The Five Factors in Building Great Teams

Building teams takes effort and time. Many books have been written on the subject but still many leaders do not appear to understand how to go about building their team. This article summarises the five main factors in building a high performing team.

The Sistine chapel was painted by Michelangelo. Right? Wrong...

It was painted by Michelangelo and sixteen other painters. Essentially he led a team that together created this remarkable work of art that has stood the test of time.

Hollywood regularly feeds our appetite for tales of Warriors, Gladiators and Knights; all individual heroes. We also regularly have stories about Business heroes. The commercial world continually seeks the CEO that can save a business in ideally twelve months! Research however is also telling us that the burn out rate for CEOs is increasing as a result. Evidence proves that teams out perform individuals over time. So why don’t team leaders focus more on this aspect?

Despite all the books written on team dynamics and personalities, leaders are often unclear on what they need to do to build a great team.

Our work in assisting executive teams to build sustainable foundations for growth has suggested that there are five key factors needed to create the platform for high performance. Research by Ruth Wageman et al suggests that almost 50% of the variance between high performing teams and average teams relate to these five factors.

The five key factors that are essential include:

Decide if you actually want a team
Ensure the right people are on the team to maximise alignment
Develop a clear purpose and direction for that team
Optimise team size and embed clear norms
Optimal team coaching

This article is a summary of each of those five factors including some simple examples and illustrations.

1. Decide if you actually want a team

Do you as the leader actually need a team?
It seems obvious but of course it is not! Jon Katzenbach’s work on teams suggests that most teams are in fact working groups.

There are a range of ‘types’ of working groups including informational, decision making, project led, coordinating and consulting. All are task orientated with specific outputs. Some leaders prefer not to have a team. IBM’s Asia Pacific Regional Head decided he did not require a team. Ric Anderson felt he was leading a sort of divisional holding company so a single leadership team was not the answer. He led a collection of working groups that managed each division but did not come together as a traditional executive team would.

However an executive leadership team is different to a working group. It has four main characteristics that make it unique:

Interdependencies between the members as they work toward a collective purpose
Clear boundaries - i.e. it is clear who is on the team and who is not
Stability, as they work together long enough to facilitate shared decision making
Collaboration and collective outputs

ACTION

Decide whether a working group or a team is best suited for your needs.
Don’t refer to it as a team or expect it to work as one if in fact what you want a working group.

2. Ensure the right people are on the team and if not, take action

Jim Collins made a very clear point about getting the “right people on the bus” and we believe he is accurate. However, it is not just about people who have bought into the vision of the leaders. Everybody on a team needs to buy into the vision and strategy in order to maximise alignment to that vision and as thus, maximise execution of that strategy. If people on the team are not aligned, act quickly to ensure their alignment or their exit from the team.

Many leaders inherit a team and often do not consider until it is too late as to whether they want to retain the existing team members. For a senior team, members need to be able to ‘think globally, not locally’ i.e. beyond their own function. The idea of being part of a first team is an essential concept in terms of its leadership capability. Members need to buy into the idea that the leadership team is their first team and not the functional team they are a part of.

Many leaders on Executive teams think that their team is the function they ‘lead’ as opposed to the one they sit on. This can lead to internal competition and lack of alignment.

ACTION

Do you have the right people on your team?
Act quickly to remove individuals if they are not aligned
Ensure the concept of the first team is well understood

3. Get clarity on purpose and direction... fast!

All teams need a clear purpose to guide direction, decisions and activities. Richard Hackman, co author of, “Senior Leadership Teams” suggests that a team purpose needs to be consequential, challenging and clear to have any traction. His research suggests that the highest performing teams spend most time on gaining as much clarity as possible. This allows them to focus on:

Clear execution
When to say NO
Remaining focused on the end goals

Other teams work on the challenging aspect but lose traction when members are unclear as to why they are being challenged so much!

ACTION

Ensure that all your team members can articulate and understand the ‘purpose’ of the team.

4. Optimise team size and embed clear norms

Team based research suggests that the quality of team structure (size and norms) is the dominating factor that engenders success. Structure includes the overall size of the team, the types of tasks focused on (‘meaningful or menial’) and the accepted norms of conduct within the team.

Studies vary on the optimal size of the team. Informational working group /team usually have smaller sizes than an alignment team, for example, team based research usually quotes 8 -10 members to be the ideal size.

However while the size of a team is important (if it is too big it becomes a committee), the task and norms of the Executive team have more impact on the eventual outputs. High performing teams are future orientated by nature and much work is done outside of the team meetings. People feel secure in the team to be able to conduct work outside of the regular meetings. Key projects or strategies are mission critical tasks on which to get the team focused on.

Developing clear and transparent group norms with regards to communication and conduct are essential to building a high performing team. All team members come to the team with prior experience from ‘somewhere’. Their individual mental models of what good communication looks and feels like will differ. The leader is responsible for ensuring the team takes time to discuss and agree on norms of communication and regularly reflect on their success as a team.

ACTION

Set time aside for your team to discuss and agree on communication norms within that team
Ensure there are clear agreements on agreed behaviours in the team

5. Optimal team coaching

All teams are made up of individuals who have come from elsewhere, be it another team, company, industry, town or country. The experiences of each member are varied which leads to different expectations. These expectations influence individual behaviour and group dynamics. In many cases this can lead to dysfunctionality and underperformance.

To overcome these challenges coaching is an essential tool. Coaching can be done internally and externally providing the right environments and skill levels are present.

Three types of coaching that are used for high performing teams:

Individual coaching (one on one with a coach) for individual performance and development
Team coaching for the intact team on its development, performance and norm creation
Peer coaching by the team - of itself. Hackman and O’Connor discovered that peer coaching (when done well with a team that has developed through individual and team coaching) is a most powerful influencer of team effectiveness.

ACTION

Evaluate the level of coaching provided to your team (if any) and add more!

Building great teams takes time and effort. The building blocks are logical and inter-dependent but each requires attention. The outcomes however are worthwhile; just ask anyone who has seen the Sistine chapel!

Download a PDF version of this article by clicking here: Five Factors in Building Great Teams

*These case studies / articles are written on the authentic coaching experiences of our clients.
Please use them as a learning resource and apply them to your own situation where possible and appropriate. Reprinting is allowed only with express permission of Praesta Australia Pty Ltd.