High Performance Team Building
Step 3. Transitioning from Group to Team
To build a perfect team, you must lead the transition from a group of individuals working on their own agendas to a team of members working together to achieve team and organizational goals.
The process for moving the group from dependence (on the leader) through counterdependence (when the leader helps the group to learn how to work together) to interdependence (when the leader and the team share leadership).
Most groups fail to overcome the challenges of the intermediate step (counterdependence) and thus remain stuck in the dependence stage and perform at a much lower level than their inherent potential.
You will learn the secrets to leading a group through this crucial transition stage to become a high performance team in Chapter 3 of the book.
Step 2. Creating Psychological Safety
Creating psychological safety is necessary to build a perfect team.
If people don't feel safe in a meeting, they will not perform at their best.
If you have ever been in a situation in a group where you felt you would probably be criticized for expressing your opinion, even if someone asked you to share it, then you know what the opposite of psychological safety is and how much its absence prevents people from participating in the group process.
Ask yourself what makes you feel psychologically safe in a group setting.
In the second step of the Perfect Team Model, you will create two ground rules/norms for interaction that create a team environment that foster psychological safety and thereby unlock the door to extraordinary team performance.
While this is not the only thing you have to do to ensure such extraordinary performance, it is an essential precursor to the other five steps of the Perfect Team Model, which collectively enable you as the leader to build the perfect team.
Step 1. Balancing the Team
This is the latest in a series of blog posts on building a high performance team based on the principles described in my new book, Build the Perfect Team.
If you want to build the perfect team, make sure the team has good balance. This means having people with relevant hard and soft skills, who think differently, are diverse and culturally aware, and understand the needs and capabilities of the people affected by the team’s work.
Hard and Soft Skills
To be successful, teams must include individuals with the hard and soft skills necessary to identify and develop effective solutions to the problems or opportunities they face. People with hard skills (such as technical and product knowledge), are easier to identify and add to the team than those with soft skills (such as self-awareness, communication, collaboration, and leadership). Potential team members as a rule have well-developed hard skills, typically gained through formal education or job-specific training. But most have inadequate soft skills because academic curricula do not stress the need for them and many leaders lack the time, knowledge, or ability to instill them. As team leader, you should include as members, whenever possible, people who bring both sets of skills to the team. When this is not possible, you should develop the soft (people) skills of those who lack them as part of the team development process, which you will learn how to do later, or through formal training.
The Perfect Team Model
This is the latest in a series of blog posts on building a high performance team based on the principles described in my new book, Build the Perfect Team.
The members of a perfect team are engaged, motivated, vision-driven, collaborative, and extremely productive.
There are 7 steps in the process for building a perfect team:
1. Balancing the Team
2. Creating Psychological Safety
3. Transitioning from Group to Team
4. Adopting the Team Leadership Model
5. Using Collaborative Problem-Solving Processes
6. Applying Participative Implementation Processes
7. Facilitating Team and Organizational Learning
Applying the 7 steps in the Perfect Team Model will enable you to build teams that work efficiently and effectively to solve the problems, and capitalize on the singular opportunities, that present themselves in the electronic age. We will examine each of these steps in future blog posts.
Tips on Building a Perfect Team
Effective teams are critical to success in today's environment of rapid, technology-driven change. Hence, in this era of very high project failure rates, it is not surprising that organizations search for ways to improve the performance of their teams. Google's intensive study of the characteristics of their best teams led them to an unexpected discovery. The best teams create an environment of psychological safety by adopting two team norms that lead to important shared behaviors. Group development experts agree that psychological safety is essential to a high-performing team. However, as you will discover, building the perfect team involves more than setting team norms.