The New Art of Building High-Performing Teams

The radical change in people’s mindset toward work has shifted the expectations of employees and leaders, which leads to new conditions under which a team becomes high-performing. There are 7 characteristics that distinguish high-performing teams in today’s working environment.

According to the 2021 Gartner Evolving Work Experience Survey, 78% of leaders/managers are focusing more on work outcomes than on the processes and procedures to achieve those outcomes, compared with pre-pandemic times. This is a direct consequence of such a long time working remotely during the hardest periods of the pandemic.

This has multiple derivatives, the most outstanding one being the need to have fostered more autonomous employees to get things done. Some leaders may believe that, once the pandemic is over, employees will not need to be so autonomous. That is a wrong belief. Research has shown that a sense of autonomy usually leads to significant improvements in attitude and performance, and it is something people actively seek. So, once an employee has tasted it — which is exactly what has happened during the pandemic — they won’t want to let it go.

Also, the speed of transformation has required more fluid teams too, with fewer hierarchical bottlenecks and a higher empowerment to make decisions more autonomously.

As you can see, all signals point to a redefinition of what a high-performing team is and where the concept of autonomy revolves around it all. Here is a “keep calm” message to leaders tending to micromanage, who are starting to get anxious with so many mentions of the word “autonomy”: counterintuitively, poor performance is detected much easier in this new scenario, since the weakest links reveal themselves organically when you grant autonomy.

If you are interested in knowing how to develop those 7 characteristics, go to “The New Art of Building High-Performing Teams” (Gartner suscription required).

May wisdom and courage be with you.