High Performance Teams I Am

High Performance Teams

I am well-suited to a leadership role with a high-performance team. I understand what it takes to drive such teams and allow them to reach their fullest potential. There are basically three things you need to master -- communication, culture and change.

Communication is the lifeblood of any high performance team. It allows people to work independently, which harnesses the capabilities of all individuals, but communication does much more than that. Communication allows for these unique individuals to function as a singular unit. They are able to understand the project in the same way, from the same basic vision. Having fluid, open lines of communication also allows the team members to work closely with one another, something that allows for constant feedback. This keeps everybody on the same page, while still allowing for autonomy. Now, almost every team has some sort of communication mechanism, but the best teams have the best communication. Let me explain what that looks like.

You need to have communication channels that work. We want to keep things in writing so that when we look them up in the future, we get it right. So email, Wikis and other permanent records are important. We also want to ensure that there are no intercultural issues in our communication. This is important because we are hiring workers from all over the world now. An Indian, a Korean and an American might be a good start for an off-color joke, but it's also the real world of high performance teams and these cultures do not think the same about their roles in the organization, they do not communicate in the same ways. Just because we all use email does not mean we use it in the same way. So the head of the team has to be aware of that, and ensure that the channels of communication are working the way they should.

Managing a team from a communications standpoint also means ensuring that the communication is clean. Noise is a word that describes the flow of superfluous information that only serves to confuse or obfuscate. I'll give you an example -- when you arrive in the morning, there are forty emails in your inbox, and most of them are six pages long and have nothing to do with you, you ignore them right? Well, if somewhere in that forty emails is something important, you'll never know, because you didn't really read it. So that's what noise is and why it needs to be eliminated.

But as good as I am at encouraging communication, I also like to foster a high-performance culture. If you think about what organizational culture is, it's the physical structures, language, rituals, ceremonies, stories, legends…all the things we associate with the word culture. The organization has these and it helps to bind the members of the organization together. We see someone with a company shirt at the football game, we say "hi," because we're all working together. It is the same thing with high performance teams. Everybody works together, so the team needs its own culture to help motivate itself -- it is an organizational subculture that makes the high performance team something special. You can put anything into the organizational culture that you want. You can build in that drive for superior performance, to be the best. I always want to do that. You can build in a code of ethics -- we do that at the corporate level now. The other thing you can do is to blend the team culture with the overall organizational culture. That team subculture can bleed into other areas of the organization, creating a shift in the overall org culture, for the better.