We often hear that high-performing teams happen by accident. “If you hire the right people, you feel it when you are on a high-performing team.” Does that sound familiar?
That is not our reality. We strongly believe that you can create high-performing teams by design but in order to do that there are three things that you need to know:
1. Where are you going?
Does your team have a strong purpose and a clear mission of what it needs to achieve? The difference between a team and a group is that a team has a shared goal, and the team members are aligned and committed to get to that goal. However, they will not talk about the goal, or any issues they see in getting to that goal, unless there is sufficient amount of relationship and trust.
2. How are you going to get there?
How is your team working together, and are there clear accountabilities of who is doing what in order to achieve the goal? If there is no clear conversation about how you work together and being sincere about your accountabilities, team members will have to start guessing about what it is that you will or will not do.
3. Where are you now?
None of the first two distinctions will matter at all, unless you as team have a clear idea of where you are currently. Additionally, you are prepared to have an open conversation about what it is you need to do to achieve the mission. We have a simple high performing team survey that we use to get that conversation started. What is interesting about the results of that survey is that there often is a difference between how you think the team will answer and what they will actually answer.
For a limited time, we offer our readers of our blog access to this high performing team survey that they can fill out with their team. If you are interested to take this survey with your team, contact me at kbogaert@strategic-momentum.com, and I will be happy to set you and your team up for a free survey that will take each team member 10 minutes to fill out anonymously.
