6 Important Rules to Build a High Performing Team (Part-II)

The lifecycle of team formation moves from 'Forming, Storming, Norming and then Performing'. We have seen what it means to be in Forming and Storming stage of team formation in first post, let's look at next phases and next rule to build high performing team.

Norming:

If project team is able to make its way through Storming phase, it enters into Norming stage. Team accepts natural leaders emerged in the process so far, it starts working together with better synergies, realizing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, it starts depending on other team members for expertise, help or advice. Sometimes team may traverse back and forth between Storming and Norming stage depending on challenging situations it may face. With passing time and after being through storming stage, then norming stage, team synergies grow and storming nature of the team diminishes.

What a team leader should do?

• Enable and empower team to work independently
• Keep providing support to your team, through imparting training, required resource, instilling team building activities
• Like previous phase, remove obstacles for team achieving their goals and provide feedback individual, team progress

Performing:

When your team enters into ‘Performing stage’, team members are observed cohesive and collaborating to achieve goals. By and large, the team structure, policies and processes are in place or well understood by team and there would be little or no hampering conflicts.

What a team leader should do?

• At this stage trust in the team and delegation is the key; delegate as much as you consider fair
• Trust in the team and delegation means you provide them with autonomy to work with minimalistic report-taking
• Like previous phase, remove obstacles for team achieving their goals and provide regular feedback individual, team progress

As a true leader, who aims to optimize the performance of your team, should help your team to be ‘in High Performing Team phase’ as early as possible.

How would you do that?

1. Get clear sense of team thoughts, mood, dynamics at every stage of team formation
2. Thoroughly consider and implement what needs to be done at every stage to speed up team formation towards Performing phase
3. Regularly assess team collaboration, performance; delegate/provide opportunities for team to achieve desired goals. It may also mean that you need to change your leadership style, behavior to glue well with the stage of team formation.

2. Shared Goals

What you are trying to build is a dynamic and high performing team that will be achieve anything reasonable that you throw at them to support you in achieving your, your organization’s goals. That’s a team on mission. A mission based team enables every individual team member to do its own activities in collaboration with team to achieve team mission.

Through the process of team formation, one of the crucial parameters that enables team to work together is shared goals. You can set specific targets to achieve goals. Your team at every stage of team formation, will focus on achieving these targets. It also means that each team member need to be great believer in whatever mission you are setting them onto. To accomplish mission, it takes more than brilliance - like strong morale, trust, team spirit, etc.

What is critical for this purpose? Clearly identifying expected end results, reminding your team about what we are going to accomplish. Such clarity garners better commitment from your team and helps them to excel in their individual tasks and collaborate better.

In next concluding post, we will look at how alignment of skills-team-goals, measuring team performance, celebrating success helps in building high performance team.