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                                       Additional Cheer Examples

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                    Sense of Urgency

                    Chaos

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                              High Performance Operating Teams

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                              Charter Example

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          Coaching High Performance Teams

                    Teaching Essential Elements

                              Trust Building Exercises

                                        Saturn Excell Course

                                        Who's Got a Dollar

                                        Willow in the Wind

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                                            Out of Control

                                            Global Vote

                    Initial Team Agenda

                    Getting Organized

                    Team Building Exercises

                                  Warp Speed

                                  Warp Speed Reprise

                                  Spider Web

                                  Toxic Rescue

                                  The River

                    Team Leading and Facilitation

                    Coach Intervention

          About the Author

This Web site is a resource for businesses and organizations interested in harnessing the power of teams to achieve business objectives. Teams and teamwork represent a very powerful mechanism for getting results and achieving significant change in organizations. Over the past several years, much has been learned about the development and implementation of teams-- What works and what doesn't work. Teams are evolving that have the potential of replacing traditional hierarchical organization structures with very flat, self directed, cross functional, process oriented organization. High Performance Teams are a special class of team that has the ability to easily adapt in a rapidly changing world. High Performance Teams may be an essential element of any successful reengineering effort.

Team Concepts
Team Building
Coaching High Performance Teams
The Evolving Art and Science of Building Teams
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High Performance Team Concepts

High Performance teams are created with a mission or purpose in mind. This purpose or mission should be expressed in the form of a written charter. Over time teams develop their own set of norms. Norms are rules or guides for team behavior and decision making. The idea of using teams to solve problems and achieve results is based, in part, on a concept that the collective brain power of a team far exceeds the ability of any manager. Therefore, to a large degree, teams are self-directed. High Performance Teams are also empowered. Teams are motivated by the challenge of achieving dramatic results within a short time-frame. It is quite normal for teams to thrash and churn during the early stages of development. This will usually appear chaotic to outsiders and team members alike. It is also normal for 75 percent of the real work of a team to be accomplished during the last 25 percent of the time allotted. Team members are expected to learn as they work together. Often the scope of work of a team touches or involves the activities of many people beyond the team itself--this external group can be referred to as the community of interest that must be included in the team's communication loop. All teams experience a shortage of resources. This phenomenon must be understood, expected, and available resources defined for the team from the team's inception.

Team Norms

Norms are the rules that the team agrees to follow as it conducts its work. Norms may be written or may evolve as unwritten understandings over time. Most newly organizing teams find it effective to start out with an initial set of norms with the understanding that these will need to be reviewed and modified frequently. Some teams decide to review norms at the beginning or end of each meeting. The establishment and adherence to team norms helps build team discipline, trust between team members, and supports a safe environment.

While team norms may touch on any aspect of team behavior the following are most commonly included:

Meetings will start on time. (Some teams include a penalty for being late. This may involve a small standard contribution to the team recreation fund, the requirement to take notes at the next meeting, or as one innovative team determined, the requirement to sing a few lines of the song of the team's choosing.)
A designated scribe will take minutes and publish them for all.
An agenda is published in advance and an initial step in team meetings is to agree on the amount of time allowed for discussion of each topic.
Decision making is by consensus. Consensus hopes for unanimous support. Individual team members may not fully agree with a team decision, but will fully support it.
Silence means consent. Since all team members are expected to contribute their views on issues and concerns, when the team achieves consensus, those remaining silent are understood to be supporters of the decision. Absence may also mean consent when the team agrees that absent members will be given notice of team decisions and the opportunity to express concerns prior to the decision becoming final.
Team members agree to hold themselves and each other accountable for meeting commitments made to fellow team members.

High Performance Teams usually include the following norms:

No Zingers. Zingers are put-downs or cheap shots directed at fellow team members. Zingers, while common in the American culture, show a lack of respect for team members and cause individual team members who receive zingers to mentally withdraw from team participation.
Celebrate Success. High Performance Teams take time-outs to recognize small steps or progress towards milestones or objectives. This act of recognizing small victories is essential in the development of team confidence and commitment. Individual contributions as well as overall team results can be identified by any team member for recognition by the entire team. Celebrations may take different forms but most often might involve a simple team cheer.
No Rank/All Peers. While it is best to start out with an elected or designated team leader, High Performance Teams strive to achieve a state where leadership migrates from one team member to another to take advantage of the skills or abilities of different team members as the topic or situation changes. A critical success factor in the development of High Performance Teams is the concept that all team members are equal in decision making and that every team member is valued and has a contribution to make. It is the responsibility and obligation of every team member to identify the skills and talents of all other team members and to encourage each team member to employ those talents in the teams progress toward objectives.
Have Fun. Working on a High Performance Team can and should be fun. But the team needs to recognize the importance of play in developing team spirit and morale. Deadly serious teams can create a Titanic mentality which will significantly lower chances for success. Humor and fun, so long as it is not at the expense of others, can help build energy and improve the teams ability to succeed. Time out needs to be taken for fun. This can be in the form of team building activities, team brain teaser problem solving, or new learning such as juggling, or drawing, poetry or song writing.
Quality Reviews. The team needs to consciously set time aside to monitor the quality of its work and progress towards goals. These quality checks can be as short as a minute or two where one member asks the others, "what did we learn? How could we improve our performance, based on what we have observed over the last few hours or days?"

Team Decision Making

How a team reaches agreement and commits to the agreement is an area of serious struggle for most teams. The common approach for working teams is to elect or appoint a leader who will try to guide their team's discussions to reach team consensus. Most High Performance teams shun this traditional model as potentially manipulative and detrimental to the building of trust that is so necessary for strengthening a High Performance Team. Since Americans come from democratic roots, it's natural for a team to want to set a standard of unanimous agreement--an ideal state that is difficult and sometimes impossible to achieve. Often the seemingly simple prospect of getting the whole team to agree to the time and place of the next meeting can turn out to be a virtual impossibility.

High Performance Teams are working under a deadline. The pressure to reach agreement and get started is enormous. As an alternative to unanimous agreement, some teams evolve to the majority rules model: A decision is called for, hands are raised in support and counted, and if more than half the total present agree, the decision is made and everyone is expected to support it. But as human beings we are both intellectual and instinctive. One or more team members may feel that a decision is wrong or will be ineffective but cannot articulate why they have reservations. Others may feel that the decision being agreed to might be right for the group as a whole but not right for them or the area of the organization or process that they represent. Still others may not fully understand what is being agreed to by the team as a whole.

