High Performance Teams: Growing Awareness Through Assessments

When you’re on a high performance team, you know it. As a group, you feel an energized sense of synergy as you solve puzzles, set and achieve goals, and work through challenges, conflicts, or obstacles that get in the way of accomplishments or wellbeing. You experience motion, creativity, and growth, especially when the ride isn’t smooth or predictable. How you get and sustain that high-performing energy is 3% a mystery, and 97% the beneficial confluence of having shared purpose, values, and vision, clear roles and responsibilities, great communication and mutual feedback practices, and genuine care for one another.

Underpinning all of that is a healthy measure of self-awareness mixed with a willingness to stay open to the countless differences in each individual’s background, personality, working style, and natural skills that add creative diversity to a team. Time spent understanding one another will help you recognize and honor everyone’s unique contributions and boundaries, while also respectfully challenging each other to develop into the best version of themselves (within the group and in general). It’s the magic that allows the team to do more building and exploring, less dividing and languishing.

Simple proximity with one another will undoubtedly give you a sense of who you’re working with, and how each of you ticks. So how can you scratch the surface of the relational foundation that day-to-day, task-to-task interactions create to find out where all of that rich, high-performance understanding of each other lies?

So many ways. Check out the buffet of options.

Figure Out How You Roll

It’s easy to believe everyone operates with the same set of motivations, preferences, and instructions that you personally live by. Surface how that isn’t the case with SYPartners’ How We Roll exercise.

Use the template they provide to map out where people land on basic work preference spectrums like:

- Who on your team wants a back story and who wants you to cut to the chase
- Who works better if you schedule a time to meet and who is cool with being interrupted when needed

2. Discuss how your team make-up impacts your collective flow, and how you might shape group guidelines and agreements to create more ease and alignment.

3. Come up with your own set of working-style or practice spectrums to drill deeper into what’s important to working well together as a team. Examples include:

- Who believes deadlines are life and who believes deadlines are loose guidelines
- Who prefers to wing it and who prefers to strategize or plan
- Who prefers to learn as they go and who likes to build expertise first

Discuss Each Team Member’s Archetypal Working Styles

There are a lot of tools out there that can help individuals assess how they approach tasks, projects, and relationships in the job place. If you want a quick yet insightful conversation about how each of you show up together in a work environment:

Find a shared resource that describes different working styles
- Try Team Asana’s “6 Work Styles and How to Help Team Members Discover Theirs”
Share and talk about which one/s you identify with in general – dig into this conversation theoretically and with plenty of examples
Discuss how your approach may vary in different scenarios (i.e., when you’re learning v when you’re confident in your skills, when you’re leading v when you’re given direction, etc.)
Explore how this knowledge can help you level up, match projects and tasks to people’s default work style, and how it can help you find harmony instead of conflict when differing styles bump up against one another

Assess Individual and Team Strengths and Areas for Development in Vestalia’s Leadership Essentials

These 7 essentials define 7 behaviors that leadership can practice to create and sustain work environments that are healthy, productive, and engaging.

1 . Have your team members read through them, and come back together to share which ones they feel like they have natural ability and talent in, and which ones they have room to grow with.

2. Keep track of how folks are responding – you can use this info to pair up teachers and students in specific essentials, and you can see as a group how your skills explain what’s happening in your environment. For example, if you have a team of people that are great at connecting, and also great at tolerating conflict, you may have a lot of frustration and drama bubbling under the surface that will inevitably explode. If your team reports being great at getting and giving feedback, you may move through projects and daily performance with more ease than a team that withholds or softens feedback.

Learning about how and why you do the things you do, and sharing that knowledge amongst your teammates is an exercise you’ll never get to the end of. Keep coming back to new ways to uncover the inner-workings of individuals and the group as a whole to unlock new levels of high performance and creativity for your team and the work you do.

Side Dish

Sometimes the main course just isn’t enough – find links here to content that rounds out the themes explored in this week’s article.

Digging into the motivations, instincts, and modus operandi that shape us to come to a deeper understanding of how we can work individually and together to the best of our ability should be energizing and meaningful. Not everyone is going to connect with the same models or definitions out there that help us do that work. If you haven’t found anything that holds up an insightful mirror to yourself or your team, click through these resources to see if something catches your eye:

Heather Harper’s article “10 Best Workplace Personality Tests for Effective Teams” outlines and provides links to great models and tests to increase awareness of who we are and how that impacts how we work. Her list includes crowd favorites Myers-Briggs, CliftonStrengths (formerly StrengthsFinder) and Enneagram. She also gives guidance on how to utilize assessment results for maximum impact.

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Kolbe Corp – Peruse their website to learn about how their different assessments can help you understand why you do things the way you do. Kolbe produces profound results, it’s also comprehensive and dense. You’ll need to pay for their program to get the most out of it. For a brief-ish and decent overview of what they measure and what it all means, check out intellitalent’s summary.

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Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) – Engaging with this tool will help you see how you (and your team) show up in conflict. The TKI model recognizes that we may take different approaches toward resolving conflict in different scenarios, yet surfaces where an individual’s approaches are more default or more balanced. Taking their assessment will show your tendencies to:

- Compete (fight for your way or the highway)
- Collaborate (work together to come up with a mutually beneficial possibility you might not have discovered on your own)
- Compromise (find a solution that works yet means everyone gives up a little of what they want)
- Accommodate (you decide it’s not worth it to be or stay in conflict, you’re willing to give the other side the victory)
- Avoid (you go aloof because you determine it’s either too scary, complicated, unnecessary, or time-consuming to get involved)

Explore the rest of the Kilmann Diagnostics website to discover more tools aimed at increasing our ability to understand and move mindfully through conflict.