What makes high performance teams

When I conduct outdoor team building activities — the ropes-and-blindfolds kind of stuff — I’m fascinated to see the standard ways in which leaders emerge.

Immediately I’ve finished spelling out the task and given the team their time limit, someone with an idea shouts it out — usually in the form of the initial instruction required to implement it.

That person valiantly perseveres, amid an inevitable cacophony of criticism and competing incompatible proposals.

But as often as not, they are eventually overthrown.

Their replacement — the coup leader — is invariably just as assertive, but often also ends up being dumped by fellow team members.

Sometimes the team succeeds, sometimes it fails.

And when we start analysing the group dynamics that led to whatever outcome, we try to explain how the leadership being offered was a major contributory factor.

In these short, time-constrained tasks, the leader is always the one who’s quick to formulate and articulate a solution.

He or she then also assumes the role of project manager, through which they work at coordinating the group in following their instructions.

They tend to place themselves at the very centre of implementation too, as well as figuring out needed strategy amendments, quality control and anything else that needs doing… leaving most others as idle and disconnected observers.

It’s quite standard that in the post mortems the leader comes in for merciless bashing, not least for failing to control their unruly charges. ‘And where were you?’ I ask such critics. ‘Why were you disruptive, or silent? Why didn’t you step forward to protect your leader?’ (I must admit that such supportive action is not unknown, although it’s usually far too timid, and rarely prevents emerging coups.)

Now I ask the participants to break out the various component roles that came together in their leader (or, in the case of regime change, leaders). Ideas person? Yes. Coordinator? That too. Implementer-in-chief? Yes, again. Time and quality management? Of course. Why, I ask, did the leader take on all these functions? More so that they proved to be far more effective in some than in others.

Enter Meredith Belbin, who in 1981 published his insightful book, Management Teams.

In it he offered an inventory, as he called it, of nine team types, identifying the various traits associated with each.

Each of us has a role, or type, we gravitate towards, which we can figure out through self-assessment and also through evaluation by others.