When a team is not in full agreement on a decision or direction, or one or more of the team members disagrees, it is unrealistic to expect that those team members will adequately support the decision. People cannot execute decisions and plans they do not understand, and when they disagree with the majority direction they will be looking for the first opportunity to resurrect the decision for reconsideration. High Performance Team members understand this phenomenon and work together to test each other's support and understanding. While each team will have to find its own way to effective team decision making, one of the best models for testing for understanding and support is "thumbs up, thumbs down, or thumbs sideways." Thumbs up means I agree and fully support the decision. Thumbs sideways, means I have one or more reservations, but I can't think of anything better, and will support the decision. Thumbs down, means I don't or can't support the decision. Any thumbs down means further discussion is needed to understand the reasons for the thumbs down vote and to work some more on making the decision acceptable to all.

Then there is the issue of absentee team members. Ideally all team members are present when important decisions are being made. Even with careful advance agreement on meeting times and locations, emergencies, both business and personal, do arise. Since the support of all team members is critical to a team's success, High Performance teams will have to find ways to include absent members in the decision making process and gain their understanding and support.

Celebration

The mentality of our society is that you either win or you lose. We wait until the end of the project or the end of the year to see if we achieved our final objectives before celebrating. But High Performance Teams are driven by energy that the team creates within itself. One source of building team energy is to stop frequently to check progress and to celebrate any small successes or victories. These may involve recognizing that some progress has been made towards the team goal, or that the team has learned a new technique for improving its quality, or simply that the team has learned a new thing about how to work together more effectively. Championship professional sports teams are a good model for High Performance Teams. Even the casual observer will note that teams stop to celebrate great plays, touchdowns, three point shots, or difficult goals. Win or lose, as the game progresses, these sports teams are building team energy with these small celebrations of success.

Small celebrations should be quick and invigorating. A typical celebration begins when a team member recognizes that the team has something it needs to celebrate. The team member voices the success to the other team members. Heads nod in agreement and the team member leads the others in a short cheer. The cheer can be elaborate or as simple as everyone trading high fives, or pumping their arms in the air and shouting, "one, two, three, YES!" Elaborate cheers might involve something usually observed at high school or college games that's been tailor to reflect the team's goal or identify.

Additional Cheer Examples

Additional Cheer Examples

A Pat On The Back - Form the team into a circle facing inward. Ask the team to face to the right, place a hand on the upper back of the person in front and give that person three gentle pats on the back, simultaneously saying the words, "Way" [pat] "To" [pat] "Go" [pat]. Next, have the team face about and repeat the process with the person behind them. Finally, have each person repeat the cheer and give themselves a pat on the back.

The Corporate Cheer - Sometimes a corporation or organization has a highly focused strategic intent. When this is the case, the strategic intent can be converted into a cheer. As an example, if the organization is a corporation, it's strategic intent may be to out-perform a tough competitor, so its cheer might be "Beat Acme!". In another example, the team may have been chartered to achieve a highly focused goal. In this case the team cheer might become "Zero Defects", or "Cut inventory". When working up a new cheer based on strategic intent, the coach should consult the team to get their ideas about their perception of the organization's intent and an appropriate cheer.

Self Directed Teams

Once a High Performance Team understands its charter and has worked through its norms, it is ready to get down to the business of solution building, planning and implementing the plan. Ideally, the team should select its own leader. This person's primary role will be to interface with other teams and coordinate team activities. The team leader should strive to avoid taking over the team, imposing his or her ideas on the team, or becoming the sole conduit of information to management. As the team meets and works together the team leader should assume a equal position with the other team members. Some team's find it helpful to rotate team leadership to give everyone experience. At the pinnacle of high performance team operation anyone on the team should be able to lead the team and everyone would feel comfortable with that possibility.

The sponsoring manager is responsible for defining objectives for the team - the "what" that the team needs to accomplish. To the largest extent possible, "how" the team accomplishes the objectives should be left to the team to decide. The sponsoring manager should be mentally prepared to support the team's chosen approach so long as the approach to achieving the objectives are within moral, ethical, and legal bounds. The sponsoring manager must recognize that the team may choose a path that appears less than optimal to the management team. When this occurs it is critical for management to recognize that achievement of the teams objectives is more dependent on the team's enthusiasm for its own solution than the quality of the solution. High Performance teams are asked to accomplish objectives within timeframes that are truly stretch objectives. Management must give the team the maximum latitude possible for achieving objectives that, at the outset, seem nearly impossible.

The relationship between the team and sponsoring management should be mutually supportive. The team delivers what management needs in the way of results. Management delivers what the team needs in terms of resources, political support, and recognition.

When a High Performance Team meets with top management to report on its activities, the entire team should attend and should, so far as possible, have as many team members as possible involved in the presentation. Team members should be encouraged to speak up during presentations in order to demonstrate co-equality and solidarity with the team. This is very important, as it is quite natural for managers to seek to identify individual team leaders. Once a manager gets the idea that one or two individuals are driving a team, the manager will direct future questions and comments about the team to those individuals. As a result, the other team members will pick up on this phenomenon and may withdraw participation, withdraw support, or defer to the de facto team leaders.

Empowered Teams

Much of the modern literature speaks about empowerment. For teams, the idea is that team members have control over the team's performance and behavior. Control is one source of power. Most power derives from the organization's management authority. A team is empowered by virtue of that power that is granted to it by management. A team charter is a very useful tool for helping a team and management understand just exactly what the team has power (or is empowered) to do. This can help avoid the problem that one manager observed about empowered teams, "They are like a tiger cub, at first they are eating all the mice and rats, after a year they are eating you."

Information is another source of power. To be effective, High Performance Teams need information, and lots of it. Some who are active in building teams believe that the teams should be told everything that could possibly help them in achieving their objectives. They need to know the financial condition of the organization. They need to know about pending organizational changes. They need to know what is going on in the market they are serving. Some top-managers believe that teams don't need this information or that widespread knowledge of this information could be dangerous for the organization. The opposite is more true. Teams that are trusted with sensitive information know that and take care to make certain that non-team members do not pick it up from them. They value that trust and will not betray it. Teams also need to clearly understand the organization's mission, vision for the future, and direction. Armed with this knowledge the team can much more rapidly achieve desired results. Such knowledge gives the team confidence in its decisions and energy to implement those decisions. Little time is wasted debating whether the proposed decision fits with the organization's direction or may be overturned down the road.

Access to resources is another source of power. A team's ability to succeed will depend in part on how free it is to use precious resources. Most people realize that with enough resources, anything can be accomplished. Yet most organizations are resource constrained. So there is often a very real tension between the team's need for resources to accomplish its objectives and the organization's need to conserve resources. One possible solution is provide the team with guidance on how quickly any substantial resource investment needs to be paid back in term of savings or new business.

