As the co-host of our previous MM 11/1 Applying "Good To Great" session, I was pleased with our discussion linking Jim Collins' Good to Great to my experience in the professional sailing world, applying many of Jim's principles to the teams I worked with then, as well as what I see with clients I work with now as a business coach and Professional EOS Implementer