5 specific actions to create a high-performing team culture
5 specific actions to create a high-performing team culture
Insight from research about 5 things high-performing teams do differently
This list of suggestions is based on Ron Friedman’s 2021 HBR article 5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently. I especially appreciate the article because it is research backed and observes specific actions, which makes it, well, highly actionable. As a manager, what can you do to create a culture in your team that fosters high performance?
Encourage team members to pick up the phone
Be deliberate about meetings and deploy proven methods to make them productive.
Create space and time for for team members to bond over non-work topics
Give appreciation to team members frequently and encourage the team to express appreciation to one another.
Give team members the permission to be authentic and express their emotions, both, positive and negative.
1. Encourage team members to pick up the phone
Coming from sales, this is a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, when I see customer facing employees writing long emails or doing extensive background research on clients rather than giving them a call. Also internally, many employees prefer the convenience of Slack over a quick (or even longer, see # 3.) phone call.
Phone calls have many advantages and I have seen many grievances and even conflicts based on misunderstandings in emails or messages, that could have been easily avoided. According to the research, top performers “are significantly more likely to communicate with colleagues using the telephone than their less successful peers (10.1 vs. 6.1 calls per day on average)”
2. Be deliberate about meetings and deploy proven methods to make them productive
This should be well understood in theory and much has been written on the topic. In practice, many employees and managers proclaim about too many and unproductive meetings. Here are the top three from the study:
require prework from the participants (e.g. read material, submit content, provide updates…)
introduce an agenda (dah)
begin with a check-in that keeps team members apprised of one another’s progress
Of course, challenging if a meeting is necessary to begin with and limiting the number of participants as well as the duration are two other ways to improve meeting culture.
3. Create space and time for for team members to bond over non-work topics
I find this an interesting point, which to some people is completely obvious and intuitive, and to others not at all (who regard non-work related talk as chit-chat and waste of precious time). Hence it is very useful to have research that makes a powerful case for creating time and space for bonding as well as role modelling the behaviour for teams. There are many different and usually fun ways of doing this, from just asking “how was your weekend?” in Monday’s team meeting to participating in team sport together (e.g. I highly recommend to all my Berlin clients to participate in the Startup League, a local football competition)
Arguably, this also makes a (controversial?) point for a certain presence in the office.
4. Give appreciation to team members frequently and encourage the team to express appreciation to one another.
Many executives are concerned about deflating the value of praise and as a result rarely recognise good performance at all. There is lots of research proving this wrong. Giving and receiving positive feedback is not a limited resource. Not only makes both sides feel good, but it is also necessary to embed positive change. It scales even better, when recognition is not only top down, but also peer-to-peer. At two companies I worked, Google and ResearchGate, team members can give shout-outs (or “kudos”) to anyone in the business and even nominate peers for bonuses. This approach creates a culture of appreciation at scale.
5. Give team members the permission to be authentic and express their emotions, both, positive and negative.
I recommend reading this section as it is quite interesting.
members of high-performing teams were significantly more likely to express positive emotions […]. They were […] more likely to compliment, joke with, and tease their teammates. In emails, they […] use exclamation points, emojis, and GIFs.
Interestingly, however, they were also more likely to express negative emotions at work. We found that they were more likely to curse, complain, and express sarcasm with their teammates.
Why would expressing negative emotions at work yield more positive performance? It’s because the alternative to expressing negative emotions is suppressing them, and suppression is cognitively expensive. It involves expending valuable cognitive resources attempting to hide emotions from others, leaving less mental firepower for doing the work.
The main point here is to create an environment, where team members feel safe to express their emotions and are also ok to accept a degree of unfiltered language from others without getting offended. This can also be seen controversially, as many workplace policies (and btw. university campuses, but that is a topic for another day) in order to create psychological safety are more focused on avoiding unsettling expressions rather than promoting authenticity.
As Ron Friedmann concludes “creating a high-performing workplace […] requires creating opportunities for genuine, authentic relationships to develop.” A manager’s job is to encourage and role model these activities that foster communication and effective collaboration.