A521.6.3.RB
High
Performance Teams
As a
27-year Army retiree, I am very familiar with high performance teams. In a combat situation, performance could make
the difference between life and death of your team. In the corporate world, performance could
make the difference accomplishment of a task or failure. It also can dramatically affect the bottom
line.
In
Stephen Denning’s text (Denning, 2011, pg 156), Denning lays out six
characteristics of high performance teams:
·
High-performance teams actively shape the
expectations of those who use their output –and then exceed the resulting
expectations.
·
High-performance teams rapidly adjust
their performance to the shifting needs of the situation. They innovate on the fly, seizing
opportunities and turning setbacks into good fortune.
·
High-performance teams grow steadily
stronger. Over time, members come to
know one another’s strengths and weaknesses and become highly skilled in
coordinating their activities, anticipating each other’s next moves, and
initiating appropriate responses as those moves are occurring.
·
The members of a high-performance team
grows individually. Mutual concern for
each other’s personal growth enables high-performance teams to develop
interchangeable skills and hence greater flexibility.
·
Fueled by interpersonal commitments, the
purpose of high-performance become nobler, team performance goals more urgent,
and team approach more powerful.
·
High-performance teams carry out their
work with shared passion. The notion
that “if one of us fails, we all fail” pervades the team.
These
characteristics really speak to me when considering my past military
experiences. They speak to the shared
vision and focus of a Brigade, Battalion, Company, Platoon, Squad and
individual Soldier. They work and train
as a team but also grow individually with each member encouraging the
other. They all are concerned with the
accomplishment of the mission and share the same values although they are also
individuals. They collaborate and learn
from mistakes. They train as they would
fight. There is friendship, love,
respect and comradery among Soldiers. To
emphasize this, they remain friends forever even when they move on to different
units or leave the military. Personally,
I still maintain a relationship with people that I met 33 years during basic training
and also many that I met over my decades of service.
Because
of this type of relationship, we became “plug and play”. We could leave one unit and immediately be
plugged into another unit without missing a beat.
So
what does working together really mean?
I can tell you that as a school teacher, team work is pretty
scarce. It seems that in my current
occupation, it is every man or women for him or herself. It was definitely culture shock when I left
the Army and experienced this type of behavior.
I digress. In Denning’s text
Denning, 2011, pgs 161-163), he lays out the four patterns of working together:
·
Work Group
·
Team
·
Community
·
Network
By
definition, these four patterns are self-explanatory. From my perspective, I believe that work
groups, teams, communities and networks are synonymous…it’s just semantics.
During
my experiences in the Army, these four patterns didn’t always pull together a
cohesive team. You see, although we
tried our best to work together, there were times (although not many) that we
faced problems…this was because people are who they are. There were loners, nerds, introverts,
extroverts, knuckleheads and just plain idiots.
How
to overcome and gel these folks together required innovative leadership. As a leader, I needed to be a friend, mentor,
brother and father, therapist and authority figure.
There
were many positive experiences. One
positive experience I can recall is during the Battle of Falluja (for my
unit). Communication was fluid and each
team member seemed to know what the other team mate was thinking. We lost not a single Soldier and repressed
the enemy through destruction or surrender.
It’s
hard to recall a negative experience but I do recall a member of our unit who
exercised toxic leadership. This was a
hard on to overcome because he was the Platoon Sergeant. If he did not like a unit member, he would
enlist the help of other members of the unit to abuse the un-liked member. It became so bad that we would have unit
members show up to formation with black eyes and fat lips. I did my best to get on this individuals good
side to avoid the abuse that he could so easily cause. Because I was a young Soldier with limited
experience, I had no idea what to do.
Now, with years of experience under my belt, the right thing to have
done would have been to report him and have him removed. He was definitely not a team player and had
his favorites or who I would refer to as his “enforcers”.
Reference
Denning, S. (2011). The leader’s guide to
storytelling: mastering the art and discipline of business narrative. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
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