The Five Core Drivers of High-Performing Teams
I spent years working with all kinds of teams: project, product, management, supply chain, and so many others.
I discovered that all high-performing teams, regardless of the type of team, shared five drivers or reasons for their performance.
The good news is that when you focus on and improve one or more of these habits, your performance improves.
What are the Five Drivers of Team Performance?
Team Driver Number 1: They Balance High Care with High Candor
As one high-performing team member put it, “We play hardball with deep respect for every team member.” If you were to watch a team that balanced care with candor, it wouldn’t be a love fest.
The hardball part of the equation means that they speak up about issues, problems, and disagreements, yet do that in a way that isn’t attacking or insulting. Real conversation rarely happens after the team meeting. Yet, if that is part of your team’s pattern, it’s time to grow.
Healthy candor is finding that sweet spot where critical views and information are shared with empathy and respect. I’ve noticed that high-candor teams rarely remake decisions once they’re made. Talk about a time saver!
If your team has high levels of candor but lacks caring, that’s easier to fix because you can speak candidly about the disrespect.
State that your goal is to create an environment where you enjoy high levels of candor but also with deep respect for each individual.
At the end of the meeting, check-in.
Ask, did we hit our goal to foster high candor with high caring or respect for each person?
A high candor group will let you know if someone felt disrespected or if personal attacks were allowed.
Candor will open the way to deal with gaps in caring.
If you’ve got low candor yet enjoy healthy levels of respect, set the intention with the team to improve it.
Low candor means you’ve got a bunch of “un-discussables” that sit like elephants in the room waiting to be acknowledged.
These “un-discussables” sit on a matrix of levels of emotional intensity and impact to the team.
A “high team impact” with relatively low emotional intensity is a good “un-discussable” to bring out of the closet.
Often an “un-discussable” isn’t as emotionally intense as we our minds make it to be.
When you think “they can’t handle the truth,” it might be true or is just a story that you carry in your mind.
The journey to greater candor moves in steps as a team gets better emotionally-charged conversations.
Team members become more candid when they stop overthinking if they are accepted by the team and start having more and more positive experiences in sharing with respect.
Bit by bit, small step by small step, a team can build their candor skills if they agree to try, then check in periodically about progress, adjustments needed, and next steps.
“We play hardball with deep respect for every team member.”
Driver #2: Compelling Mission and Goals
Not every team has a mission to bring home stranded astronauts or save Private Ryan.
But a strong “why” always inspires the heart to move the team to perform with excellence.
A supply-chain team managed millions of dollars in assets and costs, providing THE strategic advantage for a consumer goods company.
Team effectiveness suffered until we reframed the team's mission to “Guardians of THE Strategic Advantage Team” and identified three compelling goals that would either make or sink the company.
What felt kind of boring and routine now got an added sense of meaning.
Those outside the team started to protect team time and assignments more, given their enhanced understanding of the team's mission and goal focus.
Driver #3: Clear Roles and Relationships
Teams stay stuck in the storming phase when it’s unclear who does what, decides, or is involved in key activities and decisions.
Sometimes, this gets sorted out as a matter of course for a team, while other times, team leaders need to use a tool like RACI to create clarity on roles and relationships.
RACI identifies who is responsible (R) for a given activity, deliverable, or decision. “A” stands for approves or those who sign off on the deliverable.
“C” stands for the people who will be consulted or provide input to the activity, “deliverable,” or decision, while “I” is for those people or groups who need to be informed afterward.
The magic of RACI is in the process of creating it. When you have more than one person responsible, it’s a flag that you are dealing with unclear roles.
Identify one lead sled dog for each key “deliverable” or process. When you have many approvers, yet most aren’t available in a timely fashion or worse, then you have a dysfunctional role that requires attention.
A project got back on track when the senior sponsor made sure that approvers or their designee were available at key “gates” to make sure the project would deliver on time and within budget. High candor helps you resolve role and relationship problems that keep the team from becoming high-performing.
Driver #4: Gaps Resolved
Gaps? Yes, anytime there is a gap between expectations and results, it’s a gap.
How you handle a gap either moves you towards high performance or prevents it.
Candor can help or hurt a gap situation, depending on the use of it.
Low-performing teams either avoid gap conversations due to low candor or, worse, approach gaps as a witch hunt, looking to punish someone for the gap.
If you want more fear, less trust, defensiveness, and less collaboration, turn a gap conversation into a witch hunt and make punishment the priority.
If you want more trust, lowered defensiveness, and more collaboration, use gaps to understand what’s really going on so that you can learn and adjust.
It’s that simple.
Driver #5: Manage Information
Teams and those who influence the team deal with a lot of information. Too much.
If your team members can’t find the latest requirements document, decisions that were made last week, and a hundred other information needs, you’ll derail an otherwise strong team.
Many teams make the mistake of creating a SharePoint site, Microsoft Teams or other collaboration solutions only to have them grow to become unmanageable messes. There's nothing wrong with these solutions, just wrong in the way we often use them.
No team can thrive in a confused information-sharing environment.
One project team solved this by creating links on the weekly update with the latest key team deliverables.
This team did their best to keep clean versions on their SharePoint site and identified document versions clearly, but for this team, the links on the weekly update became their source of truth.
A management team started using a decision log to document their weekly decisions and communicate the status of key decisions to those outside the team. The log became invaluable to understand the decisions, where to find supporting information, and who to reach out to learn more.
A project team improved information sharing when they started to do a post-sponsor meeting check-in with the extended team after meeting with sponsors.
Who needs another meeting? Yet in this case, all benefited by hearing the voiceover on the issues discussed with sponsors. A few sponsors joined the after-party meeting to ensure the team got the clarity they needed to course-correct. It was a key reason they performed at high levels.
Quinn Price
Quinn is an Executive Coach and change expert who has worked with dozens of large companies, including Microsoft, Nike, Lockheed, Thiokol, PGE, Deloitte, and many others. He is interested in helping people regain their vitality after a setback, heal after manipulation, create high-performing teams, and implement cultural change that realizes measurable benefits.
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The Change Capability Institute exists to help people and organizations change faster. We focus on change education in the areas of creating vitality after setbacks, developing high-performance teams, and accelerating organizational change (especially culture change).
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