Building High Performing Teams with Spirit

There are two types of teams. Teams with spirit and teams without spirit. Teams with spirit are winners. Teams without spirit are losers. That’s just the way it is. Take a look at your favorite sports teams. Take a look at the teams in your organization that outperform others. And you will see that the reality is that those with spirit become high performing teams that make great things happen.

Spritied high performing teams have distinctive characteristics which can be instilled by its leadership. By focusing on the following 5 Steps, your organization can establish a solid platform for building high performing teams.

• Step 1: Use the Power of Corporate Vision
• Step 2: Think and Act as "Us" in Your Corporate Environment
• Step 3: Demonstrate Courage in Words and Action
• Step 4: Use 1+1=3 Thinking Outside the Box in Business
• Step 5: Make Decisions that Drive Business Profits

Each of these steps is discussed in detail in below.

Here’s what my version of vision is . A corporate vision describes a dream that is emotionally inspiring and commercially relevant. This means that when people hear the corporate vision statement, they can almost see and touch and feel and smell the image of that ultimate goal, while at the same time, they understand it logically. Essentially you can call it what you like, a sense of purpose, a reason for being, and a guiding corporate philosophy - the point is that building high performing teams, a shared corporate vision, well formulated and well communicated has the power to unite, inspire and align a workforce to deliver extraordinary performance. Companies that have a corporate vision that is alive and well and in their DNA, continue to prosper even when others around them don’t.

Think about it. All significant behaviors and decisions begin with a vision first. The same principal applies to building high performing teams. When everybody ‘gets’ where the company and the team is going, making decisions becomes so much easier. They simply ask themselves the question…’does this decision take as a step closer to the corporate vision?’

When skillfully applied to business team building, the corporate vision draws people like a magnet into the future and is the force that will sustain the team when the going gets tough. For building high performing teams, having a shared vision is a no-brainer. It’s knowing how to use it that is the kicker! I believe that one of the chief reasons for the notorious failure of companies to achieve their corporate vision is that the vision statements are used for publication in the annual report and beautifully displayed in the reception area. The vision is not cascaded down, and used to guide business team building throughout the company.

How to use this power of corporate vision in building high performing teams:

1. Create a grand, noble vision, of 8 words or less, expressed in 7-year old language, which elevates the energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem of everyone in the company. When you hear the vision statement it should get you in the gut as well as the head. For successful business team building, avoid a vision statement that provokes the response, ‘So what?!’

2. Set the sights high and have no time limit. It should make every employee excited about the future because they see a benefit for themselves in making it happen. Merck is a great example of a building a high performing team through a strong corporate vision: ‘We are in the business of preserving and improving human life.’ British Airways had a vision, ‘To Become the World’s Favorite Airline’ and when they achieved this; they began to lose their edge.

3. Convey the corporate vision in a dramatic and enduring way. Please avoid memos, powerpoints, and boring speeches. These forms of communication are not successful mediums for sharing the corporate vision or for business team building because they do not inspire and excite people’s imaginations. This is a powerful dream you are communicating!

4. Give the employees a picture or image with details to make this corporate vision real. Words alone are not enough. People need a picture in their mind’s eye so they know what the outcome looks like. In addition to an image, build a story around the vision. Stories are the most powerful form of communication. People relate to, and remember, stories very easily.

5. Implement a process for articulating and communicating your vision and get buy-in throughout the organization. Be prepared to take the time to do this. The foundation of business team building is a corporate vision that cascades down specifically into each organization or sub-organization.

6. Discussion with each of the employees is necessary to ensure they fully understand the corporate vision and how it affects their own performance. Each individual must then be able to talk about how they believe it affects them.

7. Keep the vision alive by constantly referring to it and using it as a foundation for building high performing business teams.

Think and act as ‘Us.’ A high performing team shows spirit and thinks of ‘Us’ as…

• Me and my boss
• Me and my colleagues
• Me and others in other departments whose support I need (internal customers)
• Me and the company I work for

Thinking ‘Us’ has traditionally been called ‘teamwork.’ For me it goes far deeper than that. Thinking and acting as ‘Us’ is about having the self awareness to identify how what I am doing and saying impacts others. Thinking ‘Us’ starts with looking in the mirror and asking ourselves a confronting question, ‘is my behavior and communication switching others on or switching them off from our common purpose?’

Here’s what I see in business teams around the world. If you take a team, place them in a room, or climb a mountain with them to strengthen teamwork, this does not result in a sustainable shift in the way this team works together. Soon after they return to the stress of the real world, they revert back to their old behaviors.

