Leveraging Insights About Successful, High-Performing Teams to Minimize Risk

Talent management is an agile way to develop a response to that risk, though you’ll need to consider how you’ll navigate the complex modern landscape created by low unemployment, at least prior to the current COVID-19 pandemic, a ballooning gig economy, increasing digitization and more.

To that end, a refresher on what exactly makes for a successful, healthy and engaged team is tremendously beneficial, helping you decide how you’ll identify, acquire and retain talent and navigate the totality of the talent management process alongside your colleagues and other employees.

Traits of High-Performing Teams: Why Do They Work?

High-performing and successful teams have many things in common. By studying these traits, you can emphasize these qualities during talent acquisition, team formation and day-to-day operations, helping you cut down on the significant risk of flying blind and hoping teams come together to accomplish their intended purpose.

High-performing teams:

• Unite around common goals and understanding:
  Successful teams understand not only their shared goals, motivation and purpose, but also the standardized rules, processes and environment that drive progress forward.
   
• Feature talented, hard-working people:
  It seems like a no-brainer, but recruiting the most talented people – who also feature the motivation and work-ethic to constantly strive to improve – is critical.
   
• Incentivize constant improvement:
  Even though ideal team members exhibit motivation and drive that originates internally, other incentives for strong performance makes them feel valued and accomplished.
   
• Take their cues from strong leaders:
  The culture of the team begins at the top. Effective, strong leaders build team members up, get their hands dirty to create a feeling of unity, support their teams and manage outside relationships, and more.
   
• Have empowered members:
  Though teams have clear leaders, each member needs to feel empowered to take initiative, make decisions and feel like they’re trusted beyond being given assignments from the top.
   
• Effectively communicate:
  Communication is perhaps the most critical aspect of successful teams. All other aspects may need to shift in response to member needs, but these needs can’t be expressed without clear, open lines of communication and the trust necessary to utilize those methods.

The 5 Stages of Developing Your Team

Identifying, acquiring and retaining talent are the three steps of effective talent managements, and it’s helpful to break down team building into similar bite-sized chunks that can help you understand how to ensure your teams get the most out of the entire process.

Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, identified a five-stage development process that most teams follow to become high performing. He called the stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Consider this five-step process when tasked with creating teams, managing them throughout their life cycle and assessing their overall performance:

1. Forming
   The forming stage is largely self-explanatory – this stage will see you choose the team’s members, bring them together for initial orientation and interaction, and allow members to get answers to high-level questions about the team’s purpose, norms, and more.
    
2. Storming
   This contentious and critical stage sees members assert themselves more freely, which can lead to conflict. If a team is to emerge from this stage and become more cohesive, these conflicts will need to be addressed, cliques need to be avoided, and work toward norms and shared goals needs to be done.
    
3. Norming
   If the team passes through the storming phase, the norms that naturally develop through conflict resolution will begin to solidify. These include leaders, roles, processes, shared motivation and purpose, and more.
    
4. Performing
   With norms established, true performance begins. The team hits its stride, functioning at a high level under this shared understanding, and significant progress is made toward the team’s ultimate mission.
    
5. Adjourning
   Once the majority of the team’s purpose has been accomplished, the adjourning phase sees the remainder of tasks wrapped up and, in the case of more temporary initiatives, the team disbanded. Sometimes, a gathering or ceremonial acknowledgement of everything the team accomplished can provide closure.

These stages can be critical in assessing the health and performance of individual teams. By analyzing the activity of your team, any conflicts, its productivity and more, you can get an understanding of where the team might fall on this spectrum of phases and take appropriate action to either promote continued success or get things back on track.

Managing Conflict

Even for the most successful teams, conflict is a fact of life. The goal, then, is to ensure conflicts are correctly and maturely managed in the performing phase, not allowed to disrupt the team’s functionality in the storming phase.

Some common causes of conflict include:

• Distant leaders who feel elevated compared to their teams
• Impulsive, solo decision-making
• Breakdowns in communication and unclear processes
• Lack of definition in roles, mission and shared goals
• Inability to overcome personal differences

There are nearly endless other conflict-starters, though they usually boil down to one thing – inattention to the traits of high-performing teams outlined above.

However, for the most successful teams, conflict can be a positive thing.

By dealing with conflict openly and immediately after it emerges, framing conflict as beneficial due to the diversity of views and its impact on overall growth, and focusing on making each individual feel empowered and heard, you can turn conflict into a way to mold your teams into even more productive finished, polished products.

Looking Forward During the Coronavirus Pandemic

As industries the world over work to adapt to the reverberations caused by COVID-19, the ever-shifting landscape of the modern workforce, new talent management requirements and both expected and unexpected emerging risk, focusing in on these techniques for the formation of highly successful teams will continue to become increasingly important.

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