The goal of team-building and creating a psychological safety foundation is not to make work fun, it’s to create high-performing teams. Sometimes that means fun, but sometimes it doesn’t. And that’s okay. Work doesn’t have to be ping-pong, golf and amusement parks to be enjoyable. People enjoy work more when they feel supported. Work can be fulfilling even without bean bag chairs, cocktails and slot machines (though those can be nice).
Putting together the right team and making sure that the team feels supported are key. This isn’t about being ‘touchy feely’. This is about making sure that people on your team will take risks. Remember, it’s “No risk, no reward.” If you don’t set your people up to feel comfortable taking risks, neither they nor you will get any reward.
Last week, I discussed misunderstandings of what it takes to build a high-performance team. This week I will focus on misunderstandings about high-performance teams themselves. Before you begin the work to create a culture to support your team members, make sure you know what “good” looks like. Confusion on these four myths can suck up a lot of time and energy.
High-performance team myths
Myth 1: Strong teams have people who like each other
There are plenty of videos and photos of teams where everyone is smiling. There are tons of stories of people spending every waking minute with a team they love. This is not a necessary goal. Building a high-performance team doesn’t even mean forcing everyone to like each other.
It does mean that everyone needs to respect each other. Teammates do not need to be friends outside of work hours. They do not need to do everything together. They do not need to share every piece of their souls. They do need to learn enough about their teammates to understand them as human beings and treat them with respect.
Activity: Think about the high-performance teams that you’ve been on. Have you liked everyone on the team?
Myth 2: Once a team is high-performing, you don’t need more team-building
High-performing teams are a work in progress. You need to spend a lot of time breaking in a new baseball mitt and much less time keeping it clean and oiled after you’ve got it adjusted for your hand. But if you break it in perfectly and never oil it, you will not like the result. Similarly, you need to make a real investment in time in the beginning to build a foundation for your team. Then you just need to maintain the foundation.
The initial work isn’t so much breaking in the team as opening them up. It’s about getting people to see the others as fellow humans beings worthy of respect. It’s about building psychological safety. Afterwards, it’s maintaining the connection to ensure that work never becomes so robotic that you lose focus on the people who work with you.
Activity: Have you ever been on a team that was high-performing and then went downhill? What changed?
Myth 3: Team conflict is bad
Not all team conflict is good. Not all is bad either. Bad conflict is conflict that destroys trust between people. It tends to be personal and mean-spirited. Good conflict is conflict that focuses on making the work better. It tends to be work-focused and productive. Good conflict is about how to improve the work. Bad conflict is about why some person isn’t good enough/doing enough/etc.
A team without conflict is a team that will produce subpar work. If teammates don’t challenge each other, they will do only the first level of thinking. They will get to only the obvious conclusions. Teams that trust each other can ask hard questions about work—and can do it respectfully. They don’t question the teammates. They question the assumptions or the conclusions.
Activity: Do you have good memories of conflict on teams that you’ve had? How do those teams differ from teams where conflict has been bad? Or non-existent?
Myth 4: A great leader guarantees a great team
This is probably the biggest myth out there. Because context matters. People learn to be great leaders. Putting that great leader into a different cultural situation or an area with people with different skills, the leader can fail to adapt. Someone might be a great leader when there is a burning platform in the North America unit. That doesn’t prove that they’ll be a great leader in a global transformation project. Just because some people are great sales leaders doesn’t mean they’ll be successful in leading a strategy team. (It doesn’t mean they won’t; it just isn’t a guarantee.)
Activity: Who have you worked for that you respected the most? Has their behavior translated effectively to different teams and different times?
These myths have grown around high-performance teams, so it's easy to over-invest in the wrong areas. You need to make sure that you’re not working hard in the wrong direction.
Keeping these myths in mind, spend some time thinking about the best team you were ever a member of. Ask yourself:
What was it that made it the best?
What did your manager do?
What did your peers do?
What were the team norms?
What were your expectations?
Summary
The good news is that anyone can learn to build high-performance teams. The bad news is that it takes work and it’s an unending effort. If, from the beginning, you build and maintain a good foundation, there is a very high probability that you will establish a high-performance team. If you have a currently under-performing team, all is not lost. You can shape the team members into a high-performance team. But you need to focus on building a solid foundation while still getting the day-to-day job done. And then you need to maintain it.