Teamership: Clarifying Team Performance
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
A useful distinction for teams to make is between effectiveness and performance.
Most of the time in conversations, performance and effectiveness are interchangeable and used to mean the same thing. In organisational and industrial psychology, a distinction is made between results and performance. Results are outcomes that are achieved while performance is related to the behaviours - what was or wasn’t done by individuals and teams.
Too often, we conflate these two concepts. Decoupling performance and effectiveness can often unlock high levels of both performance and effectiveness.
It helps to realise that sometimes we can get positive results in spite of our behaviours.
This might happen when a sales team has the market leading product. Their excellent results may be largely due to the product and market conditions and happen in spite of the fact that the sales team was relatively reactive, not particularly responsive to customer needs and poor collaboration between team members.
This is actually a very risky situation for teams. The highly visible positive resullts (effectiveness) can mask the less visible negative behaviours (performance). This means that if or when the external conditions change, the team may not have developed the capacity to perform in the way that it needs to.
It also helps to realise that sometimes the right behaviours may not lead to the results that we want.
This might happen in an inverse situation. Factors outside of the team’s control may mean that they are not able to achieve their desired results. For example, a production team may not be able to meet its targets due to supply chain issues or weather that has impacted its plant. Despite that, the team may be doing many of the things that they have identified as important for their success - like communicating regularly with each other and customers, sharing lessons learned and maintaining key relationships.
In both instances, simply looking at results (or behaviours) gives an incomplete view of what leads to success in a team.
For this week, here are a few questions for you to consider:
Is your team achieving results in spite of its behaviours?
Does your team ever fail to achieve the results you seek despite the right behaviours?
Do you pay attention to both team effectiveness (results) and performance (behaviours) in your team?