How to Create a High-Performing Team

Has your team’s performance plateaued? Do they struggle to collaborate? Do you have the leadership skills to help the team improve? Identifying your team’s strengths and dysfunctions is one step in the right direction. This blog post will help you discover Agile leadership mindsets and behaviors that can be used to promote continuous team cohesion and collaboration. We’ll share some key tools for how to collaborate as a leadership team in developing a positive work environment to promote desired team behaviors.A high-performing team makes all the difference 

Assess Your Team’s strengths

Donald Clifton was a psychologist who in the mid-1960s realized we had countless ways of describing what was wrong with people. Unsatisfied with this “bloated catalogue of what’s wrong with people,” in 1998 he teamed up with scientists at Gallup to initiate more conversation about what’s right with people by creating the Clifton Strengths Finder.

He hypothesized that talents were “naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling or behavior that can be productively applied,” and a strength is a mastery of talent through refined practice and acquired skills and knowledge.

You can take the official paid online version of the test, or you can do a shorter, free version.

Your top 5 ‘Signature Themes’ as they are called, are “the ways in which you most naturally think, feel, and behave.” The strengths movement is built upon the idea that you can become who you want to be, only if it’s more of who you already are. You can’t and should not aim to become someone different. Each person has huge potentials, but in specific areas. Your biggest room for growth and success lies within your talents, so let’s focus on them, as this marks the path to personal excellence.

Build a matrix by domain of your team’s strengths

Once you and your team have taken the Strengths Finder test and have the results, ask yourself:

• Does this team have balance
• Does this team have what it needs to be high-performing?
• Based on their strengths how can I meet their needs of:
  • Trust
  • Compassion
  • Stability
  • Hope

What a High-Performing Team Looks Like

Psychological safety—Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable with each other

Dependability—Team members get things done on time and meet expectations 

Structure and clarity—Team members have clear plans, roles, and goals

Meaning—Work is personally important to team members

Impact—Team members think their work matters and can create change

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