Few thrills in our careers are more incredible than being part of a high-performing team. We revel in the joy of outstanding achievements with a tight band of colleagues. We seek that joy again and again and feel its lack acutely. Being a team member can be one of our most fulfilling social experiences—or it can be hell on earth.
BTS research suggests four critical factors for effective teaming: psychological safety, constructive conflict, enterprise value, and stakeholder engagement. Beyond being important to teaming, these four factors can predict a team’s likelihood of being seen as high-performing. If teams perform at the 50th percentile in behaviors associated with these factors, there’s a more than 80% likelihood the team will be rated as high-performing. Performance at the 75th percentile raises that likelihood to over 95%, so teams don’t have to be perfect to get outstanding results.
4 mindsets of high-performing teams
A set of behaviors and a shift in mindset distinguish these teaming factors. High-performing teams do things differently and challenge conventional wisdom in their assumptions about teamwork. They embrace four teaming mindset shifts.
1. The psychological safety shift
In the psychological safety shift, you move from trying to get along to a much deeper mutual engagement. You’re set free to contribute your unique perspective because you can rely on purpose-based trust. You can expect mutual respect and curiosity from your teammates. A few attributes of this shift:
- Team members communicate authentically and transparently. Parties with contrasting views in a discussion are explicit about their priorities and intentions. Team members avoid gamesmanship.
- When a team succeeds, it’s easy to share the glory. The true test of safety is when things go awry. Do team members share how they may have contributed to the problem rather than look for a scapegoat?
- Teammates work to ensure each other’s success, reinforcing connections and deepening relationships.
2. The constructive conflict shift
In the constructive conflict shift, you move from making “either/or” choices where the “best” idea wins to solving for “both/and” outcomes. You hold the tension to craft win-win solutions. Your business challenges are complex and often require solving for multiple outcomes. You need to succeed in both poles of tension, such as the short and long term, think globally and locally, or provide high quality while moving quickly.
An executive team had wrestled with the conflicting interests of two divisions. When it shifted its decision criteria to what would serve the broader enterprise, the team quickly found a novel solution by making a leader from one division responsible for the other division’s project. That way, the leaders could pursue both/and solutions reflecting each division’s interests.
Guideposts for the constructive conflict shift include:
- Team members actively seek diverse perspectives as they compare, contrast, and critique, reinforcing their commitment to working together. Picture them at a table, but instead of debating across the table, they’re on the same side, mutually exploring the insights they get from examining the different views.
- The team’s active engagement is focused on moving the action forward. Teammates devote time to explore contrasting points of view, actively gain alignment, and build agreements to drive progress.
- Team members often avoid providing feedback that can feel like criticism. Far from being a personal confrontation, high-quality feedback provides team members with valuable coaching, sincere appreciation, and objective evaluation—all investments in building an even stronger team.
3. The enterprise value shift
If teams focus only on their own goals without regard for how they contribute to enterprise outcomes, they risk reinforcing siloes and sacrificing strategic success. When high-performing teams face dilemmas about the best courses of action, they look for win-win outcomes that serve larger organization and enterprise priorities, not just expediently make a choice and move on. In the process, this creates extraordinary outcomes. Here are a few principles of the enterprise value shift:
- High-performing teams have a customer-centric, design-thinking orientation. They stay close to internal and external customers to understand emerging needs and check their plans against the realities of the market.
- High-performing teams use the enterprise strategy to guide what will be most relevant in their environments while also considering the implications of their data-driven insights on the strategy’s relevance.
- High-performing teams look around corners and read tea leaves. As William Gibson infamously said, “The future already exists; it’s just unevenly distributed.” They are attuned to weak signals amid the background noise through continual sensing.
Consider taking an enterprise view in setting decision criteria when solving problems. This often results in solutions that address underlying causes and larger business needs rather than just addressing the interests of one team or function. Another option is to view proposed solutions as a collection of actions to consider rather than an all-or-nothing proposition. This enables crafting solutions from parts of multiple proposals to address a broader set of interests.
4. The stakeholder engagement shift
Teams operate in organizational networks, and their successes are inextricable from their contexts. Some stakeholders are in other parts of the organization, such as upstream or downstream functions, other business units, or even the team members’ direct reports and their organizations. This isn’t just providing updates or informing others on a RACI chart; it means partaking in collaborative dialogue and being open and curious to engage those with different information, perspectives, or concerns. To make this shift, consider the following:
- The team doesn’t expect others to adapt to the impact of its actions and decisions automatically. Change readiness varies widely in organizations. Intentionally engaging stakeholders to understand impacts can yield powerful insights into previously unexplored success factors while building shared commitment.
- Engagement is not a one-and-done proposition. Stakeholder insights have a limited shelf life. Changes in the environment, large and small, are inevitable and constant. Effective teaming requires jogging alongside key stakeholders and remaining connected and curious.
- High-performing team members look at their decisions’ “what ifs.” They actively try to identify the second-order effects of their choices.
To implement this, try regularly inviting stakeholders into team discussions. Another option is to create a stakeholder map to identify who may be affected by a decision and their interests in the decision. Reviewing these assumptions with the stakeholders can bring additional interests to light.
Through these four mindset shifts, team members experience the psychological safety that liberates them to bring their unique perspectives into constructive engagement so they can effectively collaborate to create value. High-performing teams set free the genius of their members to create the extraordinary together.
Andrew Atkins leads the executive & team performance center of expertise for BTS, a global consultancy specializing in the people side of strategy.