Module 4: Leading a High Performing Team

module 4: leading a high performing team

In difficult times, people look to leaders to be a pillar of light in a stormy ocean. But this isn’t always easy. Not only are you grappling with your own personal challenges, but you’re also leading a team of people going through a similar rollercoaster ride. Plus there’s your boss’s demands and expectations to manage.

Your ability to be successful in this challenging environment will depend on the strength and agility of your team and their ability to focus on the vision and deliver the results needed.

In this module, we’ll explore how you, as a leader, can set your team up for success. We’ll explore the signs of high performing teams and how to manage the four stages of team dynamics. Plus we’ll dive into the four essential elements of managing your team’s performance and how to optimize each element.

Watch this short video clip of a Formula 1 pit stop. It’s a great example of a high performing team where every millisecond counts.

  • What makes this team high performing?
  • Who is the leader?
  • How would have this team become so high performing?
  • What would hinder this team’s performance?

Read the following three articles.

McKinsey:
High-Performing Teams: A Timeless Leadership Topic

HBR:
The Secrets of Great Teamwork

Training Industry:
The Brains Science of Creating High Performing Teams

Self-Reflection:

  • What were your key takeaways from reading these articles?
  • What are you already doing well to build a high performing team?
  • What could you be doing better?

The forming–storming–norming–performing model of group development was first proposed by Bruce Tuckman, an American Psychological Researcher, in 1965. He proposed that all these phases are necessary and inevitable in order for a team to grow, face up to challenges, tackle problems, find solutions, plan work, and deliver results. In 1977, he added a fifth stage, named Adjourning.

Forming:

The team meets and learns about the opportunities and challenges. They agree on goals and begin to tackle the tasks. Team members tend to behave quite independently. They may be motivated but are usually relatively uninformed of the issues and objectives of the team. Team members are usually on their best behavior but very focused on themselves.

Storming:

In this stage, the group starts to sort itself out and gain each others’ trust. They voice their opinions and, as a result of this, conflict may arise between team members as power and status are assigned. They start to learn about individual working styles and what it is like to work with each other as a team, it also identifies different hierarchy of status of positions in the group.

Norming:

In this stage, all team members take responsibility and have the ambition to work for the success of the team’s goals. They start tolerating the whims and fancies of the other team members. They accept others as they are and make an effort to move on.  They share a common goal. 

Performing:

By this stage, team members are now competent, autonomous and able to handle the decision-making process without supervision. Group norms and roles are established, and group members focus on achieving common goals often reaching an unexpectedly high level of success.” Dissent is expected and allowed as long as it is channeled through means acceptable to the team.

Adjourning:

In 1977, Tuckman, jointly with Mary Ann Jensen, added a fifth stage to the four stages: adjourning that involves completing the task, and breaking up the team (in some texts referred to as “mourning”).

Given what you now know about Tuckman’s team dynamic model, watch this video clip from “Remember The Titans” and watch as the team goes through the four stages.

What new thoughts does this spark for you?

Now that you have watched the previous two videos explaining and demonstrating Tuckman’s stages of team development, let’s explore what your role as a leader is for each stage.

Forming: The leader’s role is to create a sense of belonging by sharing a clear vision, setting goals and objectives, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and role modeling ideal behaviors.

Storming: Passing through the storming phase can be difficult, but necessary. Here the leader’s role is to allow people to establish their influence, by recognizing differences, managing conflict, providing constructive feedback, and developing team processes.

Norming: During this stage, the leader’s role is to build a strong sense of achievement by improving productivity, re-establishing roles and responsibilities, resolving conflict, and cultivating a team culture.

Performing: By now the team is working interdependently and the role of the leader is now to cultivate unconditional trust by supporting and stretching team members, providing quality tools and resources, giving regular feedback, and facilitating self-monitoring of key KPIs.

As a team leader, it is inevitable that you will need to lead your team through each stage. This will take time, patience, and persistence. To avoid getting stuck in any stage, it pays to understand what your team needs from you to move through that stage and transition into a high performing team.

Self-Reflection:

  • What stage do you think your team is at?
  • What signs can you see?
  • What do they need from you right now?
  • What could you do more of/less of to enable your team to get to the next stage?

T.E.A.M. Model by G. Goddard, Brainsparker Academy

Download T.E.A.M. infographic here

As you navigate your team through the different stages of team development, there are four levers that you can use to optimize the performance of your team.

Talent: By understanding the knowledge, skills and experiences that each team member brings, you’re able to draw on their talents and ensure you get the best out of them individually and in group projects.

