When you take a look at the DNA of successful companies, you notice that high performing teams within the company drive success, whether it's in areas like sales and marketing, operations, customer service, or manufacturing.While there are many aspects to building great teams that continuously take their companies to new levels of success, there are three fundamental characteristics that we see over and over again in the highest functioning organizations. Leaders model these characteristics, their teams emulate them, and the very best organizations systematize them, creating a culture of excellence.These fundamental qualities necessary for building high performance teams in business organizations are trust, openness, and understanding. Let's start with trust. As with any of these qualities, the success of the team depends upon how leaders interact with their teams and how each team member interacts with one another.In a recent Inc. Magazine article, Geoffrey James discusses the work environments and results produced by teams with average leaders who motivate by fear and demand that their teams simply follow orders, versus extraordinary leaders who motivate through vision, giving their teams the freedom to have fun, take action, and be accountable. The foundational concept here is trust-if leaders trust team members to make their own decisions, then they will, in turn, empower each other. Trust not only heightens performance-it simultaneously drives engagement.Many leaders and employees struggle with the concept of openness. We have gotten so trained in our society on the concept that "knowledge is power," and, in our weaker moments, we feel that we need to concentrate knowledge in our own hands to control our professional destinies. Time and again, though, we see the worst performances out of teams led by secretive leaders who only give their teams the nuggets they think they need to drive their performance. James addresses this concept as well-it smacks of a patriarchal approach where leaders see their employees less as peers and more like their own children. A lack of openness results in many types of negative behaviors. Among them-employees finding themselves working in lowest-common-denominator fashion, doing the bare minimum to get by, and looking to stay out of trouble versus achieve. To the contrary, the most open leaders-those who freely share business challenges and obstacles freely with their teams-are able to bring more minds to the table to effectively solve problems. Openness creates a "rise to the occasion" mindset from team members with regard to how they see their leaders and the business, and they want to pull together for each other as well.As if trust and openness weren't hard enough for many business leaders to achieve, perhaps the hardest nut to crack is that of understanding. While we regularly train and coach our clients on concepts like trust and openness, to truly create understanding among each team member, you either have to be a psychological savant or have the right tools.That's where companies like ours come in with solutions to get to the core of understanding each individual team member as a unique and special human being through an assessment of personal branding, values and interests, and natural strengths.There's a perception out there, no doubt harbored in many low performance organizations, that companies use this type of front-end screening to weed people out of hiring processes and then utilize manipulative management tactics with employees once they are hired. We turn these notions on their respective heads-to the contrary, we think that these types of assessments are best used to plug people into the right functional roles to optimize teams, and we also believe that they provide a critical roadmap for understanding.This roadmap for understanding is two-fold and best understood by a couple of our products, the Talent Card and Peer Card. Each of these cards is simply a set of outputs and recommendations, one for managers and one for peers, to promote ongoing understanding and better team results. It almost goes without saying that if people understand what you value in yourself and others, how you operate in stressful situations and react to conflict, and where you find your motivation and passion, they will meet you in the right place.Promoting understanding among leaders, team members, and peers is ultimately what building high performance teams is all about. High performance teams deliver sustainable success to both organizations and the individuals who drive them.To learn more, contact clientservices@tms-hr.com or visit us at www.tms-hr.com.
