Is Your Team Already a High-Performance Team? How the QLab Enables Teams to Perform at Their Best
How do you know whether your team is a high-performance team or just like any other? Are there indications that your team is on the right track?
Translation by Finn Faust; find the original article by Boris Gloger, published in German, here.
Through experience, the QLab team developed a very personal view on this topic over the past months. We believe we recognized that a few specific factors decide whether a team can work at a high level and deliver accordingly.
How we create teams
The QLab puts together teams of five internationally selected students. These come from all over the world, including India, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Germany, and many other countries. We ensure that we have as many different disciplines on board as possible and do not fall victim to gender bias.
Diversity is key.
After our team members have gotten to know each other for an hour, our client introduces them to the task (the team’s goal), which they have to solve in just five weeks. Up to this point, the team members did neither know each other nor their topic or working models.
Read next: How to Build Trust in 6 Minutes and 40 Seconds: Team Building with Pecha Kucha.
Total strangers commence on an adventure that ultimately has to produce an excellent result for QLab’s clients. But how does that work? Is it the process, the task, or just luck?
The composition of the team
We start with the selection of the students. With no guarantees, we hope to select people who have the qualities that make our team successful. But what qualities make the team successful? We think that the following factors form the basis for high-performance teams.
- Willingness to share knowledge and cooperate
That teams have to cooperate is a no-brainer. But all team members must be willing to work together, share their insights openly and commit to contributing to their team’s common goal.
Each team receives a concrete work assignment and adapts accordingly. The clearer this assignment is formulated, the faster the team can get to work. The quality and precision of a target’s formulation are decisive.
2. Willingness to leave the comfort zone
However, innovative solutions cannot arise if the framework restricts itself in its sphere of action. While the students already have various backgrounds and thus bring in broad expertise, they often don’t know much about the project’s topic. They have to familiarize themselves with it from scratch.
You can only do that by asking experts. But even experts who are ingenious in their field and able to explain the problem comprehensively only see part of the problem. As a result, they only partially recognize the connections between their area and other domains. For our team members, this means they have to turn their gaze outwards.
During an initial internet search, our students identify professors, CEOs, or specialists who can offer specific perspectives. Then it’s a matter of categorizing these key people more precisely with the help of LinkedIn and, eventually, persuading them to be interviewed by our team.
In conversations that often last just a few minutes, our students have to find out what these prestigious strangers know. For many in the team, this requires a leap out of their comfort zone and thus an enormous mental effort.
3. Willingness to get involved as a person
It’s amazing how much each team grows. Our team members build trusting relationships by constantly telling each other personal stories, describing where they come from, what moves them, and what they have experienced.
It’s no secret that people learn in relationships, and that’s precisely what happens in this trusting environment, which the teams create for themselves by getting involved as individuals and opening up to each other.
Leadership, not micromanagement!
We don’t leave the team alone. Coaches moderate the meetings, hand the teams procedural models, and formulate tasks clearly. Communication within the team must be structured.
Now and then, the coaches may intervene in their teams’ processes. When we discover blockages or see a team member becoming too dominant, we step in. That is, we avoid any micromanagement but apply the principles Boris Gloger (the author) discussed in Selbstorganisation Braucht Führung.
Read next: Leading Virtual Teams Online: How a Start-up Finds its Actual Asset.
Experiencing self-efficacy fast
The above management style and the agile process model get the team members working and quickly show them how effective they are. They realize that they are developing actual results, feel like creators, and work even more focused.
Criticism of their work is then merely a data point to be integrated as it does not target them as individuals. Being effective is what counts, not the result. This is how the students experience each other right from the start and immediately benefit from working as a team.
The need to learn from each other
However, the most interesting observation is that the team members strongly desire to learn from each other. They are open to the competence of others, interested in their personalities, and curious to find out how others live, think, and act.
This requires the willingness to listen and integrate what is being said. It is clear to each member that they gain from mutual openness, and any interpersonal differences quickly become less frightening.
Conclusion
These few elements make up our high-performance teams. While much is already described in countless books about team building, you must implement it with your teams for success.
It’s simple: Invite to a challenging task, take an agile process model and support the team members to live the above elements. Then your team will quickly become a high-performance team.
Boris Gloger, Co-Founder and CEO of QLab Think Tank GmbH
