What makes a high-performing team?
Is your team high-performing or dysfunctional? (pic: Yan Krukov for Pexels)
Google investigated high-performing teams over the course of a decade. The researchers found that the individuals on the team were less important than the way the team interacted. The single most important factor for high performing teams, they found, was psychological safety.
Psychological safety can include such factors as the ability to have open and frank conversations, people’s willingness to offer and ask for help, the level of inclusivity and diversity, and the attitude to risk and failure. Without psychological safety in a team, members will be less able to respond effectively to challenges.
Want a quick way to establish psychological safety?
Warm up!
Sports teams warm up their muscles, practice drills, and rehearse plays.
Warming up is equally important for work-based teams. It’s a chance to rekindle curiosity about teammates, to discover new things about each other, to wake up the empathy muscle (also important for designing a positive customer experience), and to laugh together (stimulates the feel-good enzyme dopamine).
Here’s a quick and easy warm-up activity that works equally well in onsite meetings and breakout rooms in virtual meetings:
If you could have a new skill in an instant, what would it be?
With this question, you’ll learn how your teammates want to grow or what they aspire to do. You might learn that your partner would love to be able to pick up Italian instantly, or get good at woodworking.
As well as feeling safe enough to contribute ideas, high-performing teams also have these attributes:
Diversity in experience, knowledge, and thinking styles
Teammates trust their leader and each other
A compassionate leader
The work environment feels important and they know their own purpose in the team
They know they can take risks, and there’s an understanding that failure is ok.
First, answer this crucial question
Why would you want to put the work into creating a culture of high-performing creative teams if things are working perfectly fine as they are?
The reason is that there are a number of benefits to creatively solving problems as a team:
1. Benefits in brainstorming:
You end up with a larger pool of concepts, which leads to a greater likelihood of getting a useful new idea.
The resulting idea is more likely to stand up to scrutiny because team buy-in occurs at an early stage.
Done properly, brainstorming creates many moments of fun and laughter. Laughter reduces tension and brings people together.
2. Benefits for team working
It’s a universal law that challenges generate excitement. One of the best ways to get people working together is by solving a common problem.
Teams that work well together are more productive and have a greater impact on the bottom line.
There’s a shift from fight/defend/ignore to know/like/trust.
Thinking out loud with each other creates safety and reduces fear of the unknown.
3. Benefits for individual team members:
Individuals feel more involved and motivated knowing their voice is being heard.
There’s a feeling of belonging to a real team, rather than just being part of a department on an org chart.
They feel supported.
There’s the opportunity to learn something new
When to start?
If you want a higher-performing team, there’s no need to wait. You can choose one of the above points to focus on first, and start building up that aspect. If you don’t know where to begin, just do something. Everything makes a difference!