Three Characteristics of Effective Teams

A highlight of my job is working with leadership teams to increase their performance, help them drive organisational strategy, and develop clarity around values and purpose. Having consulted with teams in almost every sector and industry, it has been interesting to observe the common difficulties all teams seem to experience. While every organisation has its own unique environment and challenges, from what I can see, teams that thrive do things different from everyone else. The following three characteristics are a big part of it…

1.     Comfort with conflict

We all like to be liked. This probably goes back to caveman days where if you weren’t, you were going to get kicked out of the cave and eaten. Nothing wrong with being likable, but the need to be liked creates significant problems in teams. People react negatively to having their views and belief systems challenged, and so, because we want people to like us, we have a tendency to tell them what they want to hear.

We need people to disagree with us. Frankly, sometimes our ideas and judgement are terrible. I couldn’t tell you how often I have been emotionally invested in an idea, convinced I was right, only to look back in hindsight and realise it was ridiculous. The frustration is that upon admitting an idea was poor, others then acknowledge they knew it all along, just said nothing. Ever ended a relationship only to have your friends all tell you they didn’t like that person anyway? Yeah, same thing. Agreeing for the sake of agreement is inefficient, and counterproductive.

Billionaire Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen knows the value of productive disagreement. At his firm if one of their team tables a potential venture for investment, all others on the team play devil’s advocate on principle. If, at the end of the meeting the person who suggested the idea still likes it, then it’s passed the test and everyone in the room backs it too. Andreessen talks about the importance of having ‘strong opinions, loosely held’.

Disagreement leads to improvement. It creates an environment where assumptions are challenged and proposed solutions are given the robust analysis they need. If no one is disagreeing, either your team is too homogenous, or people aren't speaking their mind. In fact, if there isn’t anything worth debating, why are you having a meeting? Conflict creates value.

John Wooden, arguably the best sports coach in history famously said: “Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with people who will argue with you”

The caveat with this point is that conflict needs to be done in the right way.

-       Productive conflict must be built on the foundation of trust. Build this first.

-       Debate ideas, not the value of the people with the ideas

-       Have an opinion, but be being willing to let it go

2. A unified purpose

Research proves that all of us intrinsically desire a sense of purpose and progress about the work we do (Martin Selligman, Dan Pink, etc). We want to know that when we go to work each day, we’re adding value. This is a challenge for many organisations, and in my experience there are a lot of people with no understanding of their daily contribution, outside the transactional nature of much of their work.

The ideal mechanism for giving individuals this sense of progress and impact is through the team they’re part of. If the team’s purpose is clear, and the team is functioning well, then the role of each individual is also clear. The prerequisite for this is understanding the broader context of where their team fits.

Think of someone conscious of their water use – short showers, don’t leave the tap running, etc – they consider their own behavior because of its impact on their suburb, city, country and the environment. It’s an understanding of the broader context that then give this person impetus to act. Someone with no consideration for the big picture? Who cares, I’ll empty and refill my pool each week if I want too.

This broader context determines a team’s direction and purpose, and aligns the individual actions of each person to those around them. This allows individuals to weigh each thing they do based on whether it is taking them closer to, or further away from where the team is heading. Teams only thrive when everyone is in alignment, and teams are only in alignment when they’re all heading in the same direction.

This makes measurement easy. Each person is then assessed on their contribution to the team’s scorecard. Team success is the ultimate goal, and individual success is important as far as it adds to that. This excites the high performers, gives underperformers nowhere to hide, and naturally encourages autonomy, and team collaboration.

Can you answer these questions?

-       Why does your team exist?

-       What is your team’s scorecard?

-       Do you know how your individual contribution benefits the whole?

3. Accountability for behaviours, not just tasks.

The natural flow from point two, is holding each other accountable.

-       In under performing teams there is no accountability

-       In average teams there is management led accountability

-       In high performing teams, there is peer to peer accountability.

This accountability is not just task focused, but also behavioural.

Recently I spend two days working with a departmental leadership team of a large organisation. After spending the first morning with the group, I realised that the team was much more dysfunctional than I had been told. I asked them to individually rank the performance of the team from 1 – 10, and when they shared their numbers, they were all over 7. Sensing something wasn’t quite right, I interjected. ‘Hang on…I’m not talking about what you produce, I’m talking about how you perform as a team. Do the scoring again.’ This time around, every number was at least cut in half. It turns out that while the rest of the organisation thought they were brilliant because of their output, they were all working close to eighty hour weeks, on the brink of burnout, and about to strangle each other. If ‘what good looks like’ is only task focused, not behavioral, it’s a short term and ultimately unfruitful approach.   

The good news is that it doesn’t need to be that hard. Let me use the common analogy of gaming. Think about a group of eleven year olds playing a team based online game together, communicating through headsets as they attempt to storm a castle. With this very clear goal in mind, consider their behaviour: one calls to the other, 'Great job! How did you do that? Can you show me?' Or 'Hey, you left me alone back there! Don't do that next time or our whole team will lose.' Completely intuitively, without any knowledge of corporate best practice, they are working together collaboratively, holding each other accountable and giving instant feedback. The behaviours we so desire in our teams being demonstrated by children, simply because they have a unified focus and shared commitment to achieving it. Accountability is actually pretty intrinsic if everyone is heading in the same direction, and they’re willing to have the difficult conversations – everyone will benefit because of it.

Whether you’re the team leader or not, I would argue you have a responsibility to drive positive change in the team you’re in. Remember, culture is just the collective behaviours of a group of people – if you want to change the culture, the only thing you can control is your own behavior. Start demonstrating these characteristics, ask the hard questions (in the right way) and I’m confident your work experience and those of your team mates will be better because of it.