Over the past twenty-plus years, I’ve had many conversations with team leaders in which I suggested they reach out to their team and peers for critical feedback – and every time the team leader cringes at the idea. Many of those team leaders choose to remain in the dark – not only failing to seek out critical feedback, but actively discouraging it. So why, even when they have ample evidence that shows its benefits, do leaders choose to avoid feedback?

Developed and used properly, employee surveys can provide a powerful tool for both predicting behaviors and creating rich, transformational coaching conversations. Unfortunately, most surveys fall short of providing the feedback that is most needed for modern team success.

If you’ve ever played the game of golf you quickly realized that there are countless ways to hit the ball wrong, and far fewer ways to achieve a consistently good result. Coaching conversations are much the same. There are many ways to create conversations that produce results that range from awkward to disastrous, while finding a consistently effective approach can be a challenge. The common question asked by many golfers and team leaders is: how do I improve my game?

The challenge for many organizations is that, unlike their prolific use of sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) tools and data analysis to support customer interactions, the use of technology to support team effectiveness has not kept up with the need for better team performance. Team Relationship Management (TRM) is an approach to improving the effectiveness of an organization's teams and the wellbeing of the people on those teams. It uses feedback and data analysis about key relationships: between team members and their team leader; among team mates; and with related, interdependent teams to understand and influence critical team processes and behaviors (Hurley, 2017).

Feedback: The Breakfast of Champions | While big data and predictive analytics are gaining popularity, in most organizations the employee survey remains HR's favorite feedback tool. People from organizations that consistently sit at the top of the “most recommended places to work” – Google, Amazon, IDEO, Deloitte, and Facebook – have a very different narrative. For these organizations, feedback plays a leading role in developing and sustaining the cultures, norms, and values that drive team performance and employee well-being.

For team leaders, adopting a team development model, and developing a point of view on team leadership excellence, is the key to avoiding the creation of reality distortions or blaming external conditions that lead to accepting mediocrity. With a robust team development model and checklist, a leader has the external benchmarks for objectively comparing his or her team’s performance across the important fundamentals that make up the foundation of a highly-effective team.

There is an opportunity for organizations to turn team coaching at all levels into a more structured developmental process that inspires improvement and enhances individual and team effectiveness. This starts with helping team leaders develop a coaching strategy that is simple enough for overloaded managers to implement, yet powerful enough to make a real difference to their team’s performance and well-being. The challenge is ensuring that the good intentions associated with internal team coaching don’t result in the negative relationship experiences often reported by team members.

In his March 2018 HBR article, "To Reduce Burnout on Your Team, Give People a Sense of Control", the author, Andrew Wittman, observes that team dynamics play a key role in workplace stress. The rush to an easy solution often results in an appealing, but overly simplistic prescription – a common ailment in a business world looking for quick fixes.

Complex global business environments, and the need for agility in both decision making and execution, is driving organizations towards ever greater collaboration and teamwork as the means of resolving challenges and creating competitive advantage. Most leaders agree that one key component in ensuring effective team functioning is the content and quality of communications to, and among, team members.

Many teams struggle with a fundamental conundrum: how do you get disciplined execution along with innovative, creative solutions? It often seems that any efforts to improve one-dimension causes losses on the other one. Disciplined execution stymies innovation; by its very nature, innovation and creativity are undisciplined. Agile development practices provide a way for cross-disciplinary teams to deliver new products incrementally and iteratively.

Many factors influence performance and well-being at work, including: professional and personal goals, job design and flexibility, skills and competencies, and perceptions of the fairness and trust across key relationships. For many organisations and teams, the simultaneous pursuit of performance and well-being can feel like chasing conflicting goals. And research supports this conclusion, showing that greater well-being affects individual and team performance through employee attitudes, motivation, and behavior. The challenge for organizational and team leaders is knowing how to maximize both well-being and performance.

For organizations in search of talent, people born between 1977 and 1994 matter because a) there are a lot of them; and b) by 2020, their generation will make up 50% of the global workforce. This generation’s career aspirations, attitudes about work, and comfort with technology will define the work culture of the 21st century.

Research on traditional, co-located teams has shown the positive impact that personality can have on team performance. However, it is not just the “power of personality” that determines team success, but the "mix of personalities" that foster (or hinder) an effective team.

The nature of team work has rapidly evolved over the last 25 years. The decline of organizational hierarchy, and the rise of global, cross-cultural work, have multiplied the challenges of building and leading teams. Conventional wisdom often prescribed hard work and long hours as the answer to improving team productivity and performance. Many of today’s team leaders who follow that formula quickly discover that long hours and tremendous effort isn’t the answer.

At the start of the new year, people who acknowledge the reality of their waistlines often start their list of New Year’s resolutions with a goal to exercise more. Similarly, many organizational leaders who acknowledge that the people in their organization are not as engaged as they would like, place increasing employee engagement at the top of their resolution list. Most of those disengaged people are not the worst performers, they simply lack energy, purpose, or passion. They put in their time, but not their best effort nor their best ideas. The challenge for organizational leaders is that, while they recognize the benefits of their resolution, they don’t always know how to foster the behaviors that change intentions to change into consistent habits that lead to increased energy and engagement.

