Important Rules for High-Performing Teams
To steal some lyrics from the late, great country star Kenny Rogers, “If you’re going to play the
game, you got to learn to play it right.”
And when the name of the game is high-performance teamwork, here is exactly how you do
team building:
1. Set Roles
Teams can only properly function when everyone holds a common understanding of roles and
responsibilities. Indeed, this explains why so many collaborative projects stall or outright fail.
Roles carry expectations, so when there is little clarity on who does what, tasks inevitably fall
into the space between two bodies.
With an incomplete task here and an unfinished step there, the team soon sees that key
performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t being met. This leaves people confused and frustrated,
further harming the group's productivity.
To run a successful collaborative project, each member absolutely must know their position
within the team, the exact space they fill, and the scope of that claim. If you establish definite
roles, you get minimal duplication of effort, greater accountability, and higher respect for each
member’s unique contribution towards the goal.
2. Establish Goals and KPIs
Speaking of goals, high-performing teams have a lot of them. Now, we won’t bore you on the
fundamentals of goal-setting other than saying you should identify the larger goal, break it into
smaller parts, and assign relevant metrics to track the progress of those tasks.
Instead, we’ll focus on how high-performing teams use KPIs for their goals.
High-performing teams certainly don’t underestimate the merit of involving members in goal
setting. When you choose KPIs that team members see the value in, they’re far more motivated
to work towards achieving them.
Limiting KPIs also helps clarify focus. Take this example from Agoda, an online booking
company, who cleaned up their KPIs to focus on what created the most impact. Having too many
KPIs could be a distraction.
“When our goals were too numerous and too complex, employees’ decisions didn’t sync up
within or across teams, which meant groups and individuals were tugging in various directions
and failing to produce desired outcomes at scale,” the Agoda leaders said in an article with the
MIT Sloane Management Review.
Another key distinguishing feature between average and high-performing teams is KPI visibility.
You must post information in a shared location, perhaps a knowledge base, so everyone on the
team can see it. This motivates people to progress and identifies areas requiring additional
support or resources.
3. Determine How the Team makes Decisions
As a group or project becomes larger, there are more components to consider and more ways
things could go wrong. It’s just a fact of life that decision-making tends to slow down in these
cases. Unfortunately, time waits for no one, and high-performing teams are required to make a
hundred decisions every day.
How do they manage it?
Enter the directly responsible individual, handily shortened to DRI. This title is given to the
person who is ultimately responsible for completing a task (or set thereof) and is thus expected to
make the decisions that allow for that. Apple coined the term as a progressive alternative to a
simple project manager framework. We use DRIs at Tettra.
Team leaders are the obvious candidates for DRI, but actually, high-performing collaborations
can have multiple DRIs.
Empowering people to make the decisions surrounding the goal raises accountability, motivation,
and productivity.
4. Have a Feedback Loop
Feedback may be a sin in sound engineers' eyes (or perhaps ears), but it’s good news for highly
functional teams. In the latter context, a feedback cadence improves idea generation, decision-
making, and team communication.
When teams have a space for open and honest feedback, they are better equipped to troubleshoot
issues and resolve disputes. In a more positive light, they can get points clarified, make
efficiency improvements, and share their appreciation for fellow team members.
High-performing teams know all too well that the best feedback is specific, constructive, and
actionable.
Comments that don’t meet these simple criteria are meaningless. It’s useful to remember that the
actual purpose of feedback is to improve your team as a whole, not diminish the efforts of
individual parts.