Why can’t they sustain the team spirit they thought they had in the team building exercise? Mainly because their ego gets in the way. No amount of intellectual reasoning, statistical proof, recipe style tools and techniques, or innovative team building exercise will make any difference in a team who are relating to each other with ego defenses. Teams that need teamwork initiatives to help them build team spirit and behave as a high performance team are teams whose egos are getting in the way of genuine connection and collaboration. Therefore, in building high performing teams it is vital to teach the teams how to stop sweating the ego stuff.

How do you build a high performing team that genuinely thinks and acts as ‘Us’ in a corporate environment?

1. Perform a team audit to discover the behaviors displayed by the team. List those behaviors that act as a barrier to collaboration – as well as those behaviors that that support partnership. This is best done by an outside professional to ensure objectivity.

2. The team explores the results of the audit and takes ownership of the fact that:

• We display some ego behaviors that create barriers between us and are holding us back from producing spectacular results and becoming a high performing team.
• We display some spirited, collaborative behaviors that we need to strengthen to work as a high performing team.

3. The team writes and commits to a Team Charter that states:

• The ‘Us’ behaviors that they all agree will create a collaborative high performing team capable of producing extraordinary results.
• Each team member’s willingness to strengthen their own skills in the identified ‘Us’ behaviors.

4. Agree to quick win team goals. Obtain baseline measures for these goals. Agree to a time line for measuring success.

5. Build in 10 minutes for feedback after meetings – how did we do with our ‘Us’ behaviors?

6. Offer professional coaching for team members to assist them in acquiring enhanced skill in the agreed behaviors necessary to contribute to the high performing team.

7. Measure and celebrate achievement of the identified goals.

High performing teams - teams with spirit - demonstrate courage in words and action. Courage is an interesting concept. Have you ever wondered where true courage comes from? And why some people find it so easy to do and say courageous things and others do not? Well, here’s my take on courage. We all have two selves – an ego self , which is our social self, and a spirited self which is our real self. Our real self will do and say courageous things because it is driven by feelings of self- confidence, self-belief and authenticity. The ego self will do and say things that are defensive and self-protective because our ego is driven by feelings of insecurity.

So when you are just being the real you, you will automatically behave with courage. We only lack courage when we are trying to be someone we are not, trying to please others, trying to be the person others want us to be.

The fascinating thing is that, given a choice, we would all prefer to be our real self. We crave the freedom to do and say the things that we believe in, speak about the ideas we have, share our perspectives and express our feelings and opinions because there is nothing more empowering than just being who we are. It is the ultimate form of self esteem. So why do so many of us in the corporate environment not do this? Why do so many teams and individuals flee to their egos for protection?

Mostly because so many companies create an environment and culture that does not support courage and authenticity. In many organizations employees consider it unsafe to be open and honest; they fear repercussions for challenging the viewpoint of others; they feel safer hiding their true talent and insights than courageously confronting something that is not working.

So here’s the deal with spirited high performing teams. These teams purposefully foster and cultivate courage. They are not prepared to ‘speak with forked tongue.’ They see lip service as being a coward's way out. They tell it like they see it and handle the consequences. And they do this in a manner that demonstrates mutual trust and respect. And as a result they are able to negotiate the best deals, come to the best solutions and deliver the best results.

How do high performaning teams foster courage?

1. Their first act of courage is to speak openly about courage in their team. Teams that have spirit actually set aside time to talk about the issue of courage. They make the conscious choice to do and say courageous things instead of resorting to bluster and pretense.

2. They continuously speak about their vision to each other, to the point where they are obsessed with their shared vision of greatness. The intense desire to achieve this dream gives them the courage to do everything in their power to achieve this.

3. They create strong relationships and genuine connections with their team members by being genuine and real. Knowing that their team mates ‘have their back’ and will never throw them under the bus, gives them great courage.

4. They attend self development programs, or hire a life coach to continuously strengthen their true self and enhance their self-confidence.

5. They build being courageous and real into the meeting holding process:

• The way they give each other feedback
• Not allowing an unaddressed elephant in the room
• Encouraging confrontation, challenge and spirited dialogue
• Decisions are only taken if they are based on diverse perspectives

6. They challenge any member of the team who appears to have a hidden agenda or is behaving in self-serving way

7. The team members understand that the ultimate purpose for demonstrating courage in words and action is to retain integrity with oneself and with each other.

Spirited high performing teams use 1+1=3 thinking outside the box in business.

We don’t have to be quantum physicists to grasp that in order to see the vast possibilities and opportunities available to us; we will need the ability to create a broader view. I call this 1+1=3 thinking. And to think more broadly we will need the ability to think outside the box. Swatch is a great example of this. They were getting beaten up by their Japanese competitors and had to do something different to survive. They combined Swiss watch making skills with Italian fashion design and then they borrowed plastic engineering skills from LEGO. The result was exceptional growth and revenue. How did they think in this extremely lateral way? And what holds so many of us back from thinking outside the box whenever we have a decision to make or we need a solution to a challenge?

