It’s hard to pinpoint what separates great teammates from not so good teammates, and outstanding employees from lackluster ones. The exact attributes of these designations will vary depending on who you ask, but it’s likely a definition would include a combination of practical skills and characteristics that can be harder to define, like attitude and behavior.
High-performing teams are the building blocks of top-class organizations and are enabled by the effectiveness of the individuals within them. It is the interconnectedness between the effectiveness of the individual, team and organization that warrant companies to consider people development as a business essential.
Using the reflection questions below, consider what aspects of your developmental path you can take ownership of, in support of your career, team and organization.
Individual: Are you working above the line?
When something goes wrong, are you likely to accept responsibility for your role in how the problem came about? Would you take ownership of errors that were in your control to correct?
A common characteristic of high-performing professionals is that they work “above the line” and hold themselves to a strong degree of accountability, responsibility and ownership. They own who they are, and use their understanding of themselves to leverage their strengths and navigate their weaknesses. These professionals aren’t superheroes, but they know themselves and the value they bring.
To explore this further, ask yourself:
- What are the top three strengths I bring to my team?
- What times have I worked below the line? How can I use my strengths to stay above the line?
- What changes can I make to increase my responsibility for the team’s success?
Team: What are your defining moments?
Most teams have a defining moment. This is a watershed moment that can be positive, negative or a bit of both. Types of events that might become a defining moment could be a seized or missed business opportunity, a change of leadership or a new team member joining, among other things.
It’s important to discuss your team’s defining moments because as a team moves through a series of shared experiences, they begin to build a collective history, a joint view of the world and a sense of who they’ve got in their corner. With this shared history, there’s usually a shift from “I”-type thinking to “we”-type thinking:
To explore this further, ask yourself:
- What conversations are we avoiding as a team?
- What’s been your team’s historical defining moments?
- If your team could pick one thing to stop, start and continue doing, what would those be?
Organization: What is the sum of your team’s parts?
When coming together to form a team and organization, each individuals’ strengths and weaknesses come together to create a collective of group abilities and incapacities. Understanding how these traits come together to enable success, create obstacles or form gaps is important for a team to function in a well-rounded way.
Using functional team pillars to assess capability and gaps can be an eye-opening process for teams to overcome lingering challenges. Insights uses an assessment framework that covers capability across the areas of focus, flow, climate and process.
To explore this further, ask yourself:
- Does my team have a strong results orientation and shared purpose?
- Does my team collaborate well and make decisions with agility?
- Does my team engender trust?
- Does my team have established methods and systematic measurement procedures?
Bringing it all together
When personal breakthroughs in individual development can enable business breakthroughs in organizational growth, there’s too much at stake for organizations not to support their people’s interpersonal and career development; and there’s too much at stake for individuals not to take ownership of what is within their developmental control.
Ultimately, it is the understanding of ourselves that helps us explore how each of our individual contributions can create a more effective team, and improve team performance in support of our organizational success.
