White paper: how to build a high-performing team fast, under real time pressure

Summary

You cannot build a high-performing team in an afternoon. But if you are a leader who must get the best out of a group of colleagues on a very short timescale, you can fast-track them towards more effective team-working using three simple ingredients:

1. A mechanism, such as a business simulation or other short, structured team challenge
2. A clear brief with specific deadlines and goals, but no instruction on how the team should behave beyond 'you are a team'
3. Facilitated self-analysis at the end of each round, so the team can review how it is collaborating and how it might improve

Contents

• Introduction
• Step 1: create a team game plan
• Step 2: stress test the team
• Step 3: reflect and improve
• Step 4: execute and review
• Getting started

Introduction

Can you build a high-performing team in an afternoon? No. But L&D managers and team leaders are regularly put in exactly this position: a group of colleagues, a short timescale, and a real need to get the best out of them as a team. This white paper sets out a practical framework for doing that, built from patterns we have observed across many years of running team-based business simulations.

Step 1: create a team game plan

Below is a seven-point checklist a team can use to produce a game plan, kept to one or two pages:

1. Roles. How will we divide up team responsibilities?
2. Agreements (ground rules). How will we deal with each other as colleagues and team members?
3. Processes and practices. What are the two or three most important team processes we will put in place and follow?
4. Priorities. How will we decide what matters most, particularly under pressure or in a dilemma?
5. Organisational values. What values matter most to us as a team?
6. Results. What specific results must we achieve as our minimum team performance level?
7. Targets. What is our stretch target, our ambition beyond that minimum?

The first letter of each element spells 'RAPPORT', a useful mnemonic for a team game plan. It is an apt one: the Oxford Dictionary defines rapport as 'a close and harmonious relationship in which the groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well'.

Step 2: stress test the team

Run a short, structured team activity and try to follow the game plan. Set aside at least one hour, though three hours is better.

If you only have one hour

Give the team an 'on paper' challenge: a short, unfolding scenario they must respond to together under real time pressure. This needs minimal technology, just briefings and updates on paper or projected on a screen, and can still be highly effective.

If you have one to two hours

Cohesion is built for exactly this. It is an immersive, live and in-person simulation, facilitated by our experts, in which a team earns trust, resolves conflict, and balances the dynamics that make or break collaboration under pressure, with minimal setup beyond a single internet-connected computer.

If you have three to four hours or more

Crew gives you more room to work with. Teams lead a fast-paced project together, managing tasks and developing individuals as they go, so alongside the core skills the team also has to keep collaborating to hit the deadline, a requirement that is not fully apparent until the simulation is well underway.

Step 3: reflect and improve

At the end of the activity, give the team at least 30 minutes to discuss a small number of key questions:

• How well are we working as a team, and what could we improve?
• What would we do differently if we ran the activity again?
• How closely are we following our game plan, and does it need revising?

With two to three hours available, repeat this review more than once so the team can see visible improvement quickly. It also helps to have the team self-assess against the seven mistakes teams make under pressure (Figure A), gathered over many years of observing teams in business simulations.

Step 4: execute and review

Send the team back to the job with one extra directive: follow the game plan. Build in a regular, for example weekly, review cycle that repeats the self-reflection from step three.

The evolution of team working

Watching newly formed and existing teams work through business simulations and other intensive challenges reveals how team-working evolves, and that pattern can help you accelerate it in your own organisation. On the way to effective collaboration, teams often pass through two intermediate phases of naive collaboration: hyper-communication and over-delegation.

Phase 1: hyper-communication

Here, almost every team member is involved in almost every conversation. It is democratic and feels good, but it takes forever, and a team operating like this will not hit its deadlines. Teams often start here, genuinely believing they are collaborating well, until they discover that working this way is simply not practical.

Having over-corrected from hyper-communication, teams often move to the next phase of naive collaboration: over-delegation.

Phase 2: over-delegation

Here, the team agrees it needs to work faster, so it introduces roles and a division of labour, but over-delegates: handing out jobs to individuals and sub-teams without enough ongoing communication to keep everyone aligned. Teams think they have fixed their collaboration and feel efficient, until, typically near the end of the round, they discover they are no longer on the same page and have been working to different assumptions and priorities.

Phase 3: effective collaboration

Having experienced both naive forms of collaboration, teams are well placed to find the middle ground. As with over-delegation, they allocate roles, but this time they support it with ongoing communication, particularly around task objectives and early review of findings and decisions before they are finalised.

Getting started

Many teams find it hard to reach effective collaboration without first experiencing, and learning from, both hyper-communication and over-delegation, and some flip-flop between the two indefinitely, believing all the while that they are already doing it well.

To fast-track effective team-working, you need the three ingredients from the summary: a structured mechanism, a clear brief, and facilitated self-analysis. Used carefully, they help a team develop real team-working and collaboration skills in a fraction of the usual timescale.

If you are weighing up how to build a high-performing team on your own timescale, our high-performing teams programmes are designed around exactly this challenge, whether that is Cohesion for a focused one to two hour session or Crew for a fuller three to four hour deep dive.