Teamership: Be less $#!+
Sometimes you can get better performance without making your best work better. Photo by Andy Makely on Unsplash.
There are a lot of things that it takes to be a high performing team. You need the right combination of
Capability - The ability of team members to perform tasks at a high level.
Cohesion - Team members who can work together to perform tasks for more effectively together than independently.
Context - The abiility to respond or pre-empt circumstances and setting that the team operates within.
Any one of these elements is difficult. Getting all three going is extremely rare - and may be something to aspire for, without expecting.
In fact, managing your expectations leads to one of the most underutilised approaches to high performance - particularly in team performance. With all of the things that you can improve and put more energy into across your team, the most common solution to the question of how to improve team performance is to do more. Or to do better. Or to do more better!
If your team has the time, energy and drive to do that, go for it!
Alternatively, you could just aim to be less s**t.
What are the things that your team is doing really poorly? What are the things that are causing the most friction, frustration and pain?
What if you weren’t world class at those and instead you were slightly less rubbish at them?
Every time a team that I have worked with has explored this, they have walked away lighter, more energised and with less to do, not more. By lifting the floor of our performance rather than the ceiling, we set our teams up to be make more consistent contributions without the need to be constantly striving for more.
Being less s**t is also where a lot of gains are possible.
Some 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 is huge. Not going from worst to first. 54% more profitable just by going from the bottom quartile to the middle of the bell curve.
Here are some questions to consider this week:
What are the biggest sources of frustration, friction and pain in your teams?
Is it possible that striving to be better could be hurting your team’s performance?
Could your team try to be less s**t at something this week?