Five things high performing teams have mastered

In 2002 Patrick Lencioni published a book entitled The Five Dysfunctions of a Team which outlined five characteristics of poorly performing teams. In this article, David Carne looks at what happens when master the five dysfunctions to create a high performing team

• Build trust and psychological safety

Individuals who trust each other, and experience psychological safety, are willing to demonstrate vulnerability, take risks without unnecessary fear of the consequences of failure or mistakes, and focus on collaboration rather self-protection. According to Timothy Clark, in his book The Four Stages of Psychological Safety, these are:

• Inclusion safety – being included, listened to and valued as a part of the team.
• Learner safety – feeling comfortable with asking naïve questions, admitting lack of knowledge, and being honest about having made mistakes.
• Contributor safety – feeling able to contribute, to put forward suggestions, and to share ideas without fear of embarrassment.
• Challenger safety – feeling able to disagree, to challenge the prevailing wisdom, and to present opposing arguments.

Autocratic leadership styles tend to crush dissent or disagreement and can lead to failures occurring simply because people were too afraid to speak out. Trust and psychological safety are about building an inclusive, open, no-blame culture in which people are listened to, where they act collaboratively, and with integrity, and in which curiosity about ways to improve means there are no sacred cows. 

• Embrace positive conflict

The ability to have professional challenge within a team is vital in preventing stagnation. It is important that this conflict is professional in every sense of the word, that it is done respectfully and transparently, and it is not personal. Positive conflict helps us move forward in a better way, seeing others as having knowledge or skills which improve decisions, not engendering bitterness and resentment. 

As a coach, one of the key roles I play with the executives I work with is to hold up a mirror and challenge their thinking and behaviors. We need the courage to challenge our collective thinking and behaviors at an organisational level too. A non-threatening way to do this is asking open questions. A simple incisive question is ‘What else?’ This is particularly good for encouraging people to move beyond the first suggestion and generate other ideas. 

Peter Drucker, one of the 20^th century’s greatest management experts, suggested that the five most important questions an organisation can ask itself are:

• What is our mission?
• Who is our customer? (Or, perhaps, who are we here to serve?)
• What does our customer value?
• What are our results?
• What is our plan?

Continually returning to these questions frequently is extremely valuable.  At a micro level, consistently checking that your actions are actually achieving what you intended, being willing to disagree with a particular course of action and testing assumptions or assertions are vital. When you have trust, and psychological safety, people don’t feel threatened by challenge, but engage with it as a form of curiosity about what the best way forward might be. 

• Make a commitment

High performing teams are willing to commit to each other and to outcomes. They are courageous in making ambitious decisions, buy-in to organisational mission and initiatives, and have clarity about what they are doing. They follow through on what is agreed. 

According to psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, motivation can be increased by giving individuals greater autonomy over their work, a feeling of competence and a sense of relatedness. Ways to do this include:

• Distributing decision-making to different levels of the organisation.
• Aligning job roles with individual strengths and interests.
• Continually developing and upskilling team members.
• Increasing the number of positive interactions between individuals, and reducing the number of negative ones. 
• Creating opportunities for collaboration. 
• Intervening early in personality clashes or disagreements. 

As leaders, this is about leadership by example, ensuring that we keep our commitments and that we are clear about our actions; it is also about being committed to our teams. 

• Accept accountability

Not surprisingly, teams which make a commitment are also willing to be accountable for their actions. Accountable teams stick to deadlines and deliver work which is of high quality. Creating psychological safety is key in encouraging accountability; people are most likely to accept responsibility when they know the consequence of that is unlikely to be catastrophic.

According to Gallup the key elements of building accountability within a team are:

• Aligning team members with a common outcome.
• Giving individuals input into specific goals.
• Frequently communicating the importance of a goal to the organisation.
• Providing frequent, performance-focused, feedback to individuals and the team.
• Providing coaching to team members.

Again, this involves leadership by example – we must be willing to accept accountability for our actions, own our mistakes, and accept and respond to feedback. What we do becomes a model for our team. 

• Focus on results

Finally, high performing teams have mastered the ability to retain their focus on results. If a team has mastered trust, conflict, commitment and accountability, it is no longer focused on self-protection, avoiding difficult conversations, engaging in workplace drama or avoiding the blame for failures  – so it can, instead, focus on its outcomes. With these distractions removed, there is greater clarity and more energy directed toward results. Focusing on results means:

• Knowing your results – achieved by observing and monitoring performance at all levels, not just the macro level.
• Knowing how you got your results – achieved by evaluating your initiatives and systematically removing obstacles to success. 
• Knowing the value of your results – achieved by engaging with those you serve and finding out whether your results matter to them.
• Understanding your results – achieved by benchmarking or comparing your results to others.
• Not being satisfied with your results – achieved by continually asking ‘What could we do better?’

So, if you are wondering what you and your team need to master to truly be ‘high performing’, why not start by mastering these five things?

David is a serving school business professional and executive coach.