HOW SAFE IS YOUR TEAM?
The first step in your path to high performance is know where your teams stand. Are they psychologically safe? Do they have strong team emotional intelligence? Do they engage in the behaviors of high-performance teams?
What makes some teams perform “just fine”—and others, great?
Try it now! Answer these four easy questions to measure your team’s psychological safety right now.
WHAT MAKES SOME TEAMS PERFORM “JUST FINE”—AND OTHERS, GREAT?
They’re working on similar projects, carrying out similar activities—yet one group has consistently better results than the others. It’s neither magic nor some intangible set of coincidental variables you could never identify. Instead, these standout teams have a specific set of behaviors in common—behaviors that express team emotional intelligence and psychological safety. These behaviors can be learned and applied within your own teams, and they have the inevitable side effect of increasing the achievement of the collective performance goals.
WHAT GETS MEASURED…
Richard’s diagnostic tools to help you benchmark your teams’ behaviors, comparing them with the behaviors that make the difference in effectiveness. By observing and measuring how your team members connect, communicate, and collaborate with one another, it’s easy to identify what’s serving the psychological safety goals that correlate directly with performance increases.
DESIGNING THE TRANSFORMATION
Using these concrete, observable metrics, your teams will be able to agree on the highest-impact areas of improvement. Together, you’ll be able to design a bespoke program of training and coaching to focus on these behaviors. You’ll get guidance on specific practices to implement within the team and commitments and protocols to adopt collectively and openly as a group, holding one another accountable for creating the changes.
AGILE AND CYCLICAL
After 3 to 4 months you can reassess team interactions, using the same metrics. You’ll be able to measure the behavioral changes—and the impact the changes have had on team performance and productivity. With continuous data-driven improvement, you can add on changes in manageable steps, iterating steadily towards the optimal set of team agreements and behaviors that work for you.
CONTINUOUS TEAMING
Teams work together in an amazing range of industries, settings, and circumstances. Yet the universal patterns of human interactions are applicable, in their infinite complexity, to every group.
The high-performance behaviors in this framework have achieved improvement across a wide range of industries and team types, including non-work/community teams, distributed teams, and even families.
The Core Protocols and Core Commitments provide a flexible set of practices and principles that teams can adopt to increase their psychological safety and team emotional intelligence in any setting. Comparative High-Performance Teams is the tool to help you assess how to apply them directly in your team for the greatest transformative impact, starting where your teams are right now.