The reshaping of organizations that began at the turn of the century continued this year at an accelerated pace. Digital technologies, the emergence of new global competition, and the expectations of the next generation of workers are but a few of the driving forces. How organizations respond and reshape themselves will determine whether they are on a trajectory to achieve greatness, or are relegated to mediocrity. For many companies, it is their teams and team leaders that sit at the epicenter of this dynamic landscape. They will, to a large extent, determine where their organizations land in the distribution from mediocre to great. A key challenge leaders face is understanding where to focus their change efforts.

"I recently conducted a workshop on building highly-effective teams with a group of service leaders and their team members. During a coffee break, one of the leaders and I were chatting about the challenges of team building, and he asked me a great question, ""How do I make sure that I'm hiring the right people for my team?"" It seems like that question should have a straightforward answer. In reality, most recruiting, interviewing, and hiring processes are focused on the individual, and are not designed for today's flatter organizations that are highly dependent upon teams for their success. So how do you get the right people to fill the seats on your team bus?"

Building healthy relationships requires understanding expectations, striving to meet them, and developing the habit of consistently closing the inevitable gaps. Contrary to the attitude that “it's just work”, decades of research (and common sense) show us that developing strong, trusting relationships leads to greater happiness at work. Moreover, that happiness matters not only in terms of team effectiveness and individual well-being, but it also impacts people’s families, friends, and broader communities.

Lean teams are the benchmark for best practice in manufacturing and field service organizations. With their emphasis on autonomy, continuous process improvement, and value creation, the appeal of lean-teams has broadened to include most every function in today's flatter, leaner organizations. Yet, despite the popularity and well-documented benefits of lean teams, many fail to keep improving their work practices and value creation. Why do some lean teams meet or exceed expectations, while others fail to do so?

If you lead teams for a long enough time, you are likely to recruit or inherit a 'lone wolf' - a talented, capable individual who has a tough time fitting into your team. Smart, capable, and willing to challenge the status-quo, you see their value; yet, often they are high-maintenance and disruptive to the rest of the team. Moreover, you typically don’t have the luxury of spending substantial amounts of ‘handling time’ with one team member given the typical time and performance pressures placed on most teams. So how do you quickly decide the value of the lone wolf to the team, versus the cost of him or her remaining?

One of the challenges organizations face as they have come to rely more and more on teams is that most employee-related functions such as recruiting, training, evaluations, and rewards, continue to be biased towards the individual. This is particularly true with respect to evaluating individual performance in the context of team effectiveness. That leaves the question of how to best evaluate individual performance in the context of teams.

How often have you heard observations like “my people don’t seem to be fully engaged” or, “my team needs more energy”? While the symptoms of a team lacking engagement and energy may be easy to identify, practical solutions that are easily implemented are hard to find. I did a Google search on “motivating teams” and the top results included: “25 Ways to Motivate Your Team to Greatness”, “15 Effective Ways to Motivate Your Team”, and “10 Unique Ways to Motivate Your Team”. My experience leading many dozens of teams over the past 25-plus years, and talking with hundreds of team leaders, is that we are regularly asked to do the equivalent of changing tires on a car while driving at high speed. I don’t know about you, but doing 25, 15, or 10 different things to improve motivation just isn’t going to happen.

For many organizations make-or-break projects have become the norm versus the exception. There are a variety of drivers behind this trend, including disruptive innovation, the need for speed across most every business function, and fierce competition in global markets that drives up buyer expectations. Organizations motivated to excel in this environment often respond by investing in and deploying expert teams – and expecting exceptional outcomes from them. For those teams, the pressure to perform comes from a combination of shared accountability, a high-level of scrutiny, and significant consequences of the projects outcome. These expert teams find the combination of high-stakes and elevated expectations to be strongly motivating. Yet, a paradox ensues. The same pressures that motivate these teams to perform, may also result in behaviors that undermine their performance.

All teams face challenges in their quest to be effective. The reality for virtual teams is that they face greater complexity and uncertainty as they strive to overcome the barriers of time, distance, and communications. When successful, virtual teams enable the best talent to come together to amplify energy, competencies, and creativity. But, the challenges should not be underestimated.

The common theme across the research (and my own experience) is that most leadership training fails to deliver because it is disconnected from the daily reality of team leaders and their teams—which is often akin to changing the tires on a moving car while navigating to a new location. Many training programs present good ideas, but few connect the dots between ideas and actions with the level of mindfulness, discipline, and perseverance required to make a measurable impact on results. Coaching, on the other hand, is typically less focused on big ideas and more focused on building skills, competencies, and confidence immersed within the messy day-to-day work of teams. Moreover, the best coaching is metrics driven, measuring the progress and outcomes.