High-Performance Teams, spoken with emphasis on every word. As if something mystical. Something attained by discipline, hard labor and patience. Numerous methods, theories and ideas to reach that level of collaboration. Google’s research showed that the key to high performing teams is team members feel the psychological safety to be themselves. Although that outcome feels like an open door, it feels as if there is something off to me. How is that performance being expressed? Why are non-HP teams perceived as less valuable? What do we a society appreciate to be valuable?
Performance, delivery rate or value creation. May be in your line of business the wording is (slightly) different, but the concept behind it is the same: production or growth. Well, as long as those companies need to express their success in economic terms (aka profits). Everything within those organizations is tuned to be as successful as possible. And to make things worse, that success is relative. Not only must “our success” by as high as possible, it should preferably beat competitors, making the company even more valuable.
HPT itself is not a symptom of this drive for economic success, the problem is to me that economic success is the motivation for High-Performance Teams. It defines or at least distorts the expression for success of those teams. How is their performance expressed and how is that compared to other teams?
High-performance teams (HPTs) is a concept within organization development referring to teams, organizations, or virtual groups that are highly focused on their goals and that achieve superior business results. High-performance teams outperform all other similar teams and they outperform expectations given their composition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_teams
When business results would be expressed in human lives saved, co2 emissions cut, wars ended, amount of poverty eradicated or even number of poor kids supported in their education. When profits are again the means to (meaningful) ends. When we as society choose what we perceive as valuable.
How would performance then be qualified?
Can you even imagine?