It is our ego that prevents us from thinking outside the box. When our egos get in the way we will find it very hard to think creatively and to come up with an innovative solution. This is because our ego only hears half of the story and half of the facts – essentially the half it wants to hear. The ego is arrogant and self-righteous. This is why when our ego has control we don’t invite dialogue. Our ego is not interested in points of view that do not support its own. When our ego is in control we don’t enjoy having our assumptions challenged and we spend huge amounts of energy justifying, intellectualizing and rationalizing our position. We don’t believe we need to change or that there is anything else we need to know. This gives us a lopsided and limited worldview.

The multiplicative effect of ego thinking is best illustrated by this equation: ½ x ½ = ¼. ½ the story x ½ the facts = ¼ the perceived possibilities= uninspired decisions = uninspired performance. This equation describes a team that continues to beat the same old drum, sometimes faster, sometimes louder, and while they do this they move backwards and miss seeing new possibilities that would take them powerfully into the future. Coca Cola is a perfect example of ½ x ½ = ¼ thinking. They missed some of the most important beverage trends in the past 20 years. They were late going into fruit flavored teas – Snapple did this first; late going into sports drinks – Gatorade did this first; late going into designer water – Nestle is No.1 in the world in that business; late going into new age beverages and still trying to catch up to companies such as Red Bull.

How do spirited high performing teams encourage 1+1=3 thinking outside the box? They use a process that is based on the following steps:

1. Study other companies, in any industry, that have successfully taken thought beyond that where it has been before and applied 1+1=3 thinking outside the box, such as Southwest Airlines, Apple iTunes, Starbucks, Virgin, amongst others. Study their spirited leaders too.

2. When discussing an issue, brainstorm and list the following: What traditional assumptions are we currently using in our thinking about this issue? In other words what thoughts and beliefs do we hold that keeps us stuck with 1+1=2, either-or, type of thinking?

3. Next, brainstorm the following question: What if we rejected each of these assumptions? What would we do differently?

4. Encourage dialogue and debate amongst the team. Make a list of all the suggestions, ideas and insights that emerge from this dialogue.

5. Suspend judgment - ask many questions so that you understand each person’s point of view clearly, but don’t ask questions to prove why it cannot be done.

6. Integrate as many of the ideas as possible that emerged in the brainstorm, creating a integrative solution or plan that would be described as ‘fundamentally different.’

7. Have the courage to communicate and execute this with passion.

Spirited high performing teams make decisions that drive business profits.

Teams throughout any organization are accountable for making decisions, large and small, strategic and tactical. Collectively, these decisions will move the company forward, keep it in neutral or move it backwards. The trick is to get every team, from boardroom to backroom, to make decisions that drive business profits, so that they are growing the company and keeping it moving in the agreed direction.

Here’s my definition of ‘profitable decisions.’ These are decisions that deliver an excellent return on investment on time, talent, strategy and intelligence– as well as financial outcomes. Decisions that drive business profits:

• Are made in an efficient manner
• Involve vigorous dialogue
• Include a wide diversity of input and perspective
• Are strategically focused
• Are based on fundamentally different thinking
• Lead to significant revenue enhancement

So what’s the problem? You get in a room, get lots of input from everyone, check that the decision aligns with the strategy and use a quick and efficient process? The problem is ego. When the decision-makers are responding to each other with ego, there is a significantly increased probability that they will make mediocre and misaligned decisions that are often times costly.

Making decisions that service the business goals requires that the decision makers have the integrity and strength of character to lay personal agendas aside and put the company’s goals first. If we are ego driven, this is unlikely to happen. Since the central purpose of ego is to protect us and take care of ‘me, my and I’, it is difficult, if not impossible to lay personal agendas aside, when the ego is in the driver’s seat. The result is that ego-driven decision-makers tend to make defensive, short-term, self-serving, and strategically inappropriate decisions, regardless of whether it’s right or wrong for the company, profitable or not.

What do spirited high performing teams do? They:

1. Do not engage in one-upmanship. Instead they seek to leverage each other’s unique talent and expertise.

2. Do not get locked into polarities or either-or thinking. They think integratively and holistically – asking what kind of solution or decision can we make that integrates the best of all worlds.

3. Do not allow themselves to get stuck with ‘either-or’ thinking. Instead, they synthesize contradictions.

4. Do not work with a single reality. They seek to assimilate multiple realities.

5. Avoid linear thinking where B always follows A and precedes C. They challenge the current worldview and seek the panoramic view (the bigger picture is no longer enough!).

6. Maintain their personal integrity and values; are direct and honest and at the same time show humility.

7. See the funny side of life.