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Thailand: Becoming a high-performance team
Rapid changes in the competitive landscape and consumer behaviour, along with new business opportunities, compel organisations these days to change continuously to become more effective and customer-driven.
Digital disruption along with the need to innovate and be sustainable are added challenges for corporate leaders and managers. Navigating these changes and disruptions requires not only executives who are highly people-oriented, but also high-performance teams.
Organisations are always looking to develop talent and identify possible successors who will be effective leaders. But the chief executive and the HR head might not spend much time looking at synergy among team members, as they are preoccupied with overall business performance as a priority. They may not intend to downplay the “soft” or behavioural side of management, but the fact is most executives find it easier to deal with the hard issues and how they affect the bottom line.
Getting the best results from a team is not easy because not all members have the same level of capability. Even if they are all smart and highly committed, it does not mean they can work well together. I have drawn on my own experiences as someone who joined a large firm as the youngest and least experienced employee, and rose to become a corporate executive and then a leadership consultant, to create a simple but practical process to help develop high-performance teams.
The right process: For the first step, normally in a one-day workshop format, the team will work on an issue or problem. The purpose is to allow members to find a way among themselves to solve a problem and make decisions. After the initial decision is made, they will be asked to take part in an assessment to determine the group behavioural style that emerged during their discussions, and then make a final decision.
The assessment is very important as normally nobody is focusing too much on how effective they are, as a team, during the discussion. Generally speaking, we tend to be sceptical about assessment results. Hence, the assessment must be highly reliable with strong academic research support.
The team behavioural style report will be the centre of the discussion. It’s essential to provide a clear explanation of the report and how the results were arrived at, as well as explain the relevant terminology and interpretation of each style. Each team member has to be treated with respect because they do not all have the same knowledge background or level of curiosity.
After lengthy elaboration from the facilitator, team members have to put their heads together and clear the air about how they view the result. Based on the results and recommendations of the team behavioural style report, members will create a team development action plan aimed at achieving high performance.
One critical element is individual behaviour in team activities and discussions. Although the team may have a sound plan, it is up to each individual to commit and put his or her effort into actually changing the course of the team. In this regard, one way to effectively handle team members is to ask each one of them to suggest how other team members need to behave in order to move forward to achieve higher performance.
Under this approach, each member will attend a one-on-one session with the coach who will provide “moving forward” suggestions from other team members anonymously. This way, no one will know for certain which other team members made particular statements that might reflect on him or her.
As the coach is an outsider, the person being coached will not fear losing face and is more likely to receive the anonymous suggestions from colleagues in a positive spirit. This one-on-one session should be organised around one month after the workshop. This way, team members’ own behaviour and that of others will still be fresh in their minds.
Monitoring and improvement: The third step involves follow-up. At the end of 3, 6, 9 and 12 months, the team should meet with the boss and the coach to share their views on whether and how the team has improved.
At the end of 12 months, the team will be asked to participate in decision-making and problem-solving again. This will allow them to make decisions as a group for a second time. Then they will run the same assessment they took 12 months ago. As they have been working hard on development activity, they should see clearly how their team behavioural styles have changed.
Becoming a high-performance team is not a difficult task but the team must have strong commitment with support from the boss. A proper process together with a reliable behavioural style assessment are critical factors. This kind of approach can be adopted by not only corporate executives and managers, but also board members.
Sorayuth Vathanavisuth, PhD, is the principal and executive coach at SEA Leadership (Center for Southeast Asia Leadership). His areas of interest are executive coaching, leadership development, succession planning and talent management. He can be reached at [email protected]
Source: https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/1857469/becoming-a-high-performance-team