“Oh, my teams are definitely high-performing.” I’ve heard this from countless managers in numerous organizations. Sometimes I wondered where they were keeping all the low-performing teams. Understandably, managers responsible for developing teams want to be seen as doing a good job. Isn’t the promise of high performance the reason we form teams? Without a clear definition of what “high performance” means, it’s easy to defend describing many teams with that term. And if a team is already high-performing, they don’t need to get better, right?
I’ve found that using a precise definition of team performance helps to steer many of the conversations I have with team members, managers, and other folks in organizations to a more productive place. This definition – like much of my thinking about teams – comes from the work of J. Richard Hackman. First, to be a high-performing team, you need to be a team. Real teams have a shared identity, interdependent work, and shared objectives. But just because a collection of people is structurally a team does not mean that they’re a good one. That’s where I use three criteria to determine whether or not a team is high-performing.
Their output meets or exceeds their clients’ expectations
The first thing that defines a high-performing team is that they perform at a high level. For more than a decade, I’ve asked people in my workshops what defines a high-performing team. They usually answer with things that enable high performance: trust, psychological safety, collaboration, etc. The answer I rarely get should be the most obvious one: results. If a team is not producing results, they’re not high performers.
Hackman’s description of this first criterion is slightly more nuanced than that. In Leading Teams, he says:
“The productive output of the team (that is, its product, service, or decision) meets or exceeds the standards of quantity, quality, and timeliness of the team’s clients – that is, of the people who receive, review, and or/use the output.”
Teams produce something for someone. Those people are the team’s clients – and their assessment of the team’s output that matters. Think about a team you are part of or work with. Who are that team’s clients? Is the team meeting or exceeding their expectations for quantity, quality, and timeliness? How do you know?
They get better at working together
Producing results is essential. Satisfying clients is only one of the three criteria, however. The other two are concerned with how the team creates those results. The second test I apply to see if a team is high-performing is how well team members work together to improve – rather than undermine – their ability to work together in the future. Hackman describes it this way:
“The social processes the team uses in carrying out the work enhance members’ capability to work together interdependently in the future.”
I suspect most of us have been on a team that passed the first test but failed this one. That is to say: The client was delighted with the result, and we never wanted to work with any other team members again. That’s not sustainable. If we ignore this, we confuse highly productive teams with high-performing ones. High-performing teams are not only highly productive, but they also become more so over time. The way they work together helps them to learn from their experiences. They develop collective skills and smarter work strategies.
Think about a team you are part of or work with. Does the way they work enhance their ability to work together in the future? Are they producing more, higher quality work faster and with less effort than they did three months ago? Six months ago? Do you expect them to keep improving over the next 3-6 months?
Everyone learns and grows
The second criterion is about the learning and development of the team as a whole. The last test is closely linked: Do the team members learn and grow because they are part of the team? Hackman summarizes this point as:
“The group experience, on balance, contributes positively to the learning and professional development of individual team members.”
Research shows that these last two are strongly correlated. It’s highly unlikely that the team gets better collectively without its members developing, and vice versa. Still, it’s worth pointing out that both need to be present for a team to be high-performing.
Think about a team you are or were a part of. Did being part of that team contribute positively to your growth and development? How?
High-performing teams are antifragile
In Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.”
This quality is why we call great teams great. The ability of top-flight teams to develop and learn – the second and third of Hackman’s criteria – makes them antifragile. And this is what is missing from most teams who claim – or whose managers’ claim – the title of “high-performing.”
