Creating a high performing team is crucial for every organization to carry out their work, bring out superior performance and build up a tremendous competitive advantage.
A group of individuals with specialized yet complementary expertise and skills focused on common goals. As a team, they collaborate, innovate and produce consistently superior outputs. The group relentlessly strives to excel in performance through shared leadership, open communication, clear role responsibilities, team rules, and early conflict resolution. As a result, they possess a strong sense of mutual trust and accountability. All this contributes to being a high-performing team.
Even though the outburst of the pandemic and the penetration of digital technology have transformed the workplace to extraordinary lengths, high performing teams still remain the backbone of contemporary organizational structure. From running a business organization, creating new products and services to delivering them to the customers requires a collaborative high-performance team.
So, creating a high performing team is crucial for every organization to carry out their work, bring out superior performance and build up a tremendous competitive advantage. Let’s look at some of the significant characteristics of high-performance teams.
Characteristics of High Performing Teams
A high performing team is more than a group of workers simply following orders. They have some of these distinguishing characteristics.
· A deep sense of purpose to the mission
· Great mentors to consistently motivate the team.
· They have work-life balance
· They have courage to speak out their thoughts
· Mutual commitment, interdependence, and trust among team members
· They have ambitious goals
· A clear understanding of the team’s responsibilities and individual obligations.
How to Build A High Performing Team?
High performing teams are easy to spot, and writing down their characteristics is far easier. But creating high performing teams isn’t easy, but the benefits are definitely worth the effort. There are different ways towards building high performing teams, but here are a few key factors to focus on.
1. Open Communication Is A Priority
Open communication is the cornerstone of a high-performance team and is taken for granted by average business teams. However, it will be a costly mistake if an organization fails to promote open communication, resulting in poor output, elusive targets, and ineffective employee engagement.
For creating high performing teams, managers should focus on open communication that motivates the workforce and boosts the productivity and profitability of the organization. Managers should also transparently disseminate the company information.
Of course, there are various barriers to open communication. Some of them are lack of listening, conflicting communication, and emotional distractions. However, you are on the way to successfully building a high-performance team if you overcome all these open communication barriers. There are several leading virtual employee engagement activities, online team-building games, and platforms to help you to beat these challenges. These digital tools enhance collaboration and open communication among team members as well.
2. Set Quantifiable Goals
The things that can’t be measured cannot be achieved. So, high performing teams always set quantifiable goals and objectives. By doing so, the high performing teams know precisely what they are working for and how the output contributes to their productivity and the business's profitability.
Online team building platforms help the team members to develop quantifiable goals and commit themselves to achieve them.
3. Promote Emotional Quotient (EQ)
Emotional Quotient (EQ), popularly known as Emotional Intelligence (EI), is an individual's ability to balance emotions and thoughts. An emotionally intelligent individual can understand and control their own emotions while empathizing with other people's emotions and feelings.
EQ is deeply ingrained in the DNA of a high performing team, and it is a powerful driver of teamwork. A group of emotionally intelligent people carries out open communication effectively. They naturally tend to foster loyalty and engagement. As a result, high performing teams fine-tune their collaborative skills to push towards more fulfilling success.
4. Stress on Continuous Learning
In the current Information Age, continuous learning is an inevitable necessity. Apart from building high performing teams, it is essential to smoothly sail through skill gaps and different types of digital transformations.
Technology, particularly emerging technologies, constantly changes. As a result, businesses stress faster learning and skill development among team members. Team members in a high-performance team help each other in learning and upgrade their learning ability through various digital training sources and tools.
Businesses looking for creating a high performance team should make continuous learning their priority. Therefore, apart from virtual employee engagement activities and online games, they turn towards leading online learning platforms to provide interactive training to their employees in emerging technologies. These online programs are more likely to be effective than merely reading or watching video tutorials.
5. Leadership
High performance teams are led by highly performing leaders. There is no doubt that leaders who focus on purpose, goals, relationships, and an unwavering commitment to results are behind all high-performing teams and every business organization.
More than that, building high performing teams also requires essential leadership skills. Some of them are:
· The ability to keep up with the relevance and meaning of the business purpose and goals.
· The willingness to build commitment and confidence among employees.
· Consistently motivates team members to enhance their skills.
· Manage relationships without hindering team performance.
· Courage to overcome challenges.
· Openness to provide equal opportunities for everyone.
· Finally, get to the bottom and do the real work.
A Few Little Steps for Creating a High Performing Team
To survive and thrive in today’s digitally transforming, highly competitive business world, every enterprise should be backed by high performing teams. And, building high performing teams doesn’t happen by chance.
To develop such teams effectively, managers should identify the strengths and weaknesses of team members. Then group them in a manner in which they can collaborate well and complement each other with their varying talents, skills, and attributes. Ultimately, this holistic workforce will work consistently towards meeting business challenges and goals. In short, building a high-performance team seems like a daunting task.
But towards this end, a number of online game platforms can offer some help. Online games equip team leaders and Human Resource (HR) managers with the right skillsets for creating high-performing teams. These short games help team members to get over boredom and get back to their work afresh. In addition, online games are tailored for business teams of every shape and size, satisfying their business needs. It also allows the HR department to organize online gaming tournaments for employees taking employee engagement to the next level.
