Improving Team Performance

What is the makes a high performing team?

The most frequent answer from senior leaders and the HR department would be something along the lines of ‘motivated and skilled employees who are committed to delivering the team goal’.

If your company carries out employee surveys, you will almost inevitably find that the first time you do it one of the top three issues raised will be communication. The most frequently used responses to this employee concern are newsletters, management briefings, team meetings. Now all of these are good, but they miss two key elements. Have the team members really heard what has been communicated and do they feel listened to, or is it just a one way broadcast?

Or put another way, if there is an opportunity to raise questions, have you ever wondered what the quiet ones in the room who said nothing were thinking?

Successful communication is critical to an effective team. When you communicate well, the team thrives.

So how do you improve communication?

Different people have different ways of communicating. Knowing and respecting the different ways team members communicate is a vital enabler of good communications. There are several tools on the market that can help with this – my personal favourite is the 5Voices from Giant.

If the team is communicating well then the foundation for a high performing team has been laid and the process of ensuring the team is motivated and committed to achieving its goals can begin.

Good communication makes good relationships possible and good relationships are vital for giving people the feeling of safety required to share openly the really challenging issues. What defines a good relationship? Trust. If there are good relationships there will be trust. Trust leads to openness in sharing information and engagement in the task. Communication and relationship leads to alignment and commitment on the what, when and, why of the task. Once you have that your team can start to align on vision, strategy and, tactics. If you have this, it is easier to execute and with good alignment and execution there are fewer mis-steps so capacity is raised and the team can achieve more.

If you create this, you create a virtuous circle of continuous improvement in team performance.

This is illustrated in the following graphic from Giant: