Teamership: Underperforming teams are a business problem

Underperforming teams are a business problem, not just a people problem. Photo by SEO GalaxyUnsplash

As I have mentioned regularly over the past few months, most teams are not high performing teams.

Looking at a range of measures across the past two decades or so, somewhere between 17% and 25% of teams are typically considered high performing teams. Lets call that 20%.

That means that around 80% of teams are not high performing. Statistically, there is a 4 in 5 chance that your team is not high performing.

As I have been continuing to reflect and research on this, I realised two things that I can offer you that I hope will help you, your teams and your organisations. I’ll be spending a lot more time in the coming weeks diving into each of these in a bit more detail, but let’s start at a high level (like when you are looking at a golf course map to get a sense of the overall layout!).

Here is a thought that I hope will help you change the way that you look at underperforming teams.

Underperforming teams are a business problem, not just a people problem

Underperforming teams might feel like a people problem.

It is often how we experience underperformance in a team. When teams are not at their best, it can be a frustrating experience for the leader, the team members and the people who are relying on the team doing good work. Because high performing teams are the exception and not the norm, we get used to functioning with this frustration and tell ourselves that we can or should accept it.

Actually, underperforming teams are a business problem.

Recent research by i4cp found that in once case, an organisation projected a 54% impact on profitability by raising the effectiveness of their bottom quartile teams to average.

That's a lot of money to leave on the table - just by making the lowest performing teams average (not even high performing!).

That is just one example of the business impact of team performance. There are dozens more pieces of research and case studies linking team performance to productivity, revenue growth, customer experience and safety. I’ll share more in coming weeks.

For this week, I just want to encourage you to consider the cost of underperformance in teams as financial and not just frustration.

This is a huge opportunity for most leaders and organisations and often the first step towards becoming one of those 20% of teams that are high performing.

Here are some questions to consider this week:

• Do you think that your team is one of the 20% of teams that is high performing?

• If so, what are the positive business impacts of high performance in your teams?

• If not, what is underperformance in your team costing your organisation?