Teams are divided into one of five categories:

1. a group of individuals
2. An embryonic team
3. A developing team
4. An established team
5. A high performance team

So how does a group of individuals become a high performing team?

Step 1 – Organizational Alignment

The process begins with organizational alignment. Before you can align people, you must first align the company itself. That means matching the realities of the marketplace with the capabilities of the business. You also need an organizational goal, something everyone in your organization can relate to. Then you can start the process of aligning your people. If you do this successfully –

• Everyone will understand where the organization is now.
• Everyone will understand the destination and the journey.
• Everyone will understand their role in getting there.

If the organization is not aligned at the macro level, one can hardly expect the teams to be as well.

Step 2: Teams are a means to an end, not an end in themselves

When teams became the focus of research after the end of World War II, the primary goal of their formation was to benefit the working lives of individual members. The spin-off was a better organizational performance. Today it is the other way around. The main benefit of teams is seen as improved organizational performance, with the secondary effect being the quality of individual work life. The changing emphases of the teams are summarized below. It is based on one taken from Lawrence Holpp’s “Managing Teams”:

How the emphasis of teams has changed:

• Rational: From – As an end in itself and quality of work life – to – As a means to an end and organizational performance
• Focus: From – Operational – to – Strategic and operational
• Aim: From – To better get along and employee engagement – to – To improve job performance and organizational alignment
• Wear: From – Outside the main organizational structure – to – Main building block of organizational structures
• Measure of effectiveness: From – how do we all feel? – to – Have we achieved our objectives?
• Training: From – Team building groups, interpersonal skills, personal growth – to – Team skills, quality tools, problem solving tools, communication skills, process skills
• Performance Review: From – Individual – to – Team and individual
• Life expectancy: From Temporary to Permanent
• Culture: From – Elitist – to – The way we do things here

Therefore, it is critical that team formation and development is driven by the belief that teams are the key to meeting your organization’s performance challenges.

Step 3 – Start with the Basics: Team Purpose and Goals

Team effectiveness can be categorized under eight main headings:

1. Team purpose and goals
2. team structure
3. team responsibility
4. team development
5. Relationships
6. team culture
7. external relations
8. organizational culture

These eight factors are arranged in a hierarchy. The first six measure the internal effectiveness of the team, while the seventh analyzes the relationship that the team in question has with other teams. The last one analyzes how favorable or not the culture of the organization is towards the development of the team. Does executive management support the development of the team through its actions or is it just paying lip service to the concept?

Therefore, the basic requirement for the development of the team is that its members agree on a common purpose: what has the team been created for? It can be the provision of customer service or the development of new products or the management of a supply chain. But whatever the purpose, it represents an activity. A goal, on the other hand, is a result: it is the means by which one measures how effectively the team’s purpose has been carried out. Both the purpose and goal of the team must be aligned with the purpose and goal of the organization.

Step 4 – Team structure, responsibility and development

Then comes the team structure. Members must understand their roles and those of other members. There should be ground rules that establish how the team should function, who does what, what members expect of each other, the frequency of team meetings, etc.

Each team should have a leader who is preferably a member of the team. The leader, like the other members, must do a “real” job, not act in a supervisory role. Non-playing captains rarely work on sports teams, let alone work teams.

Team development focuses on technical, process, and communication skills rather than interpersonal skills and personal growth.

Of course, developing soft skills and establishing a positive team culture are important, but if the foundations of team performance are established and nurtured, soft skills development will take place in the right context: how will you improve further improve the performance of our team? ?

Step 5 – Embed the teams within your organization

When team development is viewed as a discrete program that runs in parallel with the organization’s main program of implementing operating strategies, it will always be vulnerable to executive changes and budget constraints. The program is seen as an end in itself and seen as a nice to have rather than a must have initiative. Conversely, when teams are established as a means to achieve clear performance objectives and when they become the cornerstone of the organizational structure, a convergence occurs in which team and organizational objectives merge. Teams and teamwork are seen as a means to an end and are therefore accepted as the way “we do things around here”.

Step 6 – Measure the effectiveness of the team

How long does it take to turn a group of people into a high performance team? Well, I hate to say it, but the chances of you being a member of a high performing team that meets all the criteria are slim. That’s the bad new. The good news is that most teams should be able to achieve “high performance team” status, which should be more than adequate for the team to achieve its performance goals and be a pleasant environment to work in. . But you have to work on it by repeating the cycle of “plan, implement, measure and adapt”. That old adage that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” applies as much to team building and team building as it does to anything else in life.