420 | 3 Habits of High-Performing Teams
Discover how you can create high-performing teams. Team members can handle twice the amount of pain versus lone wolfs. Forming high-performing teams will not only allow your people to endure more pain but create more impact in their work. I spoke with Chief People Officer of Cisco Systems, Francine Katsoudas about her research on high-performing teams. Today, I share with you aspects of high-performing teams that will help you in forming and leading them within your organization.
This article was first published by Inc Magazine. “297 Teams Were Analyzed to Determine the Best Predictors of High-Performing Teams”
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High-Performing Teams: The Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
[Gene] Oxford University reported that teams can withstand twice as much pain as people that aren’t on teams. And what does that mean to your business?
Well, if you are a leader and you’re trying to do something that’s never been done. You’re pushing a team you’re challenging them to grow. You’re challenging them to serve the clients. You challenge them to enter new markets, to sell more, to market more effectively. Then you want them to be able to endure pain.
So, you probably think about how to create high performing teams in your leadership inside your culture all the time. Hi, my name’s Gene Hammett. I work with fast growth companies. I almost said hyper growth for a second there, but I work with companies that are growing in the top one percent. Those companies are, you know, creating leadership in a culture that makes fast growth possible. And I studied these from all over the place.
Today I bring to you some of the research done from Cisco Systems. I sat down with the Chief People Officer, Francine Katsoudas, Katsoudas, hopefully I got that right. But, I sat down with her to talk about what makes a high performing team, and she talked to 297 teams and they did this research as they’re taught to, but they picked out ninety seven high performing teams and two hundred control to determine what are the factors of higher performing teams and I want to share those with you today. One of them is teammates play to their strengths.
You want to put people on the team, not that are just available but they’re truly at their strengths and that the skills required, the talent required, they’re playing at their highest level. They’re not trying to learn these new things.
Now, that may seem obvious to you, but what happens most of the time is we look to see who is free and when you have a small company, I get it. But the idea is to understand that you need to put people doing projects around their strengths to get the high performance teams. Number two is, they have a safe place to share their ideas. Again, that may seem obvious but what happens all too often is, you have someone that might be an extrovert like me. They’re very gregarious and they’re talking and they’re willing to have a point of view and share that with the world.
Well, others may not have that same level of confidence and if they don’t feel safe to share their ideas then you’re not going to have the best ideas coming forward because the loudest person and the most outgoing may not be the one with the best ideas, think about it for a second.
We have many people in our worlds that are that feel better as so-called introverts and they actually do have great ideas they just share them and express them in different ways. We need to be able to tune in to that as leaders. If you want a high performing team, you want to make sure that you have teams that are willing to share their ideas safely. And that means healthy conflict is encouraged so that people don’t feel like they’re being judged by these ideas that come up. All right, number three is, teammates are aligned on their values.
Now, we know the importance of aligning values within a company, but how about within a team. They’ve got to agree on what the end goal is, they’ve got to agree on what the problem is that you’re addressing. If they don’t agree on some of the foundational elements, you’re going to have a tough time with that team to play well together. It’s more than just smart people in a room trying to figure out problems because if you want high performing teams, you want to make sure you have these three things present as often as possible. And you want to encourage them as leaders.
So, I bring to you this little bit of research. I wrote about it in Ink magazine. You can find it if you want to just respond to this. I’ll give you the link, or we’ll put a link inside the post as well, but I want to make sure that you understood what it took to develop high performing teams.
So, my name is Gene Hammett. I help leaders understand how to harness fast growth and how to really create leadership in culture. It takes a sense of ownership. I’m really excited about the work I do. If there’s any way I can help you, make sure you reach out and I’ll talk to you next time. As always, lead with courage.
Disclaimer: This transcript was created using YouTube’s translator tool and that may mean that some of the words, grammar, and typos come from a misinterpretation of the video.
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