High-performing team anyone ?

There are hundreds of books on how to develop a high-performing team. With matrices, and pyramids, and 5-7-9 steps processes. All guaranteed to lift your team to high performance. Have you ever googled “high-performance teams” ? When you look at the images that appear at the top, you don’t see a new product development team at an engineering firm, or a management team at a famous bank. You see pictures of an F1 team, or a rowing team in action. And some advertising for consultants who will transform your team with their magic formula !

Why is it that it is typically sports teams that get described as high-performance teams, while management teams only seem to aspire to reach that level ? In my experience, a key factor that sports teams apply without hesitation and in a very formal way, is … learning. After each competition, won or lost, the team will get together and analyze in very deep detail what went well, and what didn’t go well. Military teams coined the concept of the AAR, the after action review, often right on the battlefield when everybody’s recollection of the events is fresh. A boxer shared recently that after a win, his team goes right to watch the video to see the moments where the opponent, although beaten, managed to break through the defense. And they would adjust the training program to focus on that particular weakness.

In organizations, we use similar ‘tools’ like PDCA or six sigma control loops. But that seems to be applied most often to the front-line processes. When it comes to management teams, the step of reflecting, learning and planning for improvement is often watered down to a project closure report that is sent around asking to ‘rate’ and fill in comments. Or when all went well, there is a team celebration that is for sure fun but doesn’t really go in any depth, and doesn’t allow the team to learn. Teams are so busy they often consider they don’t have the time to reflect on what is behind them, because a mountain of new challenges lays ahead.

Yet dedicating some time to have an entire team review, in a facilitated setting, the key learnings and needs for improvement will go a long way to enhancing team collaboration – over time. A team might have issues, and sometimes we are stuck with “the deck we were dealt”. But if each time a team completes a project, challenge, customer account or major event, it can learn from this experience and do better the next time, it will develop a growth mindset that moves it up towards the level of high performance, whatever its starting point is. Learning is not something abstract that happens in people’s heads: it is a team activity as much as the actual project work.