High-Performance Team

Not all groups are always successful in meeting their objectives. A group or team which constantly achieves its goals and which consists of team members working for the common goal is said to be high performing. For a team to be high-performance, it should have the characteristics needed to succeed. Any group can become a high-performance team if the group members are willing to contribute as a part of the team. Each member should be aware that a high-performance team is “maximized for performance in productivity and effectiveness” .

Also, members must know that if they are pitted against each other due to factors such as compensation, organizational structure and competing goals, the group can never become a high-performance team. To avoid this, the team’s structure must support the members’ unity and working relationship. Furthermore, each member must share goals and rewards for achieving the goals. And more importantly, each member should know the impact that one member can contribute to the team .

A team can be called as such if there are two or more members, resources  which include time, money, materials, and many others – and a common goal. Teams are built with specific tasks, such as making decisions for the organization . Members in a group must cooperate and depend on each other in order to complete the task. Also, a team can be dissolved in a matter of months. Other teams extend, while some become permanent in an organization. A team can be high performing depending on certain factors.

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Having a high-performance team, whether at school or workplace, is necessary in achieving goals and creating significant change. According to experts at team building, a high-performance team is “highly adaptive, difficult to build, expensive to maintain, and glorious to behold”. A high-performance team is not as easy as finding members to form a group. Nearly every person has experienced being a member of a team. It is interesting to note that maintaining a high-performance team is indeed a very challenging task even for an experienced leader . There are complex tasks that a high-performance team needs to do, and leaders must know how to facilitate the team so that it can become successful in meeting its objectives. A high-performance team knows how to balance team leadership skills, purpose and process, measures and outcomes, and team relationships. Furthermore, a high-performance team facilitates effective communication between the leader and the team members in a way that leads to stronger relationships and greater trust.

Trust, respect, and support are the primary characteristics that set a high-performance team apart from other groups . Trust is necessary in creating a good working atmosphere. Trust indicates that each member believes that every person in the team can do his tasks in a timely and professional manner and can contribute to the success of the team. In a high-performance team, members must be coached in the need to support and trust each other. Respect for members and mutual respect for their ability, meanwhile, is as important in creating and maintaining a successful team.

Respect is necessary in maintaining the strong relationships in the team. Also, support indicates that members should keep an eye on their teammates and must be willing to lend a hand when help is needed. Furthermore, team members should actively encourage each other especially when one member needs it. Aside from all these, members of a high-performance team should continue to strive to improve quality, whether in their teamwork or output. Members are also aware that being in a high-performance team means that they are able to maximize their performance and productivity.

Above all else, a high-performance team unvaryingly achieves results in tune with the set goals (MDA Leadership Consulting, Inc. , 2009). A high-performance team will not work without a team leader, whose role is very important in managing the whole team. For a leader to be effective, he or she must know how to properly and effectively allocate resources to match the members and their skills with the roles and responsibilities appropriate for them. Furthermore, a leader should know the importance of the whole team being strong and flexible even with the absence of one member.

Other characteristics of a high-performance team include the following: participative leadership, task focused, aligned on purpose, problem solving, responsive, innovative, shared responsibility, and communicative (Traut, n. d. ). With everything becoming modernized, there are many factors which can affect the team and team dynamics. One of these is globalization, a process wherein people, governments and companies are integrated (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, n. d. ). In the aspect of business, globalization is beneficial as it increases “corporate profits and power” .

In response to this, globalization can affect the performance of the team in such a way that members may become more concerned about working for the money, thus neglecting the more important tasks needed to succeed in the team. There were also declarations which suggest that globalization leads to the understanding of other cultures. But on the other end of the spectrum, reports showed that the “freedoms granted by globalization are leading to increased insecurity in the workplace. ” In addition, those who are pro-human rights agree that the corporate power that globalization brings limits individual freedom . Furthermore, globalization in business indicates that team members are assigned at different locations. As globalization led to the rise in information technology, more and more people tend to choose to telecommute and using off-site consultants, thus meetings are more dispersed.

References

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