In this blog series we are exploring the components that come together to create Sustainable Performance. Using the Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework as reference, we will explore how elements come together and have a causal effect that builds into healthy work cultures that enable performance and productivity in organisations.
As a reminder, we define Sustainable Performance in the workplace as “the ability of an organisation, team, or individual to consistently achieve high levels of productivity, effectiveness, and well-being over the long term, without compromising future performance or the health of its people.”
In part 1, we started our journey by looking at Building Foundations of Wellbeing. We looked at how inside and outside work wellbeing enables a healthy workforce that can focus and are energised at work. Then actively promoting the right behaviours can foster psychological safety and trust. In part 2, we build on these foundations and look how to create personal ownership, build social connections which allow us to form high performing teams.
A performing organisation needs high performing teams at its core. It was Douglas Smith who popularised the concept of 1+1=3 when referring to the ability of teams to achieve more than a group of individuals. The harmonies and efficiencies of a team’s focus make a more productive workforce. Yet there is an important distinction between a group of individuals and a team. A team has internal emotional connections in place that regulate and promote performance. They support each other to ensure team success, even if it comes at personal cost. So, how does a group of employees who are mentally fit and have psychological safety lead to high performing teams? What do we have to consider to support our individual employees in their transformation into high performing teams?
The Tap’d Sustainable Performance Framework highlights three key stages that organisations need to consider and act on to maximise the opportunities for teams to become high performing. These are:
1) Creating Ownership
2) Working Well with Others
3) High Performance Teaming
Just like in the previous blog, let’s again look at each in turn:
Creating Ownership
If you want your organisation to perform well over time, one of the key hurdles to overcome is how to instil a sense of ownership in your people so that they care about the medium- and long-term goals as well as the short-term. And how do you get them to be passionate and own their part of the overall ambition of the company? The creation of psychological safety (see Blog 1) starts this process with the establishment of a rudimentary level of trust. People who feel that they are trusted and have a safe environment to speak up will feel more responsible for their work. William Kahn (1990) in his research on engagement explained that ownership is strengthened when employees feel “trusted, respected, and fairly treated”, and when there are opportunities to voice opinions and influence decisions, which in turn fosters engagement and responsibility.
Psychological safety also opens up our ability to connect our motivators to the organisation. This is underpinned by the work on intrinsic motivation by such authors as Deci & Ryan with Self-Determination Theory and Daniel Pink in his book, “Drive”. Well-explained organisational strategies and goals give our employees the ability to connect our motivations through the understanding of shared values. Amy Wrzesniewski (1997) on her work in Job Crafting to create meaning found that employees who can connect their personal values and identity to their job tasks show higher ownership.
So psychological safety and trust give us access to personal ownership by our employees. Yet we need to build on and foster this initial connection in a sustainable way. Probably the most significant key way we can propagate this over time is by giving people autonomy in their role; the giving of overt trust to our people to organise and deliver their work. This is backed up my many key authors including Daniel Pink, Hackman & Oldham, and Deci & Ryan among others. Ensuring we recognise and reward effort and achievement is another way of sustaining ownership behaviour, not just for the individual’s own worth (Expectancy theory of motivation) but also that ownership is rewarded fairly and equitably across the organisation (Equity theory of motivation).
Once there is personal ownership established with our people, we can look to enhance performance by creating teams that are focused on specific, collective goals. To do this we have to initially look at the drivers of healthy team culture.
Working Well with Others
To create a high performing team you need to initially return to the cultural dynamics within the organisation. Teams only work successfully over a sustained period of time when they are “gelled.” In other words, the group has reached a state where collaboration feels natural, smooth, and productive. It’s less about technical skills and more about the emotional and relational dynamics. If we want technical performance then we need “emotional competence” first.
When we say “emotional competence” many of us immediately think of Daniel Goleman and his work on Emotional Intelligence. Psychological safety again gives us a foundation for the development of people in a team working well together and Goleman’s work is relevant here, yet his work is primarily at an individual level looking at one-to-one relationships. Psychological safety as a pre-condition for team effectiveness has also been highlighted as the single most important factor for teams by Google’s Project Aristotle in 2015, where they researched over 180 performing teams to identify key traits that great teams had over good teams.