Sense of Urgency

High Performance Teams need to work under a deadline for achieving objectives. Teams without deadlines invariably over-engineer plans and solutions. Without a deadline, the team's work can never really finish. Deadlines create a energy building sense of team commitment toward getting results. In short, they drive the team to perform.

An atmosphere of urgency will cause team's to start to experiment with problem solving. Though they rarely hit on the correct or best answer on the first attempt, the very process of trying will invariably lead to new learning, further innovation, and enhanced performance.

Chaos

We all like and naturally gravitate toward order. Order makes us comfortable. We have a feeling of efficiency. Of things getting done or getting somewhere. As managers one of our primary responsibilities is to keep things working smoothly and orderly. When things get out of hand or become chaotic we get very uncomfortable. But when you are trying to bring about a cultural change, say from command and control to empowerment. Chaos is a necessary step that has to be experienced as the old order is abandoned and the new order is determined. When people work together to create a new order such as operating as High Performance Team they will have to experience the discomfort and chaos of letting go of the old ways and learning the new.

A High Performance Team will experience a number of chaotic situations as it learns to work together. Since the team does not have a formal leader and everyone's ideas are going to be considered, the team as well as casual observers will notice chaos at many points. This is normal. This is expected. This is necessary. Kevin Kelly, in his outstanding book Out of Control carefully explains that organisms that thrive and succeed over time constantly stand teetering on the edge of disaster. Their struggle to survive causes them to adapt and continuously try new models, many of which fail, while a few turn out to be far more efficient and effective than any that have gone before.

Team Learning

Another key concept of High Performance Teams concerns individual and team learning. Initially, a High Performance Team has a lot to learn: how to work together, how to make team decisions, how to develop and enforce norms, as well as the capabilities, talents, and skills of each fellow team member. These are important new learnings for newly forming teams. But for a team to become a sustaining High Performance Team other learnings are equally important.

As the team develops solutions and implementation plans, it needs to stop frequently and check its collective understanding for agreement. Frequent stops are also needed to check the quality of the team's output. Improvements to process need to be shared and understood by the entire team. What's working better, what's not working as well as before, and why and why not? This type of quality or learning check will need to have become ingrained by the time the team transitions to functioning as a High Performance Operating Team.

High Performance Operating Teams

High Performance Operating Teams are a logical extension of High Performance Teams. When a High Performance Team fulfills the objectives of its charter and its initial time frame, the team may continue life as an operational team. A High Performance Operating Team has responsibility for the operation and performance of a process. Typically such processes are cross-functional, that is, the processes extent across and through two or more functional areas or departments in an organization.

Depending on the scope and objectives of the original High Performance Team charter, a new or modified charter may need to be developed to define the responsibilities and authorities of the High Performance Operating Team. By now performance measures have been developed and refined and an on-going process has been implemented for monitoring the operating team's results. The High Performance Operating Team should be working together well with leaders identified and a natural level of management support in place.

As time goes by, old team members will depart and new team members will arrive. Remaining team members should stop to recognize and celebrate the contributions made by the departing team members. Newly arriving team members should be adopted by individual team members as team mentors. A team mentor would explain the norms and conventions used by the team and would actively seek to discover the new team members strengths, skills, and knowledge. A good mentor will promote the new team member to the other team members thereby speeding the new members acceptance by the overall team.

Community of Interest

When a team is commissioned it is often made up of a group of representatives from different parts of the organization. Each person may be a subject matter expert who understands the processes and activities within a department or a different part of a cross-functional process. This is not very unusual. In fact, this is the most frequent form of team composition. This is because it is usually impractical to include every person who will be involved in the operation of process or a significant implementation, in the day to day meeting and work of a high performance team.

Conventional wisdom is that teams over 20 people, some think over 15, become too unwieldy and lose the active participation of all team members. At the same time, a major change management principle embraces the notion that people will more readily accept and support a change in the way they work if they are included in the development of the solution. This presents a major dilemma for teams: How can the team be kept small enough to effectively work together and at the same time involve everyone? This is not a trivial matter in large organizations that may have several hundred people actively supporting a work stream or process. Extend the group to customers of the process and we wind up with a very large group of people who's collective buy-in is needed to assure successful change. This larger, extended team could be thought of as a community of interest.

Special efforts have to be used to involve the community of interest in the understanding of the initial team's charter and the collection of information the team needs to understand the existing operating model. Input and ideas need to be sought from the larger community of interest as the solution set is developed. Then, the community of interest needs to develop a shared understanding of the solution or high level plan and participate actively in the development and implementation of final, detailed plan. Successful teams organize, develop, and implement a communication plan to gain the participation, support, and finally the commitment of the community of interest.

Communication Planning

Communication Planning is extremely important in the building of High Performance Teams. A number of constituent groups need to be informed about the work and progress of the team. An early step in the formation of a High Performance team should focus on identifying an individual or sub-team to handle communication both within the team and with the parties that may be interested in the work of the team.

The working, or core team, needs to develop its own conventions and procedures for sharing information between each other. As ideas, research data, political forces, and team operating norms develop, the team needs to define its process for communicating with one another. Given that many teams are made up of members who are scattered around the country or around the world, it may be very impractical for the team to physically meet and work together for the entire duration of charter time-frame. A High Performance Team learns to take advantage of all the resources available to it. Communication technology is advancing very rapidly: telephone, paging, conference calling, E-mail, Voice-Mail, Lotus Notes, Video-conferencing, the World Wide Web, and emerging personal communication devices expand the team's optional methods of communication.

At a minimum, teams need to expect that fellow team members will, on occasion, be absent from scheduled team meetings. This can lead to serious disconnection's between absent team members and the team's work stream. One High Performance Team solved this problem by having team members pair off into two person "Buddy-Teams". Each team member is responsible for arriving a half hour early to update a buddy who could not attend the last team working session.

Beyond the communication needs of the team, are the team's communication needs outside its ranks. Decisions need to be made about the best way and how often to keep the sponsoring management group informed. If the charter is well written, it can serve to break down most barriers and resistance that forms. Occasionally, the sponsoring manager may need to intervene on the team's behalf or rein in its horns when the team exceeds its authority. The communication to the sponsoring management could take the form ofwritten status reports or formal presentations on progress, issues, and new resource needs. If the managing sponsor has a history of making sharp and frequent changes in direction, the team should consider writing the charter to authorize it to proceed from inception through implementation, explaining to the sponsor that it will only report at the end of the allotted time frame. Otherwise, the team runs the risk of experiencing significant changes in its charter, with the very real probability of losing momentum, enthusiasm, and successful project completion. Of course, some events are so powerful and overriding, that a team may have to stop, reevaluate its charter and change direction. Sale of the company or the end of governmental funding might constitute such an event.

