6 Fundamentals of a Great Team

August 22, 2012

 

Teams outperform individuals especially when performance requires multiple skills, judgments, and experience. Most individuals recognize the capabilities of a team and have a common sense to make teams work, but the question about ‘what are the fundamentals to a high performing team’ can be difficult to answer. With so much attention devoted to teams and teamwork in today’s organizations, it is appropriate to converse about several key factors contributing to the development of a great team.

A Clear Team Goal: High performance teams have both a clear understanding of the goal to be achieved and a belief that these goals present an important outcome to the organization. Clarity of a goal implies that there is a specific mission and performance objective that is phrased so concretely that it is possible to tell if the performance objective was attained. For example, the Apollo Moon Project provides an outstanding demonstration of such a clear and compelling goal.

Skill Diversity: Each team performance goal will present its own set of technical as well as personal challenges. The real trick, according to research, is to know what the most critical technical skills are (e.g. communication skills), and to identify the necessary balance to these skills. Further, team members of high performing teams that possess grand personal competencies (e.g. skills to identify, address and resolve problems) are able to raise all types of issues regarding the team’s objective and effectively arrive at resolutions that emerge from the collaborative effort.

A Performance-Driven Structure: An effective team structure can be as basic and simple as the communication aspect requires for the coordination of activities. The most basic strategy for structuring teams revolves around processes that heavily emphasize trust and working relationships with the ultimate objective of achieving the performance goal.

Collaborative Climate: Teamwork, ‘working well together’ is a fundamental ingredient to any team’s success. A collaborative climate can be created by defining clear roles, responsibilities, and accountabilities, as well as by establishing clear lines of communication and documentation. Through the creation of working relationships among members of the team or between the team and the leader, trust is generated. Trust is like a ‘magical’ bond that allows any kind of relationship to exist between team members. Once broken, it is not easily – if ever recovered.

A Unified Commitment: A unified commitment is often the most clearly missing factor of ineffective teams, but precisely what is it? It is ‘team spirit’, a sense of loyalty, dedication, identification with the team and the willingness to do everything to help the team succeed. Involvement of team members in planning for achieving the goals and balancing out ‘groupthink’ and ‘divergent thinking’ effectively fosters unified commitment.

Team performance standards: Setting team performance standards are not achieved by simply setting them. Meeting standards is hard work. Standards of team excellence are affected by variables that if present in a team, determines how this team pursues success. It is necessary to establish standards that entail individual commitment, motivation, self esteem, and performance. Individual team members need one another to perform according to the established standards, and as a team to wield pressure to constantly improve their performance standard.

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Kristin Weger, a graduate student in Industrial/Organizational Psychology at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. To learn more about IncBlot’s unique team training solutions please visit our website or contact us here.

 

 

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