A Framework for Evaluating High-Performing Teams

Use this framework for high-performing teams as a checklist to evaluate your current team and determine what you need to do to improve the performance.

Are you interested in creating high-performing teams? Would you like to understand why some teams perform better than others, or to objectively evaluate the condition of your current team?

In The Wisdom of Teams; Creating the High-Performance Organization, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith dive deep into team anatomy and paint a vivid picture of what makes a high-performing team. In this previous post, we explored Katzenbach’s findings about the performance of long standing teams.

One of the more useful takeaways for me was the framework for understanding team performance relative to maturity. In this framework, Katzenbach and Smith show 5 maturity states for all teams. These states of maturity reflect directly on the performance of the team. Let’s explore each of these.

A Framework for Evaluating High-Performing Teams

Level 1 — Work Group

The Work Group is the lowest in terms of maturity. Workgroups are not so much teams, as collections of…