The team needs to carefully plan its communication with its larger community of interest. How soon should the extended team that will have to implement the changes need to become involved in solution development and implementation planning in order to gain their full cooperation and participation? The same question applies to all customers who will experience changes wrought by the High Performance Team. The community of interest includes people who will be affected by the changes the team makes and those in a position of authority to approve or disapprove the changes.

Finally, other non-involved organizational members need to be told about the work and charter of the team. People imagine all sorts of things are going on when teams form. Usually the imagined possibilities are quite negative. Any secret team is going to be discovered and the rumors are going to start flying. Therefore, the official position of the team needs to be very open and honest about what it is doing and why it is doing it. Work in progress should be explained as just that. That is "Here are some of the options we are looking at implementing, but we haven't decided anything yet." Honesty and openness are the only real defenses against the rumor mill. Honesty and openness also help to build up a culture based on trust, respect and support.

The communication plan needs to consider the best vehicle for communicating and should choose the vehicle and level of detail to suit the needs and interests of the various audiences.

High Performance Team Resources

Resources are time, talents, money, information, and materials. The development of High Performance Teams will use considerable resources. Newly formed teams want to maximize the resources available to them. The team charter is the best place to establish the team's expectations concerning the resources that will be available to help the team reach its objectives. Questions must be dealt with early on: Will the team be allowed to work solely on this project or will team members have to maintain their day-to-day responsibilities as well (Time)? What if we don't have all the skills or knowledge we need on the team (Talents)? What if we need more money, or money to invest in the implementation of our solution (money)? We may need information that is held by others in the organization in order to develop our solution (information)? We need a space to work in, phones, computers, supplies (materials). As the team progresses toward its objectives it will discover new resource needs. The team needs to be trained to ask for what it needs and taught that it is good thing to ask. The American culture presumes that people can make do with what they have. But when you ask a high performance team to achieve extraordinary results you should expect that it will have some unanticipated needs.

High Performance Team Building

A critical element in the establishment of a team is the development and acceptance of the team charter. The team charter defines the task, scope and boundaries in which the team will operate. In one sense the charter is the team's license to operate. Either organizational leaders or individual teams can create the team charter. No matter which way the team charter is developed, the organization's leader or leadership group still must approve the team charter.

There are a number of elements that are necessary for the creation of any team. These include: two or more individuals, a common team goal, and the necessary resources of time, materials, space, and perhaps money needed to accomplish and then sustain the goal. High Performance teams learn and demonstrate behaviors that are not exhibited by most teams. These characteristics represent the essential elements of High Performance Teams.

In most organizations teams are formed to either make decisions or implement decisions. Decision making teams are usually made up of individuals who provide a variety of expertise and experience. Teams formed to implement decisions already made by others are usually selected to represent an area of influence or authority needed to achieve a successful implementation. High Performance Teams are expected to both decide how change is to occur and to be responsible for implementing the change. Selecting team members for High Performance Teams needs to take this dual role into consideration and choose both individuals who are thought leaders and influencers in the organization and individuals who have varied backgrounds and experience.

While High Performance Teams can be implemented to achieve any significant business purpose, they are most often formed to achieve dramatic improvements within processes. Processes are a series of activities that have a starting point and an ending point. In business the trigger or starting point of a process is often a customer order or request and the end point is the satisfaction of that order or request. High performance teams are usually cross-functional, that is, the teams are composed of representatives who understand one or more of the collection of activities that are performed by the process. A High Performance Operating Team will usually have a Process Owner who coordinates the teams activities and is the communication interface with the organizational world beyond the team.

Three key characteristics of High Performance Team building involve trust, respect,and support. Team members need to be coached in the need to trust and support each other. Support involves actively keeping an eye on the other team members and demonstrating a willingness to help each other out when help is needed--even when it might not be requested. Team members encourage each other to stretch beyond their comfort zone by offering advice or assistance when asked or when it is obvious that the fellow team member needs it.

High Performance teams are always conscious of quality and strive to improve the quality of their teamwork as well as the quality of their output.

A common practice for High Performance Teams to have one or more coaches. The team coach is responsible for teaching team building behavior. Coaches are also helpful in making certain that the team receives guidance and training as needs arise.

Team Charter

A team charter is a written document that defines the team's mission, scope of operation, objectives, time frame, and consequences. Charters can be developed by top management and presented to teams, or teams can create their own charters and present them to top management. Either way the top management's endorsement of a team's charter is a critical factor in giving the team the direction and protection it needs to succeed. Teams need to know what top management expects of them, but just as important is the idea that non-team members need to know what top-management expects of the team. A charter can be thought of as a hunting license granted by the appropriate level of management. From time to time, the team may need to show its license to non-team members, particularly middle managers, so that it is clear to all that the team has the authority, permission, and blessing of the necessary level of management to operate, conduct research, consider and implement any changes needed to achieve the expected team results.

The team charter begins with a Purpose Statement. This is a one or two line statement explaining why the team is being formed. The purpose statement should align with and support the organization's vision and mission statements.

Next the charter lays down the objectives the team is expected to achieve. Objectives should always be stated in measurable terms. It may be that there are currently no measures being made on the performance dimension the team is being asked to achieve. If this is the case, the team may be asked to develop those measures itself, including current benchmark measures. It is critical to the success of a high performance team that it be told what to achieve and not how to achieve it. To some extent, how will perhaps be limited to the resources available to the team. Nevertheless, much support, enthusiasm and energy are lost, when a team is told how to achieve its objectives.

The next section of the charter defines the scope of the team's charter. This is the opportunity to define organizational or operational boundaries within which the team is expected and allowed to operated. Defining boundaries is crucial in the matter of avoiding energy draining and time delaying turf wars. The team and everyone else needs to know the size of the sand-box the team will be playing in. This section might also contain information about the resources available to the team to accomplish its objectives. It might also speak about the time commitment expected of team members and the need to continue to support their day-to-day responsibilities.

Finally, a good charter might contain a section describing top management's support and commitment to the team. This is important because most team members will feel that they are taking personal risk by becoming a member of the team.

Charter Example

Measurement

High Performance Teams are established to accomplish something within a timeframe. A clear understanding of the team's objectives is a very important element of creating a successful teams. When what needs to be done and how we will know we have done it is known, life is simple. Most organizations do not have effective measures of performance. Indeed, most organizations are unsure about what constitutes organizational performance.

