High Performance Teams

High Performance Teams

Teams are formed for any number of reasons. For a positive experience, people enjoy playing on a team in their favorite sport or might join a team to learn a new sport. Maybe you are at the time of your life where you want to revisit a former passion like playing in a band again or being a member of a dance team. In the corporate world, formation of teams may be for completely different reasons. For instance, teams are usually organized to solve a problem or to establish a new business process. For whatever reason, the idea behind the team concept is that the team sets out to achieve a common goal. Whether the goal is to win a game, write a new process for better document backup, or to increase sales, a team is successful if it accomplishes what it initially set out to do.

To be a high performance team, the team captain simply needs to make sure each team member takes their steroids! Oh… I’m kidding! To be a high performance team, I believe the goal or goals need to be clearly defined and stated. While playing on a sports team or in a band, the goal is pretty obvious to every team member; to win the game or to give a top performance. The goal might not be nearly as obvious however, if a person is asked to participate on a team at work.

A team may be comprised of members or employees who all work in the same department and have similar responsibilities, or may consist of people selected from different departments, with entirely different and unique responsibilities. It is with teams that are comprised of people with different responsibilities where there might be issues with not being able to come to a common conclusion about how to resolve the problem in question.