When looking at the emotional and relational dynamics in a team setting, then the work by Anita Woolley et al (2010) on Collective Intelligence and Social Sensitivity is quite interesting for team formation. They highlighted a number of key behaviour sets that foster the gelling concept within a team, allowing them to work closely together. These include:
– A “social sensitivity” which is the ability to perceive and respond to others’ emotions within the team. (What Goleman would call Empathy and Self-Regulation).
– A sense of equal participation where each person if heard through a method of conversation management.
– A good level of diversity in the team. Woolley et al focused on female participation as a link to higher social sensitivity, yet other research broadens this to a diversity of background and other characteristics.
– Communication standards that are inclusive and are empathetic to the challenges of individuals within the team.
This focus on intra-team relations, based on emotional needs, creates social connections and a distinct team culture that is owned by the collective team and will evolve over time with the rituals and artefacts of team experiences. This level of subconscious “knowing of the other” creates a sense of being in it together and a level of colleague forgiveness when times are tough. The bedrock of team behaviour is now set, allowing the organisation to then focus on task achievement, in the pursuit of sustainable performance.
High Performance Teaming
We are now on the way to creating a high performing team. One of the earliest researchers in the field of high performing teams was Bruce Tuckman (1965) and his Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model is still extensively used today to understand the stages of team formation and why some teams thrive and others decay. If you reflect on the “Working Well with Others” section above, you can see how emotional competence development can overlap into the Forming, Storming and maybe Norming stages of team creation. Getting the team to understand each other at an emotional level and form relationships prepares the team to then focus on task Norming and Performing. It is easy to say that a Norming team then “moves to Performing” but how is it actually done?
Richard Hackman in his research and subsequent book “Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances” (2002), identifies five conditions that need to be satisfied for great team performance. They are:
1) The team needs to have clear boundaries of what it does and doesn’t own along with team membership that is stable enough for the team to have strong relationships.
2) The team needs a compelling direction which is clear, challenging, and are meaningful.
3) The team needs to have a structure that enables it to be successful. i.e. norms and resources.
4) The team needs to sit within an organisation that is supportive of the team’s goal focus, from rewards to learning and information flow.
5) The team needs to have access to expert coaching when it is required.
Katzenbach & Smith, in their seminal book “The Wisdom of Teams” (1993), also state that a mix of complementary skills was important to achieve the performance outcome of a team unit. It was Katzenbach & Smith who distinguished the idea of a team from a group of individuals. Complementary skills highlight that most high performing teams are brought together for the purpose of an achievement of a key task or goal, allowing us to question why we form a team in the first place. Is it to collate all similar people under one line manager for efficiency or is it to bring together complimentary skills for maximum focus on a particular goal that is outward facing?
So, if we have good positive relations and the right conditions for a team, and a complementary mix of skills then we can create a high performing team. Then how do we maintain this level of performance. At this point, we must mention the critical role of the team leader or line manager. To have a compelling direction we need a leader who can narrate a story that connects within inner motivations. To have complementary skills we need a leader who can design a team structure, create stability in the team and can coach and mentor individual members. The skills of the team leader can enhance team cohesion or lessen it. A focus on leadership capability within the organisation, from the smallest team to the largest division is therefore critical for sustainable performance. Assuming that your leaders naturally have people skills, and/or the organisation is lacking ways to refresh and refocus these skills are substantive inhibitors to many organisations’ performance ability.
The team leader also has the responsibility to ensure positive team behaviours are rewarded and encouraged. Lominger, now a part of Korn Ferry, have done extensive work on the behaviour of high performing teams and categorise them in their T7 model. They identified five internal sets of behaviours entitled Thrust, Trust, Talent, Teaming and Task Skills, yet they recognised that the Team-Leader Fit was critical and also that Hackman’s condition of Team Support from the Organisation was also necessary. By working on these behavioural areas it is possible to create, grow and maintain a high performing team.
So, we are finished. Job done. Well, no, not really. Creating a high performing team in a very stable environment is one thing. Maintaining high performance teams in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment requires the ability for the organisation to identify, react and be proactive in dealing with everything the internal and external world can throw at them whilst still being productive.
Our next blog, number 3 of 5, looks at the most identified leadership skill deficit in modern organisations, how to successfully deal with challenging conversations. We will discuss why this is the most critical of issues for sustainable performance in organisations, we will look into the cultural underpinning needed to wide-scale success of having productive high stakes conversations, and what skills leaders need to achieve this.
