Cultivating High-Performing Teams

The 1970 Brazil National Football Team. The 1985 Chicago Bears. The New Zealand All Blacks.

What do these all have in common? They are considered among the best sports teams of all time. 

While we may not all possess the athletic prowess of Pele, we can learn a lot from these legends about building and sustaining high-performing teams. Take the All Blacks, a team with a 77% winning percentage and one of the most prolific teams across any sport. 

Creating such a legacy can’t be attributed solely to athleticism but also to a keen understanding of human psychology, team dynamics, and long-term strategy.

Characteristics of a High-Performing Team

First, let’s look at the characteristics of a high-performing team. 

We know that a strong sense of psychological safety is a foundational attribute of highly effective teams. When psychological safety exists, team members feel comfortable making mistakes, voicing concerns, sharing feedback, and taking risks.

Trust is another critical component of healthy teams. Trust allows strong bonds to form, respect to flourish, and a deep sense of camaraderie to develop.

With these important ingredients, teams can innovate, outperform their peers, and navigate challenges better than teams that lack these attributes.

How to Build High-Performing Teams

Set Clear Goals

Without knowing where you’re going, you won’t know how to get there or how each individual can use their unique talents and skills to contribute to collective success.

As a leader, it’s important that you set the vision and connect the dots for your people. Be sure that you can articulate how each person fits into the larger whole and how your team’s goals relate to the broader organizational strategy.

Your goals should drive everything you do, and you should communicate regularly about how your team is tracking toward them. Use these moments to celebrate successes and recognize your team’s contributions to your progress.

Champion Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not about filling quotas. It’s about creating a dynamic team with rich ideas and perspectives where new ideas unlock limitless potential. Diverse teams are smarter, keenly focused on efficiently processing facts, and statistically more innovative than their non-diverse counterparts.

Diversity comes in all shapes and sizes. Think outside the box when creating your teams. Look across generations and find talent from Gen Z, but also include Baby Boomers. Find folks with non-traditional backgrounds who might not have a formal education but are resourceful and creative. Staff people based on the skills they have, not on the titles they’ve held in previous positions. 

Communicate Openly

Open, transparent, and timely communication is key to any healthy relationship, including those at work. Letting people know what’s happening, why, and how it impacts them helps provide a sense of security. Giving timely updates on project progress helps people know where they are and what to expect next. 

If there are difficult announcements to make, it’s best to treat your team like adults and share as much information as you can without breaching confidentiality. 

The same goes for both sides. Provide your teams with multiple avenues to communicate, like 1:1 meetings, group discussions, and full team meetings. Also, establish ways to share feedback that aligns with their communication style, including anonymous forms, emails or meetings with leaders, and team surveys.

Establish a Conflict Resolution Process

All teams will experience some level of conflict, which is healthy. Determining a process to solve conflicts will help maintain levels of trust and respect when disagreements arise. Co-create how your team will identify friction points and a clear step-by-step path to solve them. Ensure everyone knows what to do when conflicts arise and hold people accountable for following the guidelines.

Conflict can sometimes lead to inaction when a resolution can’t be found. To avoid situations like this, encourage your team to adapt the “disagree and commit” framework to allow work to continue.

Challenges of Creating High-Performing Teams

There are many challenges to creating high-performing teams including avoidance of productive conflict, shared accountability, and poor decision-making processes.  But three often overlooked challenges are mental well-being, understanding generational issues and lack of cultural fluency.

Mental Well-being

In theory, it sounds easy to create a high-performing team. But we all know that the reality is much messier. Teams are made of people, and people are fallible and imperfect. And that’s okay - it’s great, in fact!

When people come to work, we should encourage them to bring their whole selves. Not only is this a cornerstone of diversity, inclusion, and psychological safety, but it sets teams up for success. 

Sometimes, people go through hard times that impact how they show up at work. In such cases, it might impact your team dynamic. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to support your team’s mental well-being with empathy, care, and compassion. Perhaps your struggling team member needs some time away from work or to reshuffle their responsibilities temporarily while navigating their hardship. If you’ve created a healthy team dynamic, your other team members will pitch in to help their colleague in need.

Generational Divides

There seems to be an age-old conflict between generations, with young upstarts ridiculing their predecessors and those in older generations deriding the errant ways of youth.

These biases can creep in at work and impact your team dynamic. Encourage cross-generational knowledge sharing by offering reverse mentorship opportunities, so your early career employees can teach your older team members or allow your seasoned professionals to share the wisdom of their experiences.

Cultural Differences

Working with people of different cultural backgrounds is an incredibly enriching opportunity, but it can also come with a steep learning curve. 

If you’re leading a team of folks from various countries, acknowledge the cultural factors at play and provide space for people to share where they come from and discuss different cultural norms. Using this as an opportunity to learn and grow together as a team will help strengthen bonds, expand horizons, and ultimately positively impact your team’s collective success.

Get in touch to learn more about how I can help you build an effective team.