WORKSHOPS >> team performance

Right now. Need it yesterday. No room for mistakes. You get one shot at this. The deadline was moved up. Just do it. That was last year, this is now. No questions, just answers. No excuses. Zero tolerance. The bottom line. Quota.

All words you've probably heard or felt under the pressure to perform. If you have, then you know the reality of business.

And the pressure.

The pressure to perform often drives teams to make fast decisions and communicate in short-hand, thinking all along that doing so gets them better team performance. Unfortunately, in the effort to speed up and deliver, they get bogged down and deliver what doesn't really matter.

For team leaders, especially if it's the first time they've led a team, the hard part is that performance isn't totally under their control. As opposed to solo achievement, team effectiveness and performance means collaboration, not individual competition. It's we, not me. It's about us, not them.

To jump-start team effectiveness, most teams focus on traditional topics like vision, values, purpose, strategy, execution, work process, or accountability.

That focus is essential ...and premature. Even if you're committed to superb strategy, streamlined structure and execution excellence, inferior teamwork skills marginalize the ability to produce those things effectively in the first place.

High-performing teams deliver brilliant results precisely because great team dynamics are the engine behind what they do. Team dynamics fuel the engine of team performance.

In any organization, there are 5 Levels of Team Dynamics that drive performance.

Level 1 dynamics are isolated; people are stuck in first gear because their ideas stay isolated while team performance slowly declines until the team breaks up.

Level 2 Team Dynamics are characterized by indifference - when things go poorly, or occasionally well if all the stars align, people don't care. People may collaborate with one or two people in their group, but that's where it stops.

Team Effectiveness at Level 3 is independent-that is, people work on a team, but not very effectively as a team. People at Level 3 recognize the need for collaboration, but it's often clumsy and difficult to sustain because competing agendas and personal territories interfere. Forty-nine percent of teams and organizational cultures operate at Level 3.

At Level 3, average performance is the norm, primarily because certain behaviors drive teams away from effective teamwork:

Colleagues get defensive in debates, which leads to fixed positions and unproductive arguments that waste time and delay decisions
People ignore the truth when it's hard to hear, or acknowledge it but don't change
Team members don't speak up enough (and so bad policies and projects waste money)
People fear getting labeled if they try something new and make a mistake (and so nothing new gets tried)
Some people aren't engaged like they could be (or want to be), and think only within the confines of their own jobs, seeing problems as "other people's" problems.

We asked nearly 1,000 people how often they see Level 3 behaviors at work. 63% said daily or weekly. When we asked what those behaviors cost. Over half said between six and 15% of their company's annual revenue. Level 5-or the 2% teams-drive out those behaviors, and drive down those costs.

If there was a label for Level 4 Team Dynamics, it might be "doesn't play well with other teams." Level 4 Teams are "intra-dependent," which means they work well within their own team, but that's where it stops. For example, maybe marketing doesn't trust sales, and that distrust creates work silos and territories. Sometimes that behavior carries over to their team dynamics, and drives them back to Level 3.

And finally there are dynamics at Level 5-teams that are interdependent, and according to research by Logan, King and Fischer-Wright of USC, represent 2% of teams in corporate America. Team players and leaders at Level 5:

Listen with open minds
Speak candidly and tactfully
Think intelligently and rigorously
Decide with discipline and debate.

You may have heard those things before, but the team dynamics at Level 5 differ in kind and consistency from everyone else.

Based on the original, eye-opening work of David Marcum and Steven Smith, our Team Performance workshops and talented consultants give people the skills and abilities to listen, speak, think and decide at Level 5. And we provide lifetime access to diagnostic tools to measure progress every step of the way.

Every day your team doesn't move to the next level, you're locked into the results your current level delivers, while the 2% teams leave everyone else chasing.

Team players and leaders who attend our workshops report a 48.9% jump in their communication and collaboration ability, and teams increase their overall effectiveness by a full letter grade on our Team Dynamics report card.

That boost in effectiveness leads to better team performance in the critical business measures they're accountable for. While not every team reaches the elite 2%, the effort and return is always worth it.

Don't let another day go by letting your team slip behind. Clients and experts praise our work as one of the freshest, smartest bodies of work to come along in years. Including, most importantly, people like you.

You can register for one of our LiveWeb workshops, or call us at 801.492.9009 to schedule an onsite workshop or keynote, download one of our latest whitepapers, or take our Team Dynamics survey to find out how close your team is to Level 5 performance.

If you would like to watch archived webcasts and webinars, download our latest whitepapers and articles, or get free tools for your team, visit our All Access page. You can watch a short Flash presentation of our Team Dynamics work and research here.