Ten characteristics of highly functioning teams

Building a highly functioning team is an essential part of scaling up a business and winning in the marketplace. “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team,” is the way Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn cofounder, sums it up.

Creating the culture and standards for a high-performing team to emerge is a full-blown transformation. At the end of the process, the resulting team invariably displays a number of characteristics and attributes that are the hall mark of all winning teams. I have summarized below ten attributes that I captured in the course of my experiences. I have also used these as a framework for personal reviews and development plans. They have been very useful.

1. Have everyone embrace a common vision for the company or the business. This means buying into it, believing in it and using it in daily interactions with partners and customers. When the team responds well to this its motivation improves and members start sharing regularly their success stories. This brings about a positive halo effect.
2. Owning tangible goals, so that everybody is clear about what is expected from them and how they are measured. This also means keeping everybody focused on a limited number of objectives which is often a challenge. Saying No to new ideas can be necessary if they don’t fit in the plan or until prior goals have been reached.
3. A Growth mindset. High-performing teams have a clear awareness of the skills they need to success in their new roles. They are able to keep learning and perfecting their skills through practice and feedback. They don’t shy away from taking risk, stretching themselves and embracing new challenging tasks when offered to them.
4. Personal drive. This means having a self-critical attitude, always wanting to achieve more and not being satisfied with past achievements. Great performers always think of ways of overachieving their goals and not just barely scraping through them. 
5. Grit: They understand the power of perseverance and long term commitment to their goals. They have the courage to manage fear of failure and failures itself. Their resilience enables them to pick themselves up after a temporary set back, and overcome downturns. They embrace this as part of a learning process on the way to success and they continue executing their plans patiently and conscientiously. 
6. A rigorous data driven analytical mindset. They always investigate facts first, uncover what is important and relevant to their analysis and only then make recommendations or inferences. They are also comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity and like to base their decisions on quantitative models. High performing teams make very few unforced errors and have high execution standards.
7. The ability to challenge each other and their peers. They are not afraid of having original views and they offer different or opposing perspectives when needed. They uphold the obligation to dissent and understand that if they want to bring about change and innovation they have to accept to be a minority view at the beginning. Member of a highly functioning team have the habit of sharing and discussing their ideas. They welcome debate, scrutiny and challenge. They understand that learnings and best practices come out of team discussions and are valuable to all.
8. The ability to stick to team decisions and commit to them.  This means pursuing execution of agreed decisions with resolve and determination, while refraining from undermining each other, even if they don’t fully agree. They disagree and commit.
9. Agility.  They understand that customers and partners will change their minds about what they want or need and that there will be many unpredictable challenges for which a rigid or planned approach is not suitable. In this case they need to focus on the ability to respond to changes quickly and without friction.
10. The know how to resolve conflicts. Since frictions are inevitable, members have to be able to recognize, face, and resolve interpersonal conflicts promptlyto keep the team running fast and smoothly. They do this through dialogue and open, direct communication.

These ten points give a simple framework to start shaping the culture of a new team. During this process tensions inevitably arise between the new behaviors we try to introduced and the old culture. Many may also go through temporary feelings of dissatisfaction and confusion as they gradually adjust. They may go through highs and lows as they learn to deal with ambiguity and eventually settle into the new environment.