We’ve learned that businesses can thrive when they have an effective team structure, but can struggle when those teams are ineffective. It isn’t enough to organise people into teams and sit back expecting that performance will automatically follow. In some cases it does, but in others it doesn’t. Why is that?

Our research and experience show that the best teams don’t magically happen. If you want to be a high performing team, you need to follow a deliberate process, which we have been sharing with teams across many industries.

It’s a process of Creation, Evaluation and Refinement, and when teams fail to engage in these three areas, they inevitably struggle and underperform.

Here is a summary of what is involved in each of the three areas.

Create

• Create the vision and purpose so everyone is clear about where they are heading as a team

• Create the structure sand mechanisms that enable the team to do its work how we will make decisions, how we will deal with disagreements and conflict, how we will communicate, how we will prioritise what we want to do, etc)

• Create the values and behaviours that will dictate how we work together

• Create the environment outside the team so that we have the right level of support and influence

• Create the mechanisms for learning and developing together

• Create a reward structure whereby the team can celebrate its successes

Evaluate

• Regularly assess how well the team is sticking to its values, behaviours, policies and procedures

• Keep checking how people are feeling within the team

• Reach out to stakeholders to make sure that they are getting what they need from the team

• Keep looking for opportunities to strengthen the team and use the teams strengths

• Check progress against agreed objectives, and keep considering the relevance and value of those objectives

Refine

• Make small adjustments as you go, instead of wholesale revisions

• When you know what works, do more of that stuff and less of the stuff that doesn’t work

• Absorb the new experiences, skills and perspectives of team members

• Let people outside the team know what you are doing and why you are making changes to the way you work

• Simplify and get rid of cumbersome processes that add little value

In our competitive landscape, teams do not have the luxury of time to bed in. Once established, they need to start performing quickly, racing through Tuckman’s stages of development and delivering almost immediately. That’s why it is essential to take the short amount of time at the formation stage to design what and how the team will deliver. Failing to do this at the start will trip you up badly later on.

If you want to help your teams get up and running, talk to us at Kay-Lambert Associates. It’s what we do.