High PERFORMing Teams – Made Easy
The seven things to do to get your team PERFORMing – we’ve turned the science into practical steps to make it easy for you.
If you look at literature on High Performing teams you will find many different criteria on what is important, all using a large variety of terms. Any close scrutiny and analysis of these will establish that the core prerequisites are 7 and are the ones shown here against the acronym PERFORM.
Partnership: This is about the inter-team relations and therefore the extent of cooperation and collaboration. This affects how people work together, how decisions are made and how conflict is managed.
End goal: This is about the extent to which there is a common purpose, alignment of targets, a common direction and clear priorities.
Right makeup: This is about the team composition and how clearly defined the roles & responsibilities and the skill & talent requirements are.
Fit procedures: This is about having clear and effective work procedures. Clear so that everyone knows how to get things done without wasting time or creating confusion. Effective in terms of the effort involved and the time taken to follow the procedures should be justified by the purpose they fulfil.
Open communications & relations: Interpersonal relations within a program, team cohesion and the extent of feeling of interconnectedness between individuals not for work sake’s but at a personal level – the sense of empathy and wanting to do things for your colleagues!
Real stability: The extent of churn of individual resources within the program can impact performance. Stability is required for a sufficient length of time for interpersonal connections to be forged and to allow for the team to move from the Forming stage all the way to the Performing stage. (For Organisational Change buffs, this is from Tuckman’s (1965) stages of group development.)
Measured: This is about how the ‘eye is kept on the ball’, how performance is measured, and how what has been achieved is evaluated.
What helps to achieve a High PERFORMing © Program Team is to have someone who can easily ‘lift the bonnet’ of suppliers and partners and see what is actually going on and can do so not just because of their role and position but because of their approach and relationships. What is required here is an Honest Broker. They need, not only the right level of program management expertise but be able to engender Partnership and Open Comms & Relations. More on the Role of the Honest Broker next time!