Engagement: When your people are engaged and motivated they do their best work. Building trust and “psychological safety” is essential for cultivating collaboration.

Alignment: Key to your role as a leader is to provide a clear vision and way forward, and ensure everyone is aligned around, and contributing to, the strategy for getting there.

Management: To ensure your team stays on track you need to have a keen eye on key KPIs. This enables you to anticipate problems, course-correct when needed, and celebrate your successes.

Let’s explore each one of these levers in more detail.

The question to ask yourself is “Are you optimizing the talent in your team?” 

To answer this, you need to actually know what talent you already have in your team. This goes beyond what you see day-to-day.  

It means really getting to know each member of your team and understanding their personality, what knowledge and expertise they have, what skills they bring, and what motivates them.

Look beyond their current role and explore their past experience well. You ever know what hidden talents they might have that could be put to good use!

Self Reflection:

When you bring this talent insight together reflect on these questions:

  • What knowledge and experience do we each bring?
  • What skills do we have as a collective?
  • How do our different personalities work best together?
  • What are the best roles for each one of us?
  • How can I get the best out of this team – always?

Engagement is key if you want your people to produce their best work. And each person will be motivated by different things.

Going back to the Lumina Spark color archetypes, you’ll see in the graph above that each color needs to see, hear, and feel different things to feel motivated. Plus they need to see certain signals from you to feel they can trust you and have confidence in you as their leader.

If Paul has strong Green Energy, he needs to feel heard and know that you care especially about people. So having regular 1-on-1 sessions with him, listening to his opinion, and sharing personal stories will really engage him. A formal, task-list, and tick-box conversation will likely leave him feeling disengaged.

To explore this concept of motivation further, Daniel Pink wrote a great book called “Drive” which discusses the influence of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.

Read this article on “extrinsic motivation”

Read this article on “intrinsic motivation”

What new thoughts do these articles spark for you?

Self-Reflection:

Think about each member of your team:

  • What do you think is their primary color energy?
  • What normally motivates them?
  • In what situations do you see them come alive?
  • What situations bring them down?
  • What do they look for from you as their leader?

Now ask yourself the same questions. Your own level of engagement will influence the people around you.

In Module 3 we talked about the importance of sharing a clear vision to create a solid pathway through uncertainty and ambiguity.

As your team deals with the day-to-day problems and challenges it’s easy for them to get distracted. This can waste precious time and energy.

Your role as a leader is to consistently remind them of the vision so that they can prioritize their time and energy on the specific actions that will lead to this vision.  

So you have to hold the reigns firmly on where the team is going, and why. To do this, you’ll need to regularly take some time out and check in with:

  • What is our vision and purpose?
  • How do the team’s goals align with personal goals?
  • How do we adapt and realign as the external environment evolves?

In addition, you can leverage the team dynamic to create agreements on:

  • What is our process for making decisions?
  • How do we hold each other to account?

This way, everyone in the team is crystal clear on the shared goals, and they are committed to getting there as a team.


Self Reflection:

  • Do you have a clear vision for the way forward?
  • How can you communicate this with your team in an impactful way?
  • How can you consistently reinforce this vision?
  • What will you do if you need to course-correct?

As you move towards your vision in times of change and uncertainty, it’s important for you to have your finger on the pulse so that you can anticipate problems and quickly spot opportunities.

There is always a delicate balance around how much information you need, and this will also depend on your personality type.

Basically, you need to have enough information to know if you’re all on track, or not. So, first of all, define what your key measures of performance are.

Then decide on:

  • What processes do we need to track our progress?
  • What tools do we use to communicate and stay in touch?
  • What happens if we might miss our goals?

Once you’ve set up your KPIs and efficient ways of working, you will need to constantly be clear on the top priorities, clearly communicate these, be able to track them and evaluate results, and then be able to re-shape the priorities based on your progress.

And then, of course, remember to celebrate your successes!

Self-Reflection:

  • What team management processes do you need to launch?
  • What team tools do you need to introduce?
  • What information do you need and who will give it to you?
  • How will you communicate the top priorities?

Think about where your team dynamic is today:

  • Which of the four stages of dynamics do you think it is in?
  • What do they need most from you right now?

Thinking about the T.E.A.M. Performance model, which one of the elements is most important to develop right now?

  • What will be your strategy to develop this?
  • What will be your first actions?
  • How will you evaluate your success?

Here is the presentation we used in the live webinar for Module 4:

Download presentation

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  • This work is the copyright of Gabriella Goddard, 2020. All rights reserved.
  • If you share this material, you must identify Gabriella Goddard as the creator, and no alteration can be made to the original material.
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