The 3 Most Common Factors Shared By High-Performing Teams

Most undertakings of sufficiently minimal complexity require some degree of teamwork and coordination, of course, but not all teams operate at the same level of efficiency and/or produce the same quality output as a result of their cooperation.

For lower-performing teams that want their efforts to result in similar outcomes to those of top-performing teams, one logical place to start might be identifying commonalities among the working conditions and practices of the top groups in order to recreate those conditions and practices with the hopes of achieving similar results. 

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To those ends, a recent survey from Dale Carnegie and Associates collected data from business leaders across more than 2,600 countries in order to better understand some of the underlying attributes and cultural qualities that link top-performing teams.

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The report - “A Leadership Imperative: Creating A Culture of High-Performing Teams” - revealed that only about 3 out of 10 teams achieved performance levels that qualified for the top tier, and an analysis of the underlying survey data indicates that there are a relatively small number of shared characteristics found among the vast majority of those top-performing teams.

Top 3 Characteristics of Top-Performing Teams

• Clearly-Defined Goals: In order to evaluate team performance in the first place, it is necessary to have concrete expectations for what constitutes the most desirable outcome, the least desirable outcome, and the range in between. With that in mind, it is unsurprising that 85% of top-performing teams make a priority of clearly defining their goals. 
• Daily Interaction: One of the most effective ways to ensure that the moving parts within a time are in alignment, synched up, and operating in a coordinated fashion is to keep lines of communication not just open but active. 81% of top-performing teams report daily interaction among team members.
• Training & Development: To be clear, access to training and development is not exclusive to only the highest performing teams. In fact nearly half of all teams (49%) across the entire range of the performance spectrum conduct at least some training and development as a part of the team-building process. Given that nearly 3 out of 4 (74%) of top-performing teams train and develop as a unit, however, there appears to be a strong correlation between training and development and high-performance work product nonetheless.

Of course, none of those top-performance-linked factors occur in a vacuum. Daily interaction is only meaningful if the communication is open and productive. Goals can only be clearly-defined if all team-members feel the freedom to ask questions about any aspect of the goals or how they are to be realized that may be unclear to them. Further, not all members of a team must undergo the same training, but all training should be constructed and conducted with the team in mind. 

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Accordingly, for leaders that want to inspire team performance to rise to the next level, communicating with transparency and creating an environment where employees feel psychologically safe and free to creatively collaborate is essential in order to build teams with the necessary adaptability to optimize their performance and grade among the top tier of teams in the world. 

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