From the sponsoring manager's point of view, the objectives may not be all that clear. The sponsor may "feel" that significant improvement in overall organizational performance (new business or reduced costs, or improve service) is needed. In this more common instance the team has some serious work to do defining and refining performance measures.

A High Performance team can and should be expected to develop and refine its objectives and measures of performance. Even when management provides simple instructions such as a desire to reduce cost, many questions remain: Cost reductions at the expense of sales? Reduce our own costs, but push costs off on some other organization or a supplier? Or the customer? Larger objectives quickly come into play, and the team is going to also have to be given the strategic objectives of the organization so it can figure out whether what is trying to do will contribute to the organizations strategy. Unfortunately, the organization's strategy may be only in one person's head, or it seems to change with the wind, or is not followed at all by anyone in the organization. When a team discovers that it doesn't understand the organization's strategy, it must stop progress and get briefed by someone who does understand it. In the sad event that there is no clear organizational strategy, the team will have to presume a strategy and run it past the sponsoring manager for confirmation.

Once the strategy is set or understood by the team members, work can proceed on refining performance measures. High Performance Teams are chartered to improve performance in some way. Performance is associated with speed, quality, cost, and effectiveness. Finding good measures on these variables is not always easy. Effectiveness is very elusive and in the service industry. Quality may be difficult to define as well. Cost and speed are less difficult to get a handle on, but they have their pitfalls and problems as well. To top all this off, most of us are blinded by the current set of performance measures we maintain. Most organizations count what can be easily counted, without regard to whether these counts define the organization's performance: Number of telephone calls answered, number of orders processed, number of thing-a-ma-jigs made, or shipped, or serviced, are only the starting point for understanding performance. A fresh start on measurement may be needed. Getting a better handle on performance usually means starting with your customer's point of view about your performance. Finding out what is important to your customers and building a set of measures around these variables is usually much more effective than counting what can be easily counted.

Sometimes discovering who your customers are is a challenge by itself. Governmental organizations usually correctly assume their customers are the tax payers. But even this simple distinction blurs when you look at public school systems that have students, parents, teacher organizations, and state legislative mandates as well. The most straightforward approach is to trace the money flow. Someone is paying someone else money for something. The one who is paying is the customer. One caution is that in large corporations, this rule might not be true. Corporations sometimes pay for services at one place in the organization and receive the services at another. When this occurs the provider can quickly become confused about which place is the customer.

Information Protection Transformation Team Charter

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

This team's purpose is to reduce the operating cost and increase the effectiveness of the information protection processes for the Trillium Strategic Business Units (SBU).

EXPECTED RESULTS

Objective 1: Reduce the cost of operating information protection processes by 40 percent.
Objective 2: Increased effectiveness of information protection processes by 20 percent.
Objective 3: Involve the community of interest (COI) in developing an understanding of the current processes, designing the new processes, and implementing the new processes.
Objective 4: Demonstrate High Performance Team behavior.
Objective 5: Analyze current situation, design new processes that accomplish the objectives, and developed implementation plan in 30 days.
Objective 6: Objectives achieved in 90 days.

TEAM COMPOSITION AND CHARACTERISTICS

The team will consist of information protection leaders from each Trillium SBU, coached and advised by Trillium Project Team members.

CHARACTERISTICS

· Willingness to deal with the "big picture" perspective.

· Desire to work with everyone "touching" the current processes to gain understanding of current processes and to design future processes.

· Willingness to acquire new knowledge.

· Willing and able to work as a member of a team.

· Able to speak for/represent their division.

· Significant and current experience within one of the eight divisions.

BOUNDARIES

Activities are guided by Trillium Core Team, Trillium Vision, and Trillium corporate policies and procedures.
Process and change boundaries are to be determined by the scope needed to achieve the objectives.

OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU

· You will receive the full support of the Trillium Project Team and SBU leaders.

High Performance Team Essential Elements

High Performance Teams demonstrate the following characteristics and behaviors:

Shared Vision

All team members share and support a common vision that the team is working towards. Team members are highly focused on attaining objectives. High performance Teams have developed a vision that brings real meaning to the work that is being performed. The vision describes a future state that team members find personally appealing and exciting. A defensive vision such as "keep our jobs," or "retain market share" are not particularly inspiring. What is needed is a winning vision. One that inspires team members to extraordinary efforts when such efforts are required.

Time Oriented

The team operates under specific deadlines for achieving results. Teams that operate without deadlines will ultimately evolve into rap sessions. Focus shifts from what is to be done to endless discussions about what the real mission of the team is or to finding the best approach to solving the problem. Deadlines can be as much as nine months to a year away. Any longer and the team runs the very real risk of being overrun by larger events that affect the organization: major shifts in organization direction, budget changes, new responsibilities, etc. 90 to 120 day or even shorter timeframes are more desirable and achievable by high performance teams.

Communication

The team makes extra-ordinary efforts to make certain everyone on the team understands the plan and progress towards its completion. An old military saying is that there are always 10 percent of the people who do not get the word. A High Performance Team recognizes this phenomenon and uses all communication vehicles available to get new information to every team member. Team members recognize that they have an equally strong obligation to keep themselves informed.

Zone of Concern

The work of the team is beyond the team's zone of comfort. It either doesn't know how to achieve the desired results, or it doesn't know how to accomplish them in the time allowed. At first glance this seems like a crazy notion. Why would any team want to attempt anything it didn't already know how to do? Paradoxically, we get the greatest satisfaction when we achieve results that at the outset we don't believe we can accomplish. When a team operates in the concern zone, between its comfort zone and perhaps its anxiety zone, it is most likely to perform better and consequently bond better and become stronger when it does achieve results.

Reviews Quality

The team stops at appropriate times to check the quality of its recent work. This is done to determine where the process could be improved and what learning can be shared with other team members. It is this act of stopping to check quality, even in the anxiety zone, where the team internalizes its learning and improves its collective performance.

Involves Everyone

Team members work to make certain that every member of the team is involved. Watchers and wonderers are mobilized to get behind the team's march toward achieving its vision. It is human to make judgments about the capabilities, intelligence, and motivation of our fellow team members. When we do so, we limit the potential of the team. Every team member has a unique insight or contribution it can make towards team goal achievement. It may very well be true that every team member must contribute for the team to achieve full success. It is the responsibility of each and every High Performance Team member to search out and discover the capabilities of all the other team members.

Self-Directed

High Performance Team Members are self-directed. If the team is to be managed, management must be careful to focus the team on "what" needs to be achieved. The "How the work is to be accomplished" must remain the sole purview of the team. When management goes to the point of telling a team how work is to be accomplished, the team becomes de-motivated and perhaps subconsciously says "We'll see about that."

