High-performance teams

High-performance teams

Every company wants a high-performance team. According to some literature an HP team can produce 4x, 5x and even 10x more. These are teams that can boost the speed of your business/company.

High-performance teams are always multidisciplinary. Instead of having a team of specialists, when you have an interdisciplinary team, they're engaged in the project from end to end. Instead of having a team of taskers that receives and delivery a task without knowing what's going on from end to end, you get the understanding of the "why's" and also the engagement. In other words, instead of having a team that deliveries tasks you'll get a team that deliveries value.

In a team of specialists, you'll have a high level of dependency. Everyone needs to be allocated to something, and a specific group will start their work only when the previous group finishes their task. As time goes by they become more and more specialists in what they do and never get to know about other teams work.

In a multidisciplinary team, you'll have a collective intelligence. This team is autonomous and demands less coordination. The cooperation replaces the dependency, and everyone helps each other when there is a bottleneck upon delivery. Every time someone helps another person he will learn about this person's work.

One thing to be careful with is the allocation of an HP team. You can't just break the team when allocating certain persons in different projects. That's not the idea. This team is static, they need to be together, and this will make them better each day. The improvement of an HP team over time isn't linear. It can be doubled or even quadratic.

Having this in mind you'll have to stop thinking about who's best for a specific project and start thinking of what project fits best on the team's profile.

But, how to maintain work pattern and individual growth? From time to time you'll have to promote meetings for individuals from different HP teams with the same role so they can talk about how things are done. These meetings will be called "Practice Community" and will ensure de organization and pattern of work.

Create and maintain HP teams in the right way, and you'll start collecting good fruits as fast value delivery, individual professional growth, specialists, etc.