Catapult has worked with hundreds of leaders on team building and team leadership over the last ten years, and we incorporate these learnings and our high performing team model into the Catapult Leadership Programme.
One of the first questions to address is whether a team is a team, or whether it is a collection of people brought together for a particular task.
We define a team as a collection of people working constructively together to achieve collective goals. Pursuit of the collective goals drive team members' conversations, actions and interactions. Relationships in high-performing teams are characterised by trust, respect, challenge and support.
A group is a collection of people who get together but do not have collective goals, or if they do have collective goals, these collective goals are secondary to other goals. Very often the group gets together to inform each other of their progress in achieving their individual or other goals.
This is an important distinction because often those leading groups have an expectation that the group should be operating more as a team and may try to apply team building activities that are not appropriate. This can cause anxiety so readjusting expectations that a group will act as a group and not as a team can bring relief.
So How Should Teams Operate?
Catapult Leadership distinguishes five characteristics of high performing teams:
- Open and trusting
- Constructive conflict
- Decide and commit
- Support and challenge
- Result fanatics
The five characteristics build on each other. For example, constructive conflict (2) refers to the willingness of high performing teams to engage in passionate and vigorous conversations around issues and opportunities. To engage in constructive conflict requires that team members are open with and trust each other (1). Constructive conflict means issues and opportunities are fully explored which in turn makes for more effective decisions and commitments (3).
During the Catapult Leadership Programme participants are provided with a diagnostic tool that enables them to assess the performance of their team against each of the five dimensions. This enables areas of strength and weaknesses to be identified. The course then identifies team building and team leadership strategies participants can apply to build performance in each of the dimensions. The diagnostic tool is provided to participants so they can run the process with their teams when they return to work.
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