Newsletters 2020-04-30 Newsletter 281 - School Leadership Development - Functional Teams - PART 4a Five principles of high-performing teams By Prof Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe And Juliette Alban-Metcalfe on 18 May 2018 (Internet) Building a fully-functional team
Few people at work are not part of a team. Organisations need to be agile and innovative when faced with ever more complex business and societal challenges, and increasingly realise that good team leadership can help them to achieve their goals.
But what makes an authentic team? We would argue that the three criteria for the latter are:
Organisations are also increasingly looking to bring together multi-disciplinary teams, the assumption being that the variety of knowledge, expertise, information and access to networks contributes to team performance. However, this can have its downsides, too. The presence of expertise and professional diversity may also lead to the formation of subgroups and cliques within teams, which is likely to affect levels of engagement in the team, and, ultimately, reduce team effectiveness.
Success principles Organisational psychologists have identified a range of key principles to increase the engagement and wellbeing of team members, the effective functioning of teams, and their chances of success. They argue that there are three dimensions of teamwork that constantly interact. Team leaders need to maximise all three if they are to achieve sustained high performance:
So how do these principles work in practice? Principle 1: ‘Identify what unites us’ Principle 2: Work together on how to achieve the shared vision Principle 3: Building team potency Principle 4: Be clear on roles and responsibilities Principle 5: Create a culture of learning and psychological safety To deal with the increasing demands and complexity of challenges facing teams, a degree of adaptation, experimentation, and probably innovation is required, which inevitably means the frequency of mistakes will increase. |