Celebrates Success

High Performance Teams take the time to celebrate small victories toward goal achievement. This activity builds a sense of team success as the work of the team progresses. Sometimes, the celebrations are over new team learning's or insights, other times the team celebrate the completion of a small task. Together these celebrations build-up the team's morale and increase the teams determination to achieve the ultimate goal. Celebrations make take the form of a team cheer or the simple matter of collectively shouting "YES!"

Comfort Zone

We are operating within our comfort zone when we feel competent performing a given task. Beyond our comfort zone is the unknown. Here is both opportunity and threat. Here we look upon the possibility of huge success and utter disaster. Opportunity to grow, learn, succeed, and achieve. But also a place of risk. A place where we might fail, come up short, or embarrass ourselves. If we are completely honest with ourselves, most of us work pretty hard to plan and organize our lives in such a way as to remain within our comfort zone. Most of us don't like surprises. We value predictability. We seek to minimize risk of all forms. And while it's true that we can and do learn in our zone of comfort, it is also true that we don't learn as fast as when we are beyond it.

Managers also like to make performance commitments for their organizations that are fairly easily achieved. They add a cushion of error, a margin of safety to their budgets and forecasts. Good managers look for opportunities to stretch their better workers. But the risk of personal or organizational failure is seldom large.

Interestingly, everyone's comfort zone is different. The very idea of public speaking or singing can produce moist palms and racing hearts for many. Others welcome such opportunities: Go on Television? "Great, what time?" So one of the powerful aspects of teams is that they can project a collective comfort zone footprint that is much larger than any single individual's zone.

Both individuals and teams grow and learn faster when they are operating outside their comfort zone. We get excited when we surpass the performance expectations that we thought we were capable of achieving. When this occurs we start to think, "That was great. We're hot stuff. We can go beyond that achievement". And because we have achieved the seemingly impossible once, we feel more confident about being able to do it again. Then when we share that confidence and excitement with other team members we all feel more energy, more commitment, and more enthusiasm about the new stretch target.

Is every team that attempts the seemingly impossible going to reach its target? Not always is the answer. Although most will come close. And in trying is risk. Things will be different. We don't like change, but one thing is certain: We can't possibly reach impossible targets by doing things the way we've always done them. And out there somewhere way beyond our comfort zone is great risk and possibly terror. Most individuals would never willingly go that place of overwhelming fear alone. But can a group of people go there together? The answer is yes, if the rewards are collectively thought to be great enough. The truth is that a team can take on a much higher level of risk than any individual can.

Given that all this is true, management should seek opportunities to challenge teams to go after goals that seem impossible. Management needs to think hard about selecting goals that, if attained, will make a very real difference in organization's performance, customer satisfaction, or market share. Clear, measurable goals that a team can use to keep before them and measure the team's progress. And if management or teams settle on goals that meet these criteria, management must be ready to reward those teams in ways that make that level of performance worthwhile to the individual team members. Money for sure, but also public recognition, more autonomy and empowerment for the team as well.

Developing Team Vision

A vision is a word picture of a future state. Teams need both hard and soft visions of the future. A hard vision would involve a written statement that describes what the organization will perform like when it is achieved. It may involve markets captured or status or recognition received. This type of vision would read something like: " The COE Team will be the most efficient and effective provider of high quality engineering design and support in the HVAC industry. We will obtain and retain the HVAC Association Award of Excellence in Engineering. Eighty percent of all engineering designs will be produced and delivered within 4 days of order receipt, while 100 percent will be completed and delivered within 6 business days. Ninety percent of all HVAC support requests will be satisfied within 24 hours, and 100 percent within 48 hours." Hard visions can either be developed by the team or developed by management and given to the team. When management provides a team's vision, it will need to be able to complete the statement: "We are shooting for this vision so that..." And the so that's need to be things that the individual team members can relate to and care about. Some organizations are led by charismatic leaders who are capable of developing and painting a very appealing picture of what the future organization will be like. In the absence of such leadership it is better to let the team develop and present its own vision for management approval.

Soft visions should be developed, stated and shared by every team member. The "Who's got a dollar?" exercise is a way of getting team members to explain their vision of what they would like to see the organization become: "How would it feel to work here? What would I be getting out of the experience? What would it look like? How would I then be able to describe it to my neighbors?"

Contact: bodwell@onramp.net

High Performance Team Selection

When a team is assembled to accomplish significant results in a short period of time, the best and brightest people the organization has to offer should be chosen. Unfortunately, when a manager is asked to provide someone to be a part of a newly formed team, the logic often goes something like this: "Sharon's my best person, but she is already working on three projects that are critical to the department's success. Harry's pretty good too, but if I send Harry, will I get him back? George, hasn't been performing very well lately, and frankly I've been meaning to talk to him about that. Oh well, we could get along fine without George, so I guess I'll send George."

When a team comes together that's make up mostly of George's -- the team pretty quickly figures that out. They may be blind to their own status in the organization, but they will be quick to notice that everyone else is third stringers. What does this say about how serious the organization is about accomplishing the High Performance Team's objectives, or about getting real results? When less than the best are sent, the team becomes angry and concerned about the sponsoring manager's sincerity and support. While good coaches can ultimately overcome this anger and focus the team on its objectives, several critical days or weeks can be lost as the team builds confidence in it's ability to get the job done.

What are the characteristics we are looking for in individuals who are to become a part of a High Performance Team? We are looking for people who care deeply about the organization and want to see it succeed. We are interested in people who are able to work well with others, particularly as members of a team. These are people who believe that two or more minds are better that one, and that everyone, no matter how seemingly dense, has a contribution they can make that no one else can.

Beyond these few guidelines, diversity of perspective, experience, and knowledge will help the team develop mutual trust and respect more quickly.

