“What does a high performance team look like?”
This question came to me from blog reader who is also a well-respected project manager at a highly regarded Fortune 100 company.
He goes on to write,:
“Ask any team around here if they are high performance and they will respond with a strong, clear “yes.” But how do they know?
This may sound strange, but I’m thinking that institutionalized bad behaviors can become a blind spot in your mirror.”
Not strange at all.
Individuals and teams all have blind spots.
The challenge in organizations is that everyone shares the same blind spots – and so everyone reinforces the collective blindness.
Blindness, in terms of high performance, means that we narrow the definition of success to such a degree that it causes more harm than good.
Definitions can cause damage.
When the definition of high performance is overly narrow, a team may be able to complete projects or hit the numbers – but in the process cause great personal and organizational damage.
The way many organizations define high performance reminds me of the old line – “The operation was successful, but the patient died.” Not a very useful way of measuring success.
So, what’s the alternative?
Here’s a new definition of high performance:
When the results you achieve and the way you achieve them enrich the lives of those involved.
This definition says that high performance includes both what you achieve and how you achieve it. And that it all needs to enrich the lives of those involved!!
How can high performance enrich lives?
In as many ways as possible. High performing teams can enrich lives technically, financially, culturally, aesthetically, intellectually, spiritually etc.
To ensure that this enrichment occurs we need an expanded set of measures for high performance that include:
- The technical/financial results: in terms of time, quality, cost, profit, system improvements etc
- The cultural/relationship results: in terms of team development, morale, customer satisfaction, “buzz” within and outside the organization, mission congruence etc.
- The individual results: in terms of personal/professional/technical/spiritual development, sense of purpose, meaning, etc.
What happens when the ways we define and measure high performance narrows?
Here’s an example from an executive at another Fortune 100 organization:
“ I work in succession planning at the highest levels of our organization. We have a senior executive who – for the past twenty years – has been promoted and rewarded for meeting targets. He gets the job done and has been acknowledged for it. He also breaks a lot of glass in the process. The collateral damage he causes has been extreme.
At this point, in his career, no one wants him as part of their organization. They don’t want him in leadership roles. And he can’t understand why. How could he go from being high performing to being a pariah? He’s probably going to be asked to retire – and still won’t be told the real reason why.”
To me this is a tragic story – personally and organizationally – of what happens when the definition of high performance is narrowed to focus only on purely tactical/technical dimensions. Lives are damaged. Morale is eroded. And the capacity for teams to learn what high performance can really mean is short changed.
A new definition of high performance is needed now more than ever.
Tremendous pressure being put on teams to perform as a consequence of the worldwide financial down turn. There is desperation in many organizations about the numbers. And the tendency to narrow the definition of success is strong. Yet, this is exactly what we don’t need. If this economic crisis offers a gift – it is to redefine, to expand our definition of high performance to include dimensions that have been previously overlooked.
Questions for Reflection & Action
- What does high performance mean to you?
- How is it defined in your organization?
- What’s missing in those definitions that’s worth including?
- How can you expand your definition to include more elements that will “enrich the lives of all involved?”
Note: this post was in response to a question. I LOVE questions. Send me your questions on leadership, work, teams, change, purpose, spirituality and work etc etc.
You can put them in the comments box below.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 John Langlois // Jul 6, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Results in my company are typically interpreted to mean “business results.” And that’s okay because ALL firms are in business to make profit. If they don’t turn a profit, then they aren’t in business long.
But who says we can’t make profit and have a great time in this process? My definition of a high performance team, based on some idea prodding in your post here might look like this:
“A high performance team gets the job done while challenging and counseling each other and laughing all along the way.”
The first sign of a poor performing team, in my experience, is the fear many have of counseling each other for the benefit of both parties. The executive in your post unconsciously put off the “don’t counsel me” pheromone and his life was sadder as a result. I’m guessing that there wasn’t many smiles or laughter in his meetings. Probably just coincidence.
2 Peter Bradford // Jul 6, 2009 at 3:43 pm
For me, a “high performance team” is one where every individual is empowered to make decisions and take action in ways that benefit both the team and themselves. A high performance team leader often acts as part facilitator, like a switch in an electrical circuit, to help connect the energy of team members with the purpose of their common goal. Along the same lines, organizational and personal “impedance”, which can result from self-serving leadership, opaque or ad hoc processes, and a variety of other maladies, keep a high-performance team from reaching their potential. In a way, as described in some refrains of Daniel Gilbert’s “Stubling on Happiness”, most probably can’t comprehend the value of self-actualizing on an individual or organizational/team level. I think this is certainly true of internal reward systems which tend to favor prior models and narrow definitions of success. I would suspect for individual’s that truly appreciate the experience of the high-performance team, the engagement, drive, and movement compels them to a great degree. But I do think there has to be some collective recognition to help put the hard work of teaming on challenging tasks in perspective.
Probably the best way to repeat success and recreate high-performance is to inject a critical mass of individuals (2-3 on a 6-8 person team) with prior experience and expectations. If there is sufficient collaboration and sharing of norms, I believe the team can collectively achieve higher order goals.
Interestingly, productivity numbers have gone up in the US as one might expect with the initial “thinning of the herd.” I tend to believe that free market forces help facilitate people to think deeply and make choices about what their vocations really are vs. what they’ve been earning a paycheck doing. That can be good for everyone — to a point. Businesses and organizations are also similarly forced to question work they’re doing which has been perpetuated without deep consideration for the value it provides their constituencies. Remaining teams don’t become “high performing” because they are the one’s left doing the work, but I suspect through a more conscious and difficult process of self awareness, examination, and continual re-evaluation.
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