Method #1: Have a Common Mission

Without a common mission, all teams will eventually disintegrate and become entirely ineffective. This mission is defined most clearly by a set of shared values among members of the team-be it contribution, determination, altruism, loyalty, or any other value. When developing a high performance team, make certain that you enlist the services of employees that share a similar value set on some fundamental level. After all, team direction and level of motivation is determined by the amount of shared values within the team.

Some possible shared values for high performing teams include:

A. Value-oriented interactions: high performing teams put a high priority on adding value to every interaction with both customers and other team members. This value can take the form of tangible assets (improved outcomes and measures) or intangibles (increased employee cohesion, improved customer satisfaction).

B. Honesty-high performing teams value honesty, as it provides for clear and workable communication. It also provides a process for readily available constructive feedback.

C. Integrity-enough said!

Method #2: Designate Roles

Everybody has something they excel at. To that end, it is essential that you first understand what your team assets are, particularly with regards to desired work-related outcomes and tasks to be fulfilled. All corporations can benefit from a thorough analysis (usually upon entry into the company, but effective hiring process is another article in and of itself!) whereby employee strengths are readily available for team use.

Once employee strengths are understood, it is important to assign roles and tasks on a deliberate basis. These tasks are derived from desired outcomes, which result from corporate strategic goals. Working backwards from tasks, assign employees to an area of primary strength. Company effectiveness can be improved by a minimum of ten percent (my unscientific estimate) in any statistic or metric by using this simple technique.

Overall, it is important to remember that team members are most valuable where they add the most value, as we discussed earlier.

Method #3: Build Individual and Collective Accountability

Accountability is an oft-discussed but seldom understood concept. In fact, accountability is one area where most teams fall apart, leaving management to wonder why they continue to fail and meet expectations.

Once you have done a thorough job of understanding your employee strengths and delegating according to desired outcomes (which should always be tied to strategic goals) you will need to build in BOTH quantitative and qualitative methods for assigning employee responsibilities. Quantitative methods might include task-specific statistics, whilst qualitative methods might include process reviews, 360 evals, etc. Both are important, as they usually provide convergent information. Utilizing both methods for accountability allows management to pinpoint areas of remediation for specific teams and individual employees.

Of course, it is essential that these methods for building accountability include an agreement and schedule for regular and constructive feedback

Application of the above principles will enable you to build a high-performing team-whereby collective efforts are synergistic and concentration, as opposed to typical efforts (usually by committees, which are usually a waste of resources due to their ineffectiveness) which serve to dilute and misuse the resources available.

Copyright (2005). Leif H. Smith. All rights reserved.