Adding New Team Members

Care must be taken when adding new people to existing teams. The rule is not to impose an individual on a team. This can be handled by involving the entire team in the selection process. Team members interview prospective new team members either one at a time or collectively. Even before a candidate is produced for consideration, the team should be questioned about the skill set they feel a new team member should bring to the team. When the team has a significant role in deciding on any new team members, the team will be much more committed to making sure the decision was the right decision. For many teams, unanimous consent will be desirable

Removing Team Members

Sometimes, despite everyone's best efforts, a team member will need to be taken off the team. There are any number of reasons why this situation could occur: perhaps one of the members lacks the required skills and shows little interest in developing them; personality conflicts between team members, though most of these come down to a lack of professional respect and appreciation. Perhaps a team member is too stretched or stressed by other projects or personal problems, and can't keep his commitments to the team. The result is a very delicate situation for the manager responsible for the team. Both the team and the manager should have a series of frank discussions with the individual. The conversations should center on what's expected, what's at stake, and what's not happening that needs to happen, or what is happening that shouldn't be happening. Then if the situation doesn't improve, action will be required. The manager will have to see that the team member is removed. Reassigned if that's most appropriate, discharged if the situation calls for discharge. Prior to taking action the manager needs to discuss his pending action with the other team members, collectively if possible, and try to gain the team's consensus for the action. Failing that, the manager might take action or if he decides that the team wants to carry the poor performing team member, he may want to let the situation ride. Manager's should keep in mind the fact that it is highly unusual for a team to assume any responsibility for deciding to remove a team member. Management can be a very lonely job.

Contact: bodwell@onramp.net

Diversity of Perspective

To a casual observer, a team may appear to be culturally homogenous. Yet each team member brings their own set of communication values that transcend gender, nationality, ethnicity, role, or socio-economic status. W. Shabaz Associates, Inc. of Holland, Michigan takes a clear approach to affirming the communication style diversity that is required in each team that aspires to High Performance.

A team may agree in early meetings that they share and support a vision that they want to achieve, and yet each team member carries a different picture of what success for the effort will look like. Later meetings may be filled with conflict and accusations that clear communication does not take place, as each team member or sub-teams are heading in different directions.

To achieve High Performance a team needs diversity in the orientation of its individual team members:

Some team members will be needed who are primarily oriented towards task and target date accomplishment.
Other team members will be needed who hold process, planning, organization and methods in the highest regard.
Teams also need members who nurture, encourage and provide communication nodes. Otherwise, anarchy and intense frustration can result as individuals demand that "their way" is "the only way."
Teams will certainly need some members who are creative and innovative. This quality is helpful when product design, inspiration, optimism or humor is needed.
The last type of team member needed by a High Performance Team is a floater-someone who is capable of identifying with all of the above orientations and can fill in when one of the viewpoints is missing.

It important to understand that the above orientations are not something that is learned or a role that is assigned. People naturally tend to oriented their thinking along one of the first four views of what is important, while a smaller proportion of the population is more or less evenly balanced and can assume any one of the four views.

A good understanding of the above orientations and the value each brings to a team provides much needed guidance for team selection. High performance teams are sensitive to each other's viewpoints and recognize that all viewpoints are needed. Team builders who need help getting their teams to discover the value of diverse viewpoints should consider working with W. Shabaz Associates.

Those lacking the funds to engage an outside "style diversity consultant" can obtain a copy of "The Platinum Rule," and fairly easily build a relationship style course for team members.

Contact: bodwell@onramp.net

Cross Functional

Cross functional teams are made up of individuals who represent different departments or functional areas in the organization. Depending on the type of business and organizational scheme employed, manufacturing departments might include shipping/receiving, administrative services, sales, marketing, production, warranty and purchasing. Service organizations will vary greatly but can usually be classified as having the following functional areas: sales or order receipt, order processing, service delivery, post service support, and cash collection, in addition to the usual support departments involving employee care, corporate accounting and facilities management

It is desired and often necessary to assemble cross-functional teams in order to obtain a holistic or complete view of the operation. Individuals who represent a department or functional area should be subject matter experts (SME's), that is, they should be very knowledgeable about the policies, practices, and operations of their department or functional area.

The thoughtful selection of the SMEs who will represent the various areas of the organization is important aspect of building an effective team. This becomes even more critical if the team is to work only on this project for several months or more. Managers can and do use requests to supply cross-functional team members from their organization as a non-confrontational method of unloading weak performers. While the team member is off working with the cross-functional team, the manager re-assigns their responsibilities to others. One way to thwart this practice is to explain at the outset that the high performance team will be composed of individuals who will be leaders in the new organization if the team is to continue on as a High Performance Operating Team once the initial objectives have been obtained.

Process Owner

When a High Performance Team changes to a High Performance Operating Team it will need a Process Owner. The process owner is responsible for coordinating activities between all the teams that support a single process. The role of the process owner is to nurture and develop the team as well as to represent the team with external organizations. The Process Owner is responsible for procuring the resources (time, space, hardware, etc.) that the team requires in order to be successful. The process owner attends meetings and reports to the team on organizational activities and changes that may impact the teams workload or performance. The process owner is also a coach who teaches and encourages high performance team behavior and concepts. Depending on the number of people on the High Performance Operating Team, the Sub-Process Owners with similar responsibilities may be needed in addition to Process Owners.

One critical role of the process owner is to clearly articulate the team's shared vision of the future. To achieve a high performance state a team needs to have a vision about what work will be like and what meaning such work will have, once the team achieves the vision. It is the responsibility of the Process Owner to explain the team's vision to outside organizations and to help shape the team's vision to keep it consistent with the overall organization's vision.

The Process Owner must be responsible for measuring the process performance as well as for rewarding the team. This keeps the team focused and prevents the inevitable conflicts and distractions that result when functional managers retain measurement or reward responsibility for different parts of teams.

Selection of a Process Owner with the above skills is critical to the ongoing success of a High Performance Operating Team. The best Process Owners are often interviewed and nominated for selection by the team members themselves. A Process Owner selected by the team that he or she will coach can make progress much faster than a team coached by an assigned Process Owner. In fact a team selected process owner can start with a very special relationship and authority basis with the team that an assigned process owner can only hope to achieve.

Trust, Respect and Support

Developing trust among team members is at once difficult and essential to becoming a High Performance Team. Team members need to be taught from the start that building trust within the team is critically important to the team's ultimate success.

As the team forms, it is normal that the level of trust is low. Several members, or all team members may have worked together before. Or they may know each other by casual acquaintance or interaction. But trust has something to do with loyalties, and at the outset the team will not have developed team loyalty. Rather, each team member's loyalties will be to his or her own organization or manager. As the days and weeks of team building proceed, loyalties will naturally build toward fellow team members. This is often a two step process: one forward, and one step back. During the first few days, it is common for one or more team members to respond negatively about the need for the team, its composition, the coaches, the task before them, or whether this is the most important thing they could be spending their time working on. As a result, several team members are likely to call back to their functional area or manager with negative reports. As these complaints are relayed back to the team coach, and they certainly will be, the coach needs to bring the complaints before the team for consideration as an issue. It is best not to name names. This will send a message to the complainers that they are on the verge of being discovered. Invariably the complainers will change their tune, rather than risk a negative reaction from their fellow team members.

