Building a highly effective team is often seen as the pinnacle of team development, and something that often talked about, but achieving this goal is difficult. There are a number of factors that can influence the development of a team, and in this article I will discuss eight of these factors.
Bring the Right People Together
For many teams it takes a range of skills to achieve its goals – a team of experts in the same area with the same experience and the same skills won’t necessary have the breadth of skills to achieve a good result – the outcome will be limited because of this. If the team does function well, the type of tasks it can perform will be limited. In some situations, this is what you want, but in many cases it is not.
Since everyone have similar experience and backgrounds, you won’t have the different opinions to help shape the solution. The ideal situation is to be able to anticipate the different skills needed and form the team around that.
In Agile the term ‘T-shaped people’ is talked about – people with a strong skill in one thing (for example development, or testing), and then other skills or experiences. Contrast this with people who have only one special skill, and very little knowledge outside of that. If a team is able to draw on the range of skills and experience to complete their work without heavy dependence on a person or team outside of theirs, they are less likely to be impacted by events that effect that person or team.
Team stability – A team needs time to develop
Tuckman’s paper from 1965 “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups” describes the now accepted phases of team development as Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing. Many teams don’t survive the Storming phase because it takes an aware and courageous team and team leader to navigate through that phase. The Norming phase is probably what most teams achieve.
But given enough time and focus a team can achieve the Performing stage – but it does take time to reach this stage. Some teams may be changed before it can be achieved.
A common approach is for a high performing team to be split so that other teams can benefit from their knowledge and experience, with leaders believing that somehow the high performance can be spread to other teams through the team members. But this means that your teams are constantly in the initial stages of team development. Additionally, if you put a person from a high-performing team, it doesn’t mean that their new team will become high performing just by their presence.
Teams, like people, are complex beings and their performance is influenced by a number of factors.
A better strategy is avoid breaking up high-performing teams and to learn from their experience by examining the way they work.
For a group to become a team can take months – and this can vary between teams. To move to an effective team and can longer, depending on the team members and the team manager or Scrum Master, and the environment that they work in. If the team can move through the storming phase and into the norming, then the performing stage is possible.
Conflict resolution
Healthy debate within a team avoids the state of groupthink that can lead to poor decisions. If you’re not familiar with groupthink, it is basically a state where the team strives only for consensus or agreement – it doesn’t really question any of its decisions, nor the way it reaches those decisions. This can result in really bad decisions – but the team is stuck in this state and does realise it.
Healthy debate is important. The team members need to be able to feel comfortable in being able to question and challenge each other (in a non-confrontation way of course!), and in this way it can help to avoid really bad decisions.
The goal is to create an environment and culture within the team so that debate and healthy conflict can happen openly. Ideas and solutions can be challenged and reformed into the most optimal given the constraints of time and information. As Susan Whelan puts it – periods of conflicts are frequent, but brief. Additionally, the team also has effective conflict management strategies.
Psychological safety, a term that refers to an environment where there is no fear of punishment after a failure or for speaking out, is important here. In fact a Google study rated this as the most common feature of the successful teams in their study. If you can create an environment of psychological safety, you can then have team members who are comfortable to speak their mind. And if team members are comfortable speaking their mind, they will be able to create and debate ideas and approaches.
Team feedback
Feedback for a team can come in different ways. Achieving a state where team members in the team feel comfortable both giving and receiving feedback is difficult to achieve. But the absence of that feedback in the team can lead to building unresolved tension and … in the team.
Some organisations take this to an extreme – Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates is a good example of this. The company uses what they call “radical transparency” – feedback and constructive criticism is not only encouraged, but actually required. They regularly receive feedback on their performance, including how well they performed during meetings, where they are rated on how clear their presentation was, and the quality of their analysis.
They also expect transparency – criticism behind someone’s back is not tolerated, something I think is a positive move. You can be fired if you are found to be constantly criticising someone behind their back – and that is because it is toxic and very detrimental to the company’s culture, and serves only to undermine someone.
The three principles used for feedback (be vulnerable by asking for feedback first, embrace the messenger and thank them for the feedback, and asking permission before giving someone feedback) can be a good basis on which to begin with the team. [rewrite this]
Feedback buddy system: quite often in teams people are closer to one or two team members than the others. So a good way to start is to use these natural relationships to have feedback buddies in the team to practice giving and receiving feedback.
Team Goals
As I described in Building a Team from the Ground Up, a team needs a purpose, a reason for being. During the course of a year the team should have goals that they can work together to achieve.
The goals should be achievable, yet stretch the team so they are forced to draw on knowledge and skills that perhaps they didn’t know they had. The goals should also be meaningful, and develop the team members in some way. In this sense, team development is also personal development as the team members all learn and develop as individuals, as well as drawing on the unique skills and experience of the team members.
The goals need to be real and relatable, show obvious business value. Since you really need the team to buy into the goal, it is better that you set the goal along with the team, instead of dropping it on them and then demand that they complete it. It might seem like a foregone conclusion that they will do the work, the different is you’re giving them the opportunity to frame the goal in their terms.
Coaching to Develop and Achieve
The GROW model was described in John Whitmore’s book Coaching for Performance, which now has become synonymous with coaching. It is a framework for coaching that guides the coach, and the coachee through the stages of goal setting, establishing the reality of the current situation, the obstacles and the options, and finally the way forward. The coach guides the coachee through the stages by asking questions that probe, challenge and inspire. The coachee develops the way forward mostly by themselves, resulting in belief in themselves and their ability, and buy-in into taking the next steps.
A leader can also coach a team in the same way, guiding them to find solutions to their questions and problems as they encounter them. When the team is able to develop the way forward, they are more likely to buy into and own the solution.
Trust
This is related in a way to psychological safety, but there are a few facets to trust. Some are psychological – if you cannot trust someone in your team to tell the truth, or to be respectful when you speak openly, then communication will be filtered, or restricted. There is also trust in each other’s ability to do the task – if you’re constantly worried that a particular team member will produce poor work, or be late with their task, you will be hesitant to give them important tasks.
Team Size
Research shows that the most successful teams have the smallest number of members in the team to accomplish the team goals. In addition to this, the most effective teams are able to organise themselves according to the task – an example of this is being able to form subgroups as needed within the team to complete the task, and then reform for another task. For team size, it is best to have between 4 and 7 people.
Photo by Mimi Thian on Unsplash
