What would happen if you treated your top team as a high performing sports team. What would be different? How much more effective would you be? How much more impact would you have?
Most senior management teams evolve naturally. They come together through a series of common interactions and in time they play together as a team. Most of you will have probably heard of the FORM, STORM, NORM, PERFORM theory. Teams get together. They go through a few stormy times as individuals get to know each other. Then they establish patterns of interaction and as these become more familiar, eventually they start to perform. You may even have had one or two team building sessions to help accelerate this process.
But is this the best way to set up your team? How well do you actually perform? How efficiently? How much clarity and buy in? How much real discussion with real issues put on the table and explored in the limited time that you have together? When you leave the set up to chance, there’s a high probability that you’ll have areas that just don’t work well.
The difference in a high performing sports teams is that the foundation of how it operates is built by design. It doesn’t happen by chance. People know their specific roles and where and how fast they should move and how everyone is moving. They know what everyone else is doing, how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it. They are set up with their current objectives in mind.
It’s rigorously pre-planned and structured. It’s drilled with feedback until they know it works. They’re well organised.
We’ve found that this kind of approach in working with business teams brings a large number of benefits.
First people feel safer. It’s not down to power and personalities. It’s a designed system where everyone plays their part. Because they feel safer, they are more likely to open up and put their true opinions on the table. This then results in better buy in.
Secondly, it’s much more efficient. Structure allows you to get more done in a shorter time with better quality
Thirdly, expectations are managed nicely. Team members are annoyed when expectations are not being met, which results in disengagement.
Finally paradoxically, having a conscious structure brings freedom as to how you play together. This results in more creative thinking, more innovation and more ownership.