High Performance Teams – Misconceptions that Destroy Businesses

The word team is probably one of the most misused words in the corporate lexicon. Everybody is part of a team and if you’re not, you feel like an outcast. However the truth is that only a handful of people are actually part of a real team and even less in high performance teams.

In his 1993 classic, Wisdom of Teams, J. Katzenbach, defines a team as:

A small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Pretending to be in High Performance Teams

When people are asked to assess their team on whether it:

• Is small in size
• Has diverse members who have complementary skills and roles
• Is truly committed to a common objective
• Puts the interest of the team ahead of their personal interest

I often get a stony silence as people realize that maybe their team is more a group of individuals. Instead of working together, this pseudo team pretends to work in the interest of the business but really do everything in their power to promote themselves.

When High Performance Teams Get It Right

If I then ask people how many of them have ever been part of a high performing team, I get a number hands where people remember that one time they were part of a specific project / start up / transformation / launch team where:

• Team members had a special bond
• Were willing to go the extra mile for each other
• Were very good in what they did
• Where everybody was committed to team goals instead of their personal goals
• Which put together led the team to achieve extra-ordinary results.

I’ve been lucky to have been part of 3 amazing high performing teams. One was in my younger years, when I was part of a factory transformation team, under the amazing leadership of Hans Droge. Another roller coaster experience was being a member of the management team responsible for Unilever, Vietnam’s explosive growth story and lastly in Unilever Pakistan where we transformed the company’s people philosophy through a technology platform called Me & U.

Many professionals have never been fortunate enough to be part of a high performing team. The question is:

When all of us are aiming to create high performing teams, why are we not able to develop them more frequently and consistently?

The answer is that in order to have a high performing team you must get a lot of moving parts right and aligned. For this to happen, you need to know the ingredients of high performing teams, how they work and get everything moving in the right direction. I’ll be discussing these elements in the upcoming weeks so if you have any questions make sure to leave them below.

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