Healthy performing teams

Every successful organisation is built upon high-performing teams. But lots of organisations are realising that high performance can be hard to sustain over the long-term. It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the pressure of multiple priorities and near-constant change.

We know how important it is to get the right balance between high performance and well-being – both at a team and individual level. Key to this is creating an environment of trust and candour within teams, where people feel psychologically safe to express ideas and concerns. In that kind of environment it is possible to increase team well-being whilst still maintaining (or even exceeding) high performance standards.

All high performing teams know why they exist and what they need to achieve in the context of delivering the organisation’s strategy. This is where we start – defining team purpose and vision.

Then it’s about facilitating conversations that establish psychological safety and trust – where vulnerabilities are aired, conflict is recognised as a healthy necessity, commitment discussions go the distance, accountability is willingly taken, and others’ success is called out and celebrated.  This creates the foundations for achieving stretch goals and sustainable success.

Teams whose ambition goes beyond themselves, who are determined to deliver their own goals to ensure the team’s success, achieve consistently better results.

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Anyone who has been a member of a high performing team wants nothing less ever again - it is the best place to work, grow and develop

Using neuroscience and diagnostics we create team strengths maps. What is the balance across the team?  Where are your strengths? Where are your gaps and potential blind spots? Then, working together, apply this insight to make decisions about how best to work together to achieve the team purpose and vision.

Teams who are ‘in flow’ dramatically outperform those that aren’t. They also experience greater levels of wellbeing.  Creating flow in others is about understanding their strengths and then applying appropriate levels of challenge and support. Creating flow within teams is about enabling the team to bring out the best in each other.

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Strengths are a good indicator of team values and the conditions they needed to perform at their best

The highest-performing teams all report having psychological safety: that is, a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. Psychological safety helps people to speak openly, be creative, take moderate risks and learn from failure: all of which support high performance, particularly in increasingly uncertain and ambiguous times.

Psychological safety is built on trust and candour, and it can be built through deliberate behaviours by leaders.

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By sharing your failures and what you learnt as result, it makes it safer for others to share too

Team productivity and team well-being are not opposites – they support and reinforce each other. Indeed, well-being at work is becoming a key differentiator between brilliant and ‘just OK’ workplaces. Using psychological models, teams are supported to build their resilience and coping capabilities, manage stress, and improve their collective well-being.

By boosting drivers of well-being like positive relationships, meaningful work and creating opportunities to be ‘in flow’ within organisational cultures, teams can become healthy, high-performing and sustainable.

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Create the space for meaningful conversations about well-being at work: it’s no longer a “nice to have”