Dear Alison

Are you managing a senior management team? If so you'll be finding that these times demand more from you and your team members, as you face increasing internal and external pressures. Read on for advice on what's going on for the team and how to turbo-charge your performance…

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Best wishes,

Kate

How to Turbo-Charge Your Team!

Under high stress, you need to be able to function well as a team and stay together through any tensions. As team members, you must all respect each other, believe you are all on the same side with the same goal, and have the same level of commitment to achieving it.

What Happens to Teams Under Stress?

Unfortunately, you may find that times of stress bring out patterns of poor team performance. We have seen previously collaborative teams indulge in:

• counter-productive internal competition.
• endless debate, losing the ability to make decisions and prioritise actions.
• staying in the comfort zone, with their shared history and backgrounds, and  lacking the diversity of perspectives, styles and experience necessary to succeed in a changed environment.
• assigning blame, and becoming 'victims' of events, instead of moving forward. 

What's the Answer?

You could invest in 'social styles inventories' and 'psychometric tools' to understand individual personality profiles and the team composition. But in our view these are just part of the solution to achieving a high performance team.

There are six vital dimensions to achieving team effectiveness:

Alignment – the degree to which everyone on the team understands its larger purpose and focuses their actions and those of the team on that objective.

Resilience – the degree to which a team can hold itself together, even under severe internal or external stress and remain effective. There is clear trust and respect across team members, and they can debate issues and deal with conflict in a candid and constructive way.

Energy – the degree to which a team is ambitious, takes the initiative and maintains momentum at a high level over a long period of time. The group is energised by working together; team members volunteer to take things on and proactively share the load.

Openness – the degree to which a team engages with the broader organisation and the outside world, and challenges itself to adopt new information and best practice.

Efficiency – the degree to which the team optimises resources and time and drives efficiently for results. For example, all team meetings have clear agendas, schedules and rules of engagement for decision-making.

Balance – the degree to which a team understands the importance of a diversity of skills and strengths, and incorporates members with different experience, knowledge and functional skills. Also, how well different members of the team play different team roles, creating natural checks and balances.

In our experience, highly effective teams demonstrate competence right across these six dimensions - actually surprisingly hard to do. Often there are “elephants in the room” - distracting mindsets and behaviours that frustrate individual efforts and sap the energy of the team. These can get in the way of the effectiveness of otherwise extremely high-calibre individuals.

In working with teams, we first ensure that all team members have a common language for team dynamics, and an understanding of what 'great' looks like.  Then in a rigorous process (see box below) we surface where the gaps are for the team, in a way that gets to the issues but so that team members feel safe to voice their views.

What's the Best Time to Develop the Team?

Most teams, in the rush of getting on with the 'day job', never discuss these vital issues - or only do so when something goes badly wrong! Only when a stable platform has been created can actions then be agreed for moving the team forward.

You need to prioritise actions based on the context your team faces. One team we worked with needed to achieve a turnaround, so resolving issues associated with efficiency and resilience was important. Other teams needed to achieve growth, so in these cases the focus was more on alignment and energy.

In difficult times it's easy for you to decide (or be forced) to reduce investment in team and individual development. However, getting team dynamics right is ‘mission critical’ and not an exercise you should reserve for when things improve! It is exactly at these times that your team's effectiveness needs to be ‘turbo charged’ to help you all rise to the immediate challenge and lay the foundation for the future.

Thank you!

Acknowledgements for some of the ideas in this month's article to Anna Young, Principal in the Melbourne office of Egon Zehnder. 

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