Teams have always been a huge part of working life, but as more and more work is knowledge based, the desire to tap into the expertise of our colleagues has become viral.  Suffice to say, not all teams function equally, and a recent study set out to explore just what distinguishes the best teams from the laggards.

Interestingly, the research didn’t so much find that the best teams do different things to poor teams, but rather that they do these things significantly faster.

Fast teams

The study saw over 3,000 teams measured, with the performance of each team broken down into the behavior of their leader, their line manager, the team members and the team’s external stakeholders.  These constituents were evaluated across 16 factors to explore things such as the mandate of the team and how they went about achieving their goals.

Despite much commonality between teams, the study found that just 13% of teams are performing at the optimal level, with a further 29% showing considerable potential for improvement (the less said about the remaining 58% the better!).

The study highlighted a number of steps that those teams in the 29% could take to improve their performance:

1. Fail faster – The best teams apparently focus more on speed than on perfection, so conduct fast experiments to find out what works and then scale up.  Such teams typically have an excellent learning culture so that each experiment makes the group smarter.
2. Quick learners – The best teams don’t just absorb lessons from their own experiments quickly, but also are adept at assimilating ideas and insights from external sources.  They are also not just engaged in academic learning but work hard to apply what they’re learning in their specific context.
3. Challenging yet respectful – The best groups also had a culture whereby ideas could be challenged in frank yet respectful ways.  There’s no groupthink or consensus forming here.
4. Rethinking assumptions – The fourth interesting trait is their willingness to constantly reassess their assumptions.  It’s well known that groups quickly get stuck in ‘the way things are done here’, so a continual process of reassessment is crucial to innovate successfully.
5. Customer focused – Last, but not least, the best teams were found to engage the customer fully in the development of solutions.  This co-creation was crucial to ensure a focus and rigor to how solutions were developed.

Suffice to say, these aren’t an exhaustive list of success factors for your team, and each team will require a unique approach for their unique circumstances.  The study suggests however that if these things are present then your team has a decent shot at success.

With team working increasingly important to our organizational success, hopefully it provides you with some food for thought when working in your own teams.