It can also be an investment in a program like Positive Intelligence, which empowers people to really tap into their strengths, push past their roadblocks and step into their full potential through intentional daily practice and habit forming. In a team setting, it can be the difference between having expertise and knowing how to use that expertise within a larger project.
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Adopt a learning culture.
This is essentially a growth mindset culture, but framing it as learning better captures the aspect of growth mindset that often gets ignored: mistakes. Mistakes are paramount to learning. Growth simply doesn’t happen within them.
Michael Jordan once said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Continual learning, with all the mistakes and failures that come with it, is what empowers progress and is the antidote to stagnancy. Embrace that.
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Get executives to lead the charge.
For better or worse, the behavior and comportment of executives sets the tone for the overall organization. If you want a truly high-performing culture, where high-performing teams can develop and thrive, your executive and leadership teams need to adopt an approach such as transformational leadership – one that is deeply supportive and holds leadership accountable for the culture they promote.
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Model asking for help.
Asking for help is one of the most productive, efficient and empowering things a person can do within a team. Unfortunately, far too many teams and organizations inadvertently make it unsafe to ask for help. Even if your organization isn’t one of those, it can be a learned and deeply ingrained fear for many employees because of past experiences. This is why modeling asking for help matters. Once again, executives and leadership need to blaze that trail and make it safe by practicing it themselves. It’s also important to regularly encourage others to ask for help, and openly recognize it when they do, but the first and foundational step is modeling.
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“Dilemma-test” your company values
This is an awesome idea borrowed from Harvard Business Review. Company values can be powerful drivers of employee engagement if those values are genuinely lived in the day-to-day workings of the organization.
To dilemma-test your values, look to past or current dilemmas, and imagine some scenarios that could arise down the road. Try to figure out solutions that align with your corporate values or mission statement. This exercise can tell you a few things:
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- Are your values actionable, or are they too abstract?
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- Do your values actually make sense in real-world scenarios?
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- How do you, as a leader, respond when people act in alignment (or out of alignment) with corporate values, and do you need to change the way you’ve been showing up?
When the behavior of leadership is aligned with company values, it shows integrity. It demonstrates, through actions, that you can be trusted and that you walk your own talk. That leads to higher engagement, and an engaged team is a truly powerful team.
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Think ahead in team building.
People naturally work better together when they feel connected. Think about every person within the organization as potential future teammates and encourage that mindset for them. One way to do this is through workshops that aren’t narrowly job-focused. Workshops on communication, for example, can be valuable to anyone in any role, so you would get people from across departments working together. “For fun” workshops, clubs and events can also be really powerful in building relationships. Maybe a knitting circle, cycling club, walking group, pickleball league, pottery workshop, cooking class or book club. Initiatives like these foster relationships that wouldn’t otherwise happen, and that contributes to an overall culture of trust, respect and support.
The Bottom Line
Cultivating high-performance teamwork is ultimately dependent on the type of culture you allow to take root. There’s a saying that the grass is greener where you water it. If you want to empower high-performing teams in your organization, you need to “water” your organization with all the things that make such teams possible.
If you would like guidance in cultivating high-performing teams, transforming your corporate culture, or empowering your executives to be powerful agents of change, we invite you to connect with us.