Team members need to be coached to learn that it is important to trust one another. It is not possible, or desirable, for one team member to do all the work for the team. Although, someone will almost always try. New members need to learn that to get the job done they have to rely on others to do their part. The analog to this principle is that each team member needs to be trustworthy. Team members need to learn that others are counting on them to do what they said they would do. But personal or business problems outside the team come up that affect individual team members' ability to accomplish their agreed tasks. As soon as it becomes clear to a team member that his or her task cannot be completed in time, the team member needs to let the other team members know about the cause of the problem and ask for help. This practice goes a long way to convincing fellow team members that one is trustworthy.

When a call for help comes from a fellow team member, the others should carefully examine their own responsibilities and available skills or time to see if they can help. It's in the best interest of team members to support each other, especially when the team's performance is judged and rewarded as a whole. The time might come when the team member who has been asked for help, needs help himself. If help cannot be offered, the team should pull together and determine how to be revise the plan or bring in additional resources to get the plan back on track.

Resources

A number of resources are available to individuals wishing to create or sponsor High Performance Teams.

Reading List

Books

Alessandra, Tony, and O'Connor, Michael, The Platinum Rule, Warner Books; New York, Ny, 1996.

Bridges, William. Job Shift, Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Glacel, Barbara Pate, and Robert, Emile A. Jr., Light Bulbs For Leaders, John Wiley & Son, Inc., 1996

Katzenbach, Jon R., and Smith, Douglas K., The Wisdom of Teams , Harvard Business School Press, 1993. (My summary of the book)

Kelly, Kevin, Out of Control, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994. (The whole book on the internet!!!)

Pinchot, Clifford and Elizabeth, The End of Bureaucracy and The Rise of the Intelligent Organization, Berrett-Koehler, 1996.

Senge, Peter M., The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday, 1990

Wheatley, Margaret J., Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1992.

The Wisdom of Teams

Jon R. Katzenbach & Douglas K. Smith, Harvard Business School Press, 1993

Lessons we have learned

Significant performance challenges energize teams regardless of where they are in an organization. No team arises without a performance challenge that is meaningful to those involved. A common set of demanding performance goals that a group considers important to achieve will lead, most of the time, to both performance and team.. Performance, however, is the primary objective while a team remains the means, not the end.
Organizational leaders can foster team performance best by building a strong performance ethic rather than by establishing a team-promoting environment alone.
Biases toward individualism exist but need not get in the way of team performance. Real teams always find ways for each individual to contribute and thereby gain distinction. Indeed, when harnessed to a common team purpose and goals, our need to distinguish ourselves as individuals becomes a powerful engine for team performance.
Discipline-both within the team and across the organization-creates the conditions for team performance. For organizational leaders, this entails making clear and consistent demands that reflect the needs of customers, shareholders, and employees, and then holding themselves and the organization relentlessly accountable.

Team Basics

Small enough in number. Can convene and communicate easily and frequently. Discussions are open and interactive for all members. Each member understands the other's roles and skills.
All three categories of skills are either actually or potentially represented across the membership (functional/technical, problem-solving/decision-making, and interpersonal). Each member has the potential in all three categories to advance his or her skills to the level required by the team's purpose and goals.
The team's purpose constitutes a broader, deeper aspiration than just near term goals. All team members understand and articulate the purpose the same way. Members define the purpose vigorously in discussion with outsiders. Members frequently refer to the purpose and explore its implications. The purpose contains themes that are particularly meaningful and memorable. Members feel the purpose is important, if not exciting.
There are team goals versus broader organizational goals versus just one individual's goals. Goals are clear, simple, and measurable. If they are not measurable, can their achievement be determined? Goals are realistic as well as ambitious.
The approach is concrete, clear, and really understood and agreed to by everybody. It requires all members to contribute equivalent amounts of real work. It provides for open interaction, fact-based problem solving, and result-based evaluation. The approach provides for modification and improvement over time. Fresh input and perspective is systematically sought and added, for example, through information and analysis, new members, and sponsors.
There is a sense of mutual accountability.

The team performance curve

The Working Group: This is a group for which there is no significant incremental performance need or opportunity the would require it to become a team. The members interact primarily to share information, best practices, or perspectives and to make decisions to help each individual perform within his or her area of responsibility.

Pseudo-team: This is a group for which their could be a significant, incremental performance need or opportunity, but it has not focused on collective performance and is not really trying to achieve it. It has no interest in shaping a common purpose or set of performance goals, even though it may call itself a team. Pseudo teams are the weakest of all groups in terms of performance impact.

Potential Team: This is a group for which there s a significant, incremental performance need, and that really is trying to improve its performance impact. Typically, however, it requires more clarity about purpose, goals or work-products and more discipline in hammering out a common working approach. It has not yet established collective accountability.

Real Team: This is a small number of people with complementary skills who are equally committed to a common purpose, goals, and working approach for which the hold themselves mutually accountable.

High Performance Team: This is a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to each other's personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team. The high performance team significantly outperforms all other like teams, and outperforms all reasonable expectations given its membership.

Common Approaches to Building Team Performance

Establish urgency and direction. All team members need to believe the team has urgent and worthwhile purpose, and they want to know what the expectations are. Indeed, the more urgent and meaningful the rationale, the more likely it is that a real team will emerge. The best team charters are clear enough to indicate performance expectations, but flexible enough to allow teams to shape their own purpose, goals, and approach.
Select members based on skill and skill potential, not personalities. Teams must have the complementary skills needed to do their job . Three categories of skills are relevant: 1) technical and functional, 2) problem-solving, and 3) interpersonal. The key issue for potential teams is striking the right balance between members who already possess the needed skill levels versus developing the skill levels after the team gets started.
Pay particular attention to first meetings and actions. Initial impressions always mean a great deal. When potential teams firs gather, everyone alertly monitors the signals given by others to confirm, suspend, or dispel going-in assumptions and concerns. They particularly pay attention to those in authority: The team leader and any executives who set up, oversee, or otherwise influence the team. And, as always, what such leaders do is more important than what they say.
Set some clear rules of behavior. All real teams develop rules of conduct to help them achieve their purpose and performance goals. The most critical early rules pertain to attendance (for example: "no interruptions to take phone calls"), discussion-"no sacred cows", confidentiality, analytic approach-facts are friendly, end-product orientations-everyone gets assignments and does them, constructive confrontation-no finger pointing, and often the most important-everyone does real work.
Set and seize upon a few immediate performance-oriented tasks and goals. Most teams trace their advancement to key performance-oriented events that forge them together. Potential teams can set such events in motion by immediately establishing a few challenging yet a