High-Performance Teams

Katzenbach and Smith in “The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organisation,” (1993, McKinsey) suggest that organisational high performance can only be achieved through high-performance teams. If the organisation remains simply a collection of individuals, the organisation will never achieve its maximum potential. Their research revealed interesting insight into what makes a team a high-performance team.

Here’s what makes a team’s performance “high” followed by further implications (“et alors”).

High-Performance Teams

The authors’ research into team performance led to five “common sense” findings that made a significant difference in team performance:

A demanding performance challenge tends to create a team

- A “hunger” for performance is more important that team-building exercises.
- A team will fail to become a high-performance team without a genuine challenge.

The disciplined application of “team basics” is often overlooked.

- Team basics include size, purpose, goals, skills, approach and accountability
- High-performance requires all of the basics to be in place.

Team performance opportunities exist in all parts of the organisation

- Team basics apply to all different groups e.g. task forces, work groups, management teams.
- Despite differences, all high-performance teams share the same commonalities.

Teams at the top are the most difficult.

- Complexities, long-term challenges, and time pressure reduce senior team performance.
- Senior teams that do achieve high-performance tend to have fewer members.

Most organisations intrinsically prefer individual over group accountability.

- Job descriptions, pay, careers and performance evaluations focus on individuals
-  High-performance teams emphasise group accountability.

 

Et alors

These are the “common sense” findings about high-performance teams and indeed they do appear to be intuitive: get the basics defined, have a clear challenge and agree to be collectively accountable, then you should be on track. Leaders should take note that the authors found that “team leaders are best distinguished by their attitude and what they do not do” – focusing on team building for example is not always a route to high-performance.  Finally, one of the key “uncommon sense” findings is also worth noting here: high-performance teams “learn.” "By translating longer-term purposes into definable performance goals and then developing the skills needed to meet those goals, learning not only occurs in teams but endures…”