How Important Is It to Build a High-Performance Team in the Digital Age?
Journey to build a high-performance team
Teamwork is great. Being a team player is an important strength of an individual. First, we need to understand the difference between a group, a team and a high-performance team.
Group is a collection of individuals, with no common purpose and collaborations. Mostly they work in silos.
Team is not a group of people brought together to manage a project nor a group of people who are members of the same function in an organization. Not all groups are teams. A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose to achieve a singular goal.
High-performance teams are more than a collection of people simply following orders.
WHAT is a High-Performance team?
A group of goal-focused individuals with specialized expertise and complementary skills who collaborate, innovate and produce consistently superior results.
Characteristics of High-Performance Team
- Have common purpose
- Unified Commitment
- Open Communication
- Collaboration
- Mutual Respect
- Curiosity and Continuous learning
- Passion
- Flexibility and Adaptability
- Effective Leadership
- Results focused
Best practices to build a High-Performance team
- Hire good talents
- Establish strong on-boarding process
- Defines clear roles and responsibilities
- Provide cross functional training
- Rotate team between onsite & offshore, development and support
- Motivate through reward & recognition
- Provide ownership and challenge them with mission
- Keep them well informed on communication
- Establish strong effective processes
- Establish trust, commitment and accountability
- Focus on results.
Great leadership sets SMART goals
It is critical to have an effective leader to execute large critical programs. High-performance leader will a create a high-performance culture and build high-performance teams to drive strategy and deliver business values to customers. They clearly define what they want, but they will never tell an employee how to do their job. Leaders need to stay focused on the end-goal. Not the road to get there.
What great leaders do to retain employees?
- Empower them
- Challenge them with innovative work
- Make employees feel they are doing something meaningful
- Have faith and trust in them
- Provide clear roles, responsibilities and accountability
- Provide ongoing performance feedback
- Provide fair compensation
- Listen to them and respect their needs
- Manage but don’t micromanage
- Recognize the good work.
With covid situation, leaders have to adapt new style of Leadership
Mobility — Maximize the use of digital tools to enable flexible working
Adaptability — Allow employees for varied working style
Empathy — Take an empathy-first approach & provide meaningful work
Learning — Encourage experimentation & development of ideas
Communication — Be accessible & frequently communicate with employees
Flexible — Be highly flexible to handle uncertain circumstances.
High-Performance teams can bring the following benefits to the organization
- Motivated employees with high morale
- Knowledge and independence
- More delegation
- Greater flexibility
- Innovation
- Better client service
Transforming the customer experience is at the heart of digital transformation. Building high-performance teams are very critical in this digital age to reinvent new and compelling customer experiences and to foster continuous innovations. Breaking silos and promoting collaboration is the very first step in the journey of building high-performance teams. Don’t forget to have fun in the team.
