Many organizations have found that this time during the Coronavirus response is a good time to rethink their organizations and “reboot” their teams – taking them to a higher level of performance. Whether your organization’s teams continue to work remotely or have returned to the workplace, there are several things you can do to take your teams to a higher level.
In my 20+ years of working with teams, I’d say the most common reason for failure to achieve expected team performance is not completing “Team Basics” at startup. Some people call this “Team Contracting.”
In implementing team structures, almost every organization says it wants to improve performance, achieve innovation – all while gaining the “mutual accountability” that teams are reputed to provide. However, team members will not help one other and hold one another’s performance accountable unless they have made an agreement to do so. It’s common sense.
Think of it in a personal light. Let’s imagine a friend wants to borrow $1000 from you. Provided you have the money, how can you loan it to your friend and have a hope of ever seeing the money again? You create an agreement. It might be in writing or verbal (depending on the level of trust involved), but you both come to agreement on terms that are workable for you both. When the time comes for repaying the loan, you can hold the friend accountable, if needed, because you had an agreement. The agreement is foundational. In this example, the agreement is the shared purpose.
Teams are the same way. They will not have trust for teaming, team members, and the work involved the cultural changes that teams bring unless the team comes to agreement–real agreement forged through candid conversations. These candid conversations don’t just happen. They need to be facilitated skillfully. In a recent FastCompany webinar, a speaker reported that 74% of “team members” say they are incapable of speaking their minds in their meetings. I daresay, those groups in which the members function are not teams yet, if these numbers are true. We have a lot of things we call teams, but they are not teams. True teams build a climate where it works only to be candid, and Team Contracting is Step One. Assuming that the team has been structured and sized in an optimal way (see this blog), leadership then provides a clear team purpose or performance challenge to the team (see this blog). Once the team has received that purpose, the team needs to talk about it, ask questions about it, understand it and where it came from, and potentially revise it in conversation with leadership. They come to agreement: “yes we will work together to tackle this.”
The team follows the same process around goals. Often leadership provides goals, but the team still needs to hash them out and come to agreement on them. Goals are often edited by the team because the people in the process know the processes the best. Often, the team also generates and agrees to additional and/or incremental goals.
Just as important as agreement on purpose and goals, the team also needs to create team ground rules or team norms. Sometimes ground rules are given to teams (some may evolve through training and sound meeting dynamics), but teams will rarely adhere to team norms if they do not generate them within the team. In setting norms, the teams basically addresses the questions: what behaviors are we going to use in the team, and what behaviors will we not tolerate? How a will we work together? How will we get things done? What will our meetings look like? Team members come to agreement and they sometimes create consequences for norms that are particularly hard to keep.
After agreement has been reached on these Team Basics, the team is ready to get underway in earnest. Once the team has formed in this way, members are more likely to hold each other accountable and collaborate well. These steps involved in Team Contracting will need to be revisited and refined over time, as new things will crop up and the team begins to build trust. Build in this review as part of the process, perhaps every few weeks at the beginning and less frequently as time goes by.
The Corona Response provided enough upheaval to uncover the opportunity to go back and re-start our teams to improve team performance and make them even better than they were before.
The next two blogs in this series will discuss two more important principles for taking teams to higher performance:
• Team Meetings That Work
• Leadership Principles for Supporting Teams
For more information or discussion, please do not hesitate to contact us at [email protected]. You can contact Verna Lynch at [email protected] or follow us on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/transformingorganizations/ or at https://www.linkedin.com/company/linchpin-business-advisors-llc.
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