Why do some teams perform at a high level while others struggle? To be clear, when I talk about a high-performing team, I mean one that is highly productive, continues to improve over time, and develops all of the people who are part of it. Teams are complex systems, so you cannot directly cause a team to perform at a high level or predict with certainty that it will or won’t. You can, however, create conditions that make it more likely a team will develop in the way you hope.
There are six factors I recommend leaders pay attention to when they want to cultivate high-performing teams. These come from the research of J. Richard Hackman, Ruth Wageman, and others. I’ve previously described three of them, the essential conditions for high performance. Those are primarily a matter of team design, and the best time to address them is before the team starts work. The other three, which Hackman and Wageman call enabling conditions, are about the development of the team as it works together. Well-designed teams have the best chance at reaching their potential when they have:
- Productive norms to guide their behavior
- A supportive context around them
- Effective coaching to foster their development
Developing Productive Norms
One of the essential conditions for high-performing teams is that they have the right mix of people so that the necessary interactions can occur. Productive norms ensure that those interactions happen in the right way.[1] Norms are shared agreements about what behaviors are useful to the team and which ones are not welcome. These agreements are concerned with how people act, not with unexpressed ideas, values, or beliefs. One of the keys to team performance is ensuring that the benefits of working together outweigh the required coordination costs. Clear expectations of how team members will behave reduce the need for continuous negotiation to manage team behavior. Creating clear mutual expectations up-front reduces long-run coordination costs – even if that means going slower now to go faster later.
Of course, not all agreements about behavior improve team performance. Research has shown that the most effective norms fall into two categories. The first group concerns behaviors that help the team develop and implement performance strategies appropriate for their particular task and situation. All teams make choices about how to carry out their work. Many teams fall into the trap of failing to look outward as they do so. Teams that don’t actively scan their environment for threats and opportunities are likelier to perform at a lower level. Norms that counteract teams’ natural tendencies to be inward-focused and reactive help overcome this. For similar reasons, it is common for team members to fail to use their teammates’ knowledge and skills effectively. This is true even when their work requires everyone’s involvement. They may do it because they aren’t aware of what other team members are capable of, because they discount others’ abilities, or because they believe the environment isn’t safe for interpersonal risk-taking (like pointing out errors, admitting mistakes, or asking for help). The second group of useful norms addresses these factors, which gives the team access to more resources to do interdependent work. When a team has agreements that help them to exhibit these two types of behaviors, they are more likely to perform at higher levels.
Shaping a Supportive Context
After a team starts up and as it does its work, the organization around it continues to influence it. Two key organizational elements contribute to the team’s ability to perform. The first is having specific types of support. This includes access to:
- The information they need to perform their work
- Tools, training, and other people to supplement their knowledge and skill
- Relevant material needs, like equipment and supplies
It is obvious the absence of these resources will hurt team performance. The other organizational factor, however, is more subtle. Teams are more likely to reach high performance when their members are recognized for their team’s performance and when team-supporting behaviors are reinforced. Recall that teams have shared objectives; this differentiates them from co-acting groups. When their organization’s recognition and reward system focuses solely on individual performance, teams are less likely to perform at a high level.
When I raise this point, some managers object that they can’t change their company’s performance management policies, so their hands are tied. Managers often have more flexibility in this regard than they realize. I once worked in a large corporation with a highly formal performance review and compensation process. We evaluated every employee yearly based on cultural fit and achievement of performance objectives. We couldn’t change this process when we moved to a more team-oriented way of working. As it turned out, we didn’t have to. We got all the managers involved to set each team member’s objectives to be the same – the team’s shared objectives. When we were all being measured on and rewarded for the same thing, we stopped working at cross purposes to each other and started behaving like a real team.
Providing Effective Coaching
The third enabling condition for team performance is effective coaching. Coaching a team is not the same as coaching the people who make it up. Coaching needs to be focused on the team to make a difference in team performance. This means helping individual members learn ways to strengthen their contributions to collective results and exploring together ways the team can make the best possible use of its members’ expertise and perspectives.
Research also shows the type of coaching most likely to help a team reach high performance focuses on the team’s work. Coaching that only addresses how the team members feel about each other tends to come up short. Interpersonal problems can derail team performance, but conflict-free working relationships don’t guarantee success. Coaching interventions that prevent disagreement and discomfort can be detrimental to team performance. For most of us, conflict produces anxiety, and we’d much rather work in a low-anxiety environment. As a result, many teams – and the leaders that coach them – want to minimize disagreement and conflict, even when that reduces their overall effectiveness. Instead, teams should decide how to usefully engage when problems arise. Clear expectations about this reduce the overall anxiety level and increase team performance, even if they are initially uncomfortable.
Similarly, leaders should not intervene at the first sign of difficulty. Effective coaching addresses those difficulties that impact team performance and are beyond the team’s current ability to work through. Team coaching is intended to help the team improve its ability to manage its own processes. Effective coaching involves knowing when to intervene and when to let the team handle things. A shared struggle followed by team success is often the best route to feeling good about each other. As Elizabeth Taylor observed, “There’s no deodorant like success.”
Enabling High Performance
In an earlier article, I explained the three essential conditions for team performance: real team, compelling purpose, and right people. Establishing those from the outset goes a long way toward fostering high performance. Addressing the three enabling conditions further stacks the deck in the team’s favor. What do these look like in action? Think back to the best team you’ve ever been part of. It should be a team that was not only highly productive but also got better at working together over time and helped each of its members to develop and grow. As you read through each of the questions below, if your answer is “yes,” think about what was needed to create that condition.
Productive Norms
- Did team members clearly understand what behaviors they expected of each other?
- Did the team engage in behaviors that helped everyone’s expertise and perspectives get used?
- Did the team engage in behaviors that helped them to develop practical approaches to their work?
Supportive Context
- Did the team have all the information they needed to perform their work?
- Were team members able to supplement their knowledge and skill with tools, training, and other experts?
- Could the team access relevant material resources, equipment, and supplies?
- Were team members recognized and rewarded for their contributions to team performance and growth?
Effective Coaching
- Was the team coached in ways that helped it improve its ability to manage its own processes?
- Was there team coaching that focused on the task at hand?
- Did coaching come not too early or too late, but at just the right time?
Develop High-Performing Teams by Focusing on Conditions
As I have said repeatedly, team performance is an emergent phenomenon. It’s more like a garden than a wristwatch. You can’t guarantee that it will happen, but cultivating the right conditions increases the chances that teams will develop, flourish, and produce.
In the books Leading Teams and Senior Leadership Teams, behavior norms are combined with guidelines for team size into a quality called “Enabling Structure” or “Sound Structure.” In Collective Intelligence, Hackman moves the size guidelines to the essential condition called “Right People” and calls this enabling condition “Clear Norms of Conduct.” I tend to use the latter formulation.
