Not finance, not Strategy, not Technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare – Patrick Lencioni 

Is your team a high-performing team?

We are fascinated by powerful stories of larger than life individuals from mythology, culture and business, who find their way out of hopeless situations all by themselves. My time in corporate life and as a consultant-coach has taught me that this is entirely divorced from reality. The individual or the leader is only a piece, maybe the centrepiece at best, in the jigsaw puzzle of success. The puzzle comes together when all the pieces align and fit nicely together, within the boundaries of the puzzle board.

Scratching the surface of individual success stories, we realise that fortunes of businesses, organisations and functions are built by high-performing teams, more than by individuals. While the word team has been adequately defined but enough has not been done to define high-performing team. The general consensus which emerges is that a high-performing team is one which consistently outperforms the expectations of their stakeholders and also the expectations that they set for themselves. These teams are highly aware of their collective and individual strengths and weaknesses, function in an exploration and inquiry mode rather than each advocating only their views and they have the ability to resolve their conflicts without any external intervention. The leaders of such teams don’t see themselves endowed with all the knowledge and are aware that they don’t have all the answers; however, they have the capacity and capability to leverage complementary skills in the team to confront any challenge.

So, what are the signals which indicate that a team is not performing to its potential and beyond?

• Disengaged leadership: Team leader pursues a non-facilitative and a non-participative leadership style which doesn’t adequately involve and engage the team.
• Lack of shared purpose and approach: Team members are unsure about the team goals, what they are working towards and how success will be measured. Also, such teams lack a shared approach in terms of principles, process and protocol that the team will adopt when working together.  
• Inadequate stakeholder involvement: The team is very inward focussed, working on their agendas rather than understanding the expectations of the stakeholders and working towards meeting and exceeding those.
• Limited communication: Lines of communication are closed and infrequent, or they run only one way. Also, all communication is only within the team with little efforts to communicate and engage outside the team around the team objectives. 
• Lack of appreciation for Diversity: Team members are happy seeing their clones make the entire membership of the team. They do not value the diversity of experience, skills, gender and backgrounds of their fellow team members, resulting in sub-optimal decision-making and solutions.
• Lack of mutual trust and accountability: Neither do team members trust each other, nor the team entity. Each one is unsure if other team members will cover for them and neither do they make any efforts to do so for others. Responsibility of the team is left to the assigned leader and not collectively held. The team members don’t hold each other accountable for behaviours and deliverables.
• Decision-making by advocacy rather than inquiry: Decision are taken based on how strongly team members push for their own ideas and the support that they can enlist by whatever means. There is no effort to improve the quality of collective decision-making by adding to each other’s ideas and pursuing a course of inquiry and exploration rather than advocacy.
• Inability to manage conflict: No one is willing to address the elephant in the room. Conflict is not dealt with in an open, transparent and a constructive way. Negative feelings continue to simmer until they come to a boil, and unaired grudges negatively impact team morale.
• No learning: One of the key disciplines of a high-performing team is not only to increase their collective capacity but also to provide learning and development to individual members. Each individual should be better off than what they were when they got on to the team. The process of coordinating, consolidating, reflecting and integrating the learnings is non-existent.

While every team cannot always be a high-performing team, but the above checklist can undoubtedly be used to gauge if they have what it takes to perform to their fullest potential. Organisations and senior leaders who commission teams can not only add tremendous value but also have the moral responsibility to keep scanning their teams to pick up any early signs and provide the right interventions before the teams become dysfunctional. Unfortunately, more and more organisations are focussed on building individual leaders believing that the collective capacity is only an outcome, but that is not entirely true.

Success stories are written by teams and not by individuals, and that is where energy and resources should be invested for exponential returns.