The anatomy of a high-performing team
Content developed by Hult Ashridge Executive Education
When we recognize teams for what they are – living entities of fallible human beings – we can take a healthier approach to performance.
When we talk about performance, it usually comes down to numbers. But focusing on results alone means success is often short-lived. “Dominant culture takes the word ‘performance’ and attributes it to something highly efficient, and aggressive drive,” says Stefan Cousquer, Professor of Strategy and Leadership at Hult International Business School. “But sustainable high performance requires really healthy teams.”
“Generally, when we do inquiries around executive teams, most of the ones that are struggling are not learning,” he emphasizes. “They’re going from meeting to meeting, action to action” – rather than taking time to value learning.
Eddy de Waart, Executive Coach at Hult Ashridge Executive Education says: “Recognizing a team as a living entity means you can be more realistic about performance, and embrace learning to become more aware of what is happening.”
By understanding what it takes to be part of a high-performing team in a sustainable way, we can not only remedy what isn’t working, but elevate great teams to be even better.
So, what’s the secret?
The power and energy of a high-performing team lies in the unique combination of its people. So, by virtue of the multiple unique individuals that make up a team and their relationships with each other, there’s no one formula.
“Everyone in the team is working in one direction – not necessarily in the same way, but in a way that allows their unique qualities to deliver the output that everyone is looking for,” says Clare Carpenter, Executive Coach at Hult Ashridge.
But there are a few commonalities that we can see in high-performing teams:
There’s a team identity. This is the sense of the way ‘we’ do things. It’s based on shared purpose, collective accountability, the sense of belonging, as well as a sense of personal ownership.
There are clear goals – and congruence in what’s said and done. “The team can define what it wants to excel at,” says Cousquer. “It may be different by team and context, but getting that clear and holding each other to account is helpful practice.” Consistent follow-through promotes focus and accountability.
Relationships are strong and balanced. Cousquer says this shows up in “the quality, robustness and energy of their conversations, the trust to talk about the ‘undiscussable’, and their ability to coach each other live.”
You hear plenty of honest feedback. Problems don’t fester. This means there are “honest and challenging performance conversations that are purpose-driven, not personality-driven, with the understanding that constructive conflict about the way of working and cooperation, for example, or about the intentions and motivations of the team member, is good for growth and improvement,” says de Waart.
Conflict has a place. But, Carpenter specifies, “it’s conflict that has a purpose: intellectual conflict rather than personal conflict – so disagreeing about systems and process, rather than disagreeing with each other.”
There’s a strong level of psychological safety. Strong relationships, open feedback, and intellectual conflict aren’t possible without psychological safety and trust.
They have a culture of learning. This means curiosity, creativity, innovation, and experimentation. “They build learning into their everyday practices as opposed to a sideshow,” says Cousquer. This is what gives teams the capability to grow.
And they make mistakes. In a true learning culture, mistakes are accepted. “You see new things being tried and then abandoned or built on,” says Carpenter. “It’s not to say there are more mistakes in a high-performing team,” she clarifies. “But it’s safe to bring them to the table. Otherwise, they may be hidden.”
This is where ‘secrets’ can emerge – what Carpenter describes as “the other side of feedback”. While feedback is based on trust and psychological safety, “secrets start to come in when we feel like we can’t say what’s not working.”
De Waart says there’s a lot to be found by focusing on what you don’t see on the surface. “If I see a team that’s completely in harmony with each other, I always doubt what is going on here. What is not being said? What’s under the table? What is said in duos or trios, but not in the group?”
Often, it comes from fear of judgment. “Judgment (and fear of it, even when it’s absent) is really poisonous,” says Carpenter. “If I feel like I am going to be judged, I’m likely to be frightened to say if I’ve made a mistake.” In fact, fear accounts for much of what jeopardizes a team, according to Carpenter.
Change can amplify this, especially if there’s a sense of loss. “When the purpose of the organization or the team itself feels disconnected from the values of the people within it, psychological barriers go up between team members or between groups that hinder connection building.” It can result in possessiveness in the workplace and people in the team start to behave as individuals rather than as one.
“All of these things are like bacterial infections in a high-performing team that you’ve got to get in and treat straight away as a leader,” says Carpenter.
Creating the conditions to thrive
To enable teams to flourish, you have to get underneath the behaviors you see visibly and engage with underlying mindsets. While it’s very human to see things from our individual perspective, high-performing teams require a less egocentric and more relational view – one that takes into account yourself, the relationships with people around you, the group’s place within an organizational ecosystem, and even the organization’s place in the wider world.
It’s known as a ‘meta position’, says de Waart. “The meta position is like a helicopter looking at team dynamics – who says what, who has more power, what is not said, what are the interactions like? This reflective capacity is very important to build first as a team member, to have more perspectives about the work that’s being done.”
Above all, “a team leader has a requirement to learn to be a master observer,” says Carpenter. The team leader needs to be able to occupy both spaces – the immediacy of what’s in front of them and the holistic view of the room.
After the awareness, there has to be emotional fluency too, in order to nurture and maintain strong relationships. “You need a level of empathy to be able to understand somebody else’s world as they experience it rather than as you experience it,” says Carpenter.
For teams to be able to share their perspectives openly, there needs to be a high level of trust. “Feedback happens when we feel psychologically safe to say things that we like and don’t like, and things that are working really well or not,” says Carpenter. “Where that kind of level of trust is in place, growth can really happen.”
When there’s space for experimentation and the recognition that teams are living entities made up of fallible human beings, there’s an acceptance of fluctuation in performance built in. “You trust that over time they will deliver high-performance outputs, but your main focus is on creating the conditions for high performance, the core of which is their capability to learn and grow as a team,” says Cousquer.
As for the best way to support your teams and their learning, it depends on the context. “Every team is fairly unique,” says Cousquer. “The important thing is to come alongside the unique situation of the team and agree with them what they would really like to work on right now.”
That’s why learning interventions like team coaching work best as ongoing practices, rather than crisis intervention. Because when it comes to ‘performance’, there isn’t an end goal – it’s a continuous cycle of refining, replenishing, building, and evolving into the next iteration of great.
Autors:
- Dr Stefan Cousquer, Professor of Strategy and Leadership at Hult International Business School
- Eddy de Waart, Executive Coach at Hult Ashridge Executive Education
- Clare Carpenter, Executive Coach at Hult Ashridge Executive Education
- Leah Henderson
