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The High-Performance Puzzle: What separates great teams and how to build a culture of high performance in your organization.

By Dajana Kolakovic

Creating high performing teams has always been a holy grail of business management. The reasons are compelling: teams that perform better contribute to improving the fortunes of their organizations in significant ways. In a Brendan Hall study, 72% of executives indicated having high performing teams had a positive effect on overall organizational productivity. A McKinsey Quarterly article goes as far as stating there is a “1.9 times increased likelihood of having above-median financial performance” when the leadership team is working effectively together.

There is no surprise that there has been an extensive body of work directed towards understanding the underlying causes of creating high-performance teams.

Harvard professor Amy Edmondson's work — later backed up by Google’s Aristotle project — revealed that creating an environment of Psychological Safety is critical to unlocking high performance in teams. MIT’s Sandy Pentland’s empirical study using innovative sensor data found that patterns of communication between team members are crucial to enhancing performance. And Daniel Goleman, Stephen Wolff, and Vanessa Druskat found that Team Emotional Intelligence — the interaction of trust, identity and team efficacy — separates great performing teams from others.

But what do high performing teams look like? How do they do their work — and what do high performing teams do differently from the rest?

These were the questions posed to the data scientists at Comparative Agility, a leading agile assessment and continuous improvement platform. Based on validated survey data from more than 2,000 companies in 84 countries, they went to work identifying the concrete patterns of behavior that separates high performing teams from everyone else.

Here’s what they found high-performance teams do differently:

1. They regularly reflect on how they work together — and take timely action on improving their work processes.
   Retrospectives — a fundamental part of Scrum where teams regularly inspect how they work and identify ways of improving — can often descend into griping sessions or become sources of frustration if the team is not able to make tangible progress in a timely manner. High-performance teams consistently reflect on how they work — and take action when things need to change.
2. They are not afraid of confronting issues — even to people who may have a higher position in the organization.
   One of the patterns that differentiates high-performance teams from the average teams is that interactions are not hampered or negatively affected by titles or positions within the company. This is consistent with what William Schneider defines as a “Competence” culture in the Reengineering Alternative; finding the right solution based on empirical factors such as analytics and validated data is more important than who comes up with the solution.
3. They are comfortable with a degree of uncertainty — and do not attempt to get all the answers up front.
   High-performance teams understand that in environments characterized by uncertainty and volatility, spending an excessive amount of time on upfront analysis is a fool’s errand. In contrast to average teams, the high performers, therefore, embrace uncertainty and recognize that information will take shape as a natural part of the work; they appreciate what complexity theorists call “emergence”.

Although the data scientists detected other differences between how high performing teams and average teams report they work, these three factors — regular retrospection, speaking up regardless of role and being comfortable with not knowing all at once — were key factors that separated the two data sets.

How can this information help inform a strategy that helps create more high-performance teams? Here’s some concrete steps leaders can take right now:

Utilize data to Drive Continuous Improvement

High performing teams are aware of shared strengths and weaknesses, both as a team and as individual performers. Data improves awareness and can help leaders recognize key behaviors exhibited by the team, as well as areas of improvement and reinforcement. And as indicated earlier — the high Performing Teams reflect on their work and take action on findings! To get started, take a simple survey as a team, reflect on the findings together, and identify areas of improvement that are meaningful to your context.

Create a Safe Environment

A safe environment goes beyond safety hazards and signs, a safe environment is one where teams feel a sense of importance, equality, and support from their peers. In a safe environment, there is no fear of suffering negative consequences when speaking one’s mind and a culture of trust is embraced by all. By trusting each other, and by taking into account individual opinions and ideas we are widening our horizons and redirecting our way of thinking.

Lead by Example

Creating trust and an environment of psychological safety starts with leadership. Admit you might be wrong at times, highlight occasional failures and emphasize the learnings — and consequent improvements — created as a result! Enable an environment where your team is not afraid to communicate in an open manner, as great communication will help establish genuine trust among team members and yourself.

Develop a Growth Mindset

We work in a vast range of industries that are constantly changing, so we have to find a way to adapt and grow together in order to continue being effective and productive. This is why it is crucial for team members to be open and willing to receive feedback from each other. Promote growth in team and organization mindset by teaching them how to first listen, and then respond. A growth mindset enables team members to try new things, as they are more willing to get back up should they make a mistake.

Emphasizing the growth mindset was one of the pillars of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s management framework credited with turning around the company after the technology pioneer had lost its way.

Growing high-performance teams is not a matter of following a set of simple steps, it requires an intentional approach to creating an environment where teams can thrive so trust can build over time.

Despite the challenges, not being open to changing how we work might be the riskier option: as business environments continue to be characterized by more complexity and uncertainty, only the organizations that embrace a high-performance team culture are likely to benefit from disorder.

For this analysis, we first identified the highest-performing organizations based on objective financial metrics, then we isolated the teams with the highest average ratings in the Outcomes dimension within that data set. We examined the patterns of correlation among all teams, looking at the degree to which ratings on each statement would correlate to ratings on the Outcomes statements. We then compared the observed correlation patterns for the teams with high outcomes from high performing organizations to the patterns observed among all other teams. We took note of those areas (specific questions or characteristics) where the relationships were notably stronger for high-performing teams in organizations that objectively outperformed the market.