While acquiring top-tier experienced employees for your team is a great head-start to building a high-performing team, there’s much more than just talent that influences how well the team performs together.
We evaluate the essential elements often associated with high performing teams that help to develop a team that is mutually supportive, able to overcome all obstacles, and achieve its goals. How does your team stack up against this check-list?
Clearly defined objectives that align with the team's mission and the organisation's goals provide direction and focus for the team members. Team members need to fully understand how the goals apply to their role and be bought-in to continually re-assess adaptations they can make to achieve the objectives.
The team needs to do more than just know the goals; they need to know how the team fits into their achievement. In a membership sector organisation, it really helps to frame the goals based on their benefit to your members.
Open, honest, and transparent communication fosters trust, collaboration, and problem-solving within the team. The challenge for a manager or head of department here is to ensure that every member of the team can communicate effectively with every other member of the team.
This sounds simple, but some people always get on better with others, and while that can’t be avoided, the internal friction of friendship groups or cliques can hinder the performance of team members residing outside it.
A capable leader who can inspire, motivate, and empower team members to deliver for your members, while also providing guidance, direction, and support, is essential for team success. The most important element in team leadership is the ability to support team centred problem solving.
Avoid being a crutch for your team and making decisions for them. To build a high-performance team you must clearly provide the goals and trust the skills of the team to provide the optimal pathways to achieving them. Remember, leadership isn’t about being the best at everything.
A diverse team with members possessing a variety of skills, experiences, and perspectives can bring different ideas to the table, leading to innovation and better decision-making. Even small teams can have diverse experiences within it. It can be tempting, when you find a team member that works really well, that you try to repeat the success by finding someone very similar.
This can limit your team’s ability to solve problems and develop optimal pathways to achieving goals. We’re seeing many Membership organisations actively seeking diversity of experience in their hiring.
Age diversity in a team can be a great way to bring different perspectives to solving problems and abilities honed from the environment they grew-up in. From the traditional personal face-to-face communication strengths of Baby Boomers, the adaptability of Generation-X, the collaborative nature of Millennials and pragmatic entrepreneurism of Generation-Z.
A culture that encourages teamwork, mutual respect, and cooperation fosters a supportive environment where team members feel valued and motivated to contribute. A collaborative culture is characterised by a shared commitment to working together towards common goals, fostering trust, communication, innovation, and ultimately driving organisational success.
A shared passion for your members is a great starting point, but each team member also needs to buy into where the organisation is heading, and how they individually fit into it.
Only from these foundations can you build the elaborate high-performance structures you need. This is often taken for granted by managers, or overlooked as it is hard to measure with KPIs but it should be one of the top priorities.
Clearly defined roles and responsibilities, coupled with a shared commitment to accountability, ensure that team members take ownership of their tasks and deliver results.
Like clockwork, a team doesn’t perform unless every single working part performs its task. Enabling people within a team to know they have your confidence and are seen as the leader in their field, with the responsibility to deliver their part.
Never lose sight of the team being an ever-moving collection of individual parts, and guard against overlapping.
In today's fast-paced world, teams need to be adaptable and resilient in the face of change, embracing new challenges and adjusting their strategies as needed.
Your team must get used to implementing new systems, whether they are software, governance, regulatory, IT or procedural improvements, making change a constant that everyone is comfortable with is a sign of a high performing team. Your members’ worlds are constantly evolving with the rise of Artificial Intelligence and digital transformation, so you need to ensure your team can adapt and lead the transformation.
Building trust and respect among team members creates a positive work environment where individuals feel safe to express their opinions, take risks, and learn from mistakes. Consistently detach the individual from the problem when things go wrong, but laud the ingenuity, the passion and the persistence at every turn.
As a manager you truly have to believe that people strive to do their best and want to do well. Make sure your team knows this. Trust and respect filter down and it filters out. When it is shown from the top it penetrates the culture and it pulses out to your membership.
Conflict is inevitable in any team, but how it's managed can make the difference between success and failure. Teams that can navigate conflicts constructively and find solutions that satisfy everyone involved can emerge stronger and more cohesive. Understanding the personalities within your team is crucial, not only to resolving conflict but in anticipating it and working with the team in advance of it.
So often, conflict arises not from unforeseen consequences rather from malice. By building trust and respect into your team, then when things do go wrong, people’s first inclination is to react constructively.
High-performing teams have a growth mindset, continuously seeking opportunities for learning, development, and improvement, both individually and collectively.
By investing time into building the skills of your team, they will feel valued. This doesn’t have to be expensive formal education, exposing team members to situations that provide them with a wider contextual understanding of their role, such as engaging with members, can be incredibly effective.
By incorporating this check-list their team dynamics, your membership organisation, and team or department, can cultivate high-performing team-players capable of achieving goals and driving success.
While there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for every team, knowing which areas you would like to improve is a strong first step, and it’s a journey, rather than a destination, as no team is perfect.
At Membership Bespoke, we have extensive experience with how membership organisations are structuring their staffing to meet the challenges ahead. Discover more about our expertise.