This post will touch on a few slightly disconnected elements of building high performing teams: Why Teamwork Isn't More Important in Business, Psychological Safety, Rookie Mistakes, and The Disease of Me.

Why Teamwork Isn't More Important in Business Contexts

Building a team is hard work and most leaders are not very good at it.

Ask most leaders for their mental model of the key elements of a high-performing team and they won't have one which means they don't have a destination in mind. That means they are just bowling through a blanket and any successes are likely not repeatable.

Why should leaders be good at it? Just like the problem with effective meetings, the organizations they work for don't provide incentives, nor any pressure on them to be great at building high-functioning teams:

• Most organizations don't consistently include it in the screening process for leadership hires
• Most organizations don't consistently make high performing teams or team development a part of their required training curriculum for managers and leaders
• Most organizations don't consistently make the ability to develop others and build a highly functioning team a critical criterion for promotion.

Ask most leaders for their mental model of the key elements of a high-performing team and they won't have one which means they don't have a destination in mind. That means they are just bowling through a blanket and any successes are likely not repeatable.

Leaders themselves are not helping. They have a huge blind spot here that is greatly contributing to the dearth of high functioning teams. The Illusory Superiority bias also known as the Lake Wobegon effect explains why so many people think they are in the 90th percentile of highway driving ability.

Which is what is going on here. Most leaders just choose to believe that their team is high-performing, because any alternative to that might reflect poorly on some aspect of their leadership.

So there is negligible extrinsic or intrinsic motivation for leaders to assess/improve team functioning. There is no money to follow here, but you don't need to be a behavioral economist to figure out the outcomes you are going to get with no incentives.

Psychological Safety

Consultants see this lack of team building skills in leadership the same way a pack of dogs see a three-legged cat and are anxious to "help."

Unfortunately, for many consultants, that help seems to be in the form of pushing "psychological safety" as the skeleton's key for building teams in any domain.

Why they thought it would be wise to ignore the decades and decades of research on building teams in the military, sports, hospital surgical theaters, for profit and non-profit business is hard to understand.

Nor is it clear why someone would think it would be a good idea to reduce a complex, multi-faceted, long term process to "the most important thing."

You can say the foundation or the kitchen layout or entertaining areas or the overall feng-shui is "the most important part" of a house, but you won't enjoy living there if the roof leaks or the plumbing or any other part of the house stops functioning as it should. It all has to work well.  For goodness sake, especially the plumbing!

If psychological safety were all you needed, you could start some kind of business or even form a summer softball team with your best and most trusted friends and then just wait for the cash register to ring while clearing shelf space for the trophy.

Oh, but if only one thing was all it took! And oh, that it were just psychological safety!

If psychological safety were all you needed, you could start some kind of business and even form a summer softball team with your best and most trusted friends and then just wait for the cash register to ring while clearing shelf space for the trophy.

Psychological safety may be very necessary in some situations. And it could be a huge issue when it is lacking. But it certainly is not critical in all team situations. And it is, unequivocally, not sufficient for any team.

More needs to be in place.  For example, the Mission and the individual and team priorities need to be crystal clear. Members also have to be fully Bought-In to the mission. You have to describe and define for the team what winning looks like (aka, Results) and then be singularly focused on those results and not satisfied with platitudes and effort. You have to establish winning Norms and Operating Procedures, repeatable behaviors and practices that are known to be precursors or leading indicators of the Winning/Results you have focused the team on.

And, please, you need to have the right Talent. Thinking you can build a high performing, winning team without addressing the Talent on that team or treating Talent as "a given" is such a kumbaya, rookie mistake.

The members of the team intuitively know the importance of having the right Talent to win and be successful. And they have known the importance for a long time.

When they picked kickball teams in grade school, they knew. When they watched the other team in high school or college warm up, they knew. Even now when they divide into light and dark jerseys for a pick-up basketball or hockey game...they look at their side and they look at the other side and they quickly assess if it is going to be a good game or a rout and who is going to come out on top. Needless to say, what they are basing their assessment on is not the other team's degree of psychological safety.

In other words, building a high-performing team has to be a multidimensional undertaking and it is going to take time. It is not "an offsite." And speaking of rookie mistakes, not thinking about the long time horizon for achieving high functioning and it's multi-dimensional nature is also a rookie mistake. Don't promise or imply something you can't deliver on.

(For more on the key elements of high performing teams, see the Rocket Model and the writings of Dr. Gordon Curphy.)

The Disease of Me

Before you start down the road of trying to build a high performing team, you might want to see how steep the hill is you are going to have to climb with your group.

One simple way to do this is just to listen for the predominant attitude or mindset amongst the members of the team. Is it Team-first or Me-first?

In a 1994 book, Pat Riley, the former coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, talked about the how The Disease of Me cripples effective team functioning. He listed seven warning signs. Here are a few of the ones I frequently run into in my work with teams:

Chronic feelings of under-appreciation. Individual members do not feel they are getting enough credit or attention for wins or whatever success the team is having

Paranoia over being cheated out of one’s rightful share. Success also comes with individual financial rewards. Rather than celebrating team accomplishment, people are focused on who is getting what share of the pie.

Resentment against the competence/success of your own teammates. Rather than celebrating the gifts and abilities and accomplishments of your teammates, members grow resentful, jealous, and envious of the skills, talents, abilities, and notoriety of other team members.

If you frequently see these behaviors or hear these feelings being expressed, you're looking at a longer term effort to create team-first norms and to reinforce team-first behaviors and attitudes.

As seems to be the case with most undertakings, building a high-performing team probably best starts with a long look in the mirror.

It is not impossible, but until you get a more team-first orientation, it will be hard to get everyone pulling in the same direction.

The good news is that it is by working across all eight dimensions of the Rocket Model you are synergistically and systematically attacking the Disease of Me.

Finally, take a look at your own behavior and attitude in the cold light of the Disease of Me. You are probably on teams in a host of different contexts. Whether it is your team or other teams you are a member of, are you team-first or me-first? Are you role-modeling the behavior that the team needs so it can pull together and win?

As seems to be the case with most undertakings, building a high-performing team probably best starts with a long look in the mirror.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is the President of Adsum Insights and designer of The “Me” in Meetings™ a short, no-nonsense training course for leaders or organizations who are tired of living with the lost productivity and complaints about ineffective meetings.

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