“A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

High Performance Teams (HPTs) is a technical term to teams, organizations, or virtual groups that are highly focused on their goals.

While high performance workplaces are not HPTs, virtually all HPTs are high performance workplaces.

HPTs are basically characterized by stretch goals and emotionally competent members with complimentary skills. The concept of team roles is of great help to us in developing HPTs. The key roles as proposed by Belbin are defined below:

Plant – Is usually the team member who is very

creative and always brings in new and conventional ideas.

Shaper – Is the dynamic person who doesn’t give up and has a knack of finding ways around obstacles.

Coordinator – Is the person in the group who facilitates contributions from every one and keeps everyone informed.

Implementer – Is the one who is a good organizer with common sense and is good at implementing once the idea is fully developed.

Team Worker – Is the person who builds relationship while avoiding conflicts.

Resource Investigator – Is the extrovert who finds out outside support and resources for the group and is typically good at networking.

Specialist – Is the person with expertise in a particular subject.

Evaluator – Is one who is able to comfortably evaluate various options and makes decisions.

Completer – Is the team person, efficient in making final corrections, putting the group work in a presentable manner and delivering the things on time.

5 Simple Steps to building a HPT

Master your own destiny

Realize you don’t have to be the “boss” to build a HPT. It’s easy to let average performance slip by just because you’re not in charge. Take control of your work-life and be your own boss, managing your own team.

If you don’t know it’s broke, how can you fix it?

Invite constructive feedback about the team’s performance. In the classic “Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing” team building model, the Storming part is about disagreement, dissent and dissatisfaction. Ask the team what they think about themselves as a group and individually. Learn to recognize the team’s strengths, discuss where performance gaps exist and plan to close them.

In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly.

- Mark Sanborn

Proper practice prevents poor performance

Footballers spend 95% of their time practicing for the big game. How much time do you invest in practicing basic skills and team work? Even if you spend 1 hour in an effective team meeting, it’s still less than 3% of your working week. Building and maintaining a HPT doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming, when you build it into your regular work-life.

A stitch in time

Keep going. Get your priority team functioning well and establish a team-maintenance regime. Replicate positives of the more productive teams into the less effective ones. Behaviour breeds behaviour, and as you develop a reputation for being an effective team leader or member, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much easier it is to make improvements elsewhere.

Put your eggs in one basket

Chances are you’re a member or leader of many teams at work. Start small and invest your efforts in improving the team that will make the biggest difference to your working life.

The sooner team members make the transition from “I” to “We” the more productive the team will be. Teams are the most effective and productive when everyone understands and acknowledges the talents, contributions, and perspectives of the others individually and of the unit.

As elders usually say, don’t have a wish-bone where your back-bone should be! High performance teams are not conjured from thin air – they are a direct result of thought, plans and action.