June 5, 2024
8:08 AM
By OrgChart Team
Whether you are far from achieving your business goals – or it’s time for a new level of success – you need a high-performing team to achieve your goals now and into the future.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to build high-performing teams for your own organization. As you will see, an all-star team needs far more than just the right resources to “do the job.”
High-performance teams need an ecosystem of support, trust, and synergy to ensure strategic success. We will also discuss what characteristics your team will need and what models you can adapt to your own people.
A high-performing team is a group of individuals with complementary, synergistic skills who work together to achieve a common goal. More importantly, they meet or exceed desired objectives in an efficient and effective way.
Such goals could be maximizing business revenue, expanding into new markets, rebranding, reducing inefficiencies, and more.
High-performing team examples include: the elite Navy Seals, the Kansas City Chiefs in their multi-year Super Bowl Championships, and revolutionary businesses like Netflix and Amazon.
When your business brings together great people, they collaborate seamlessly and leverage each other’s strengths and expertise. High-performing teams also stay accountable and maintain a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities.
High-performing teams do so much more than meet desired metrics. Overall, they share a common vision, take ownership of their work, and tackle challenges together.
Some additional key characteristics of high-performing teams include:
These characteristics are essential for teams to surpass expectations and navigate challenges. When people feel valued, they take ownership of their work and are motivated to achieve common goals, regardless of the level of difficulty.
Building high-performing teams requires intentionality and a strategic approach. Luckily, there are several types of high-performing team models that you can follow, each starts with a solid organizational plan.
While you may find variations in practice, here are some common roles in high-performing teams:
Let’s go over some strategies to help you build a team that consistently delivers exceptional results:
As you can see, building high-performance teams is not just about formulating a strategy to accomplish a particular goal. It’s about empowering your people, motivating them, and ensuring they feel comfortable to flourish in their roles.
At first glance, many of the concepts we’ve talked about look like the basic building blocks of any team. But what really makes one team outperform another?
When you think of revolutionary teams – such as the startup teams at Apple, Amazon, or Google – they weren’t just “out of the box” thinkers. They were ambitious.
High-performing teams set stretch goals. And they may have a high risk of failure, especially initial iterations. These teams strive for excellence and are unafraid to aim high, challenging themselves to achieve remarkable results.
High-performing teams maintain a growth mindset and a thirst for knowledge. If they don’t have the expertise that they need in-house, they develop their existing team members or call in additional resources.
It is the job of leaders to actively seek learning and development opportunities while team members focus on expanding their knowledge and working at full capacity.
Some businesses attempt to save money by having team members perform various roles. But the most effective high-performing teams allow their people to focus on what they do best.
That means your specialists focus on their specialties. That means your consultants consult, and you delegate tasks to the appropriate people.
People working in high-performance teams understand that trial and error is part of the process, even if you have the most experienced people working for you.
After all, ambitious goals require teams to push boundaries and formulate new ideas.
What really makes these teams successful is that they account for failure from the beginning. They plan and allot extra time and resources for experimentation – remaining resilient even when they’ve exhausted their first round of ideas.
Leaders of high-functioning teams understand that great ideas can come from anyone at any level of the organization.
Many leaders disregard insights from lower-level or entry-level team members. But effective leaders take all perspectives and ideas into account before formulating an action plan.
This tends to happen in large organizations where leadership is focused on organization-wide initiatives, but they fail to understand the challenges of the frontline workers. To remedy this, invest time in surveys and interviews from all departments and levels.
Building high-performing teams within your organization provides several benefits, including:
And, let’s highlight some impressive statistics surrounding connected teams:
| Better Decision Making Teams almost always make better decisions than individuals (National Bureau of Economic Research) | More Profitability Highly connected teams boost profitability by 21% compared to less connected teams. (Gallup) | Greater Employee Satisfaction, Engagement, and Retention Connected, collaborative teams have 59% less employee turnover, 41% less absenteeism, and 66% better wellness. (Gallup) |
High-performing teams rarely experience linear success. They may be held back by failure, operational setbacks, and more.
Let’s highlight some challenges that high-performing teams face – many of which have nothing to do with the real task at hand!
| Common Challenges | Strategies to Overcome Them |
| Interpersonal Conflict | Conflict resolution, respectful leadership, clear communication |
| Team Member Burnout | Reduction of workload, clear communication, prioritization, employee empowerment, work-life balance |
| Lack of Alignment | Review of project goals, clear communication, prioritization |
| Conflicting Priorities | Goal establishment, clear communication |
| Poor Adaptation and/or Resilience | Skill development, honest feedback, learning from failure, employee empowerment |
To combat common challenges and restructure their teams, many businesses utilize resources like Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development and/or Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
High-performing teams are not perfect 100% of the time. They are constantly improving, especially in the face of failure.
Performance metrics are often based on your specific goals. Efficiency, efficacy, and profitability are the most common. Taking a look at employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention is also beneficial.
One of the most effective ways to monitor your high-performance team is to have a clear understanding of how the team is structured. Take advantage of adaptable tools like an organizational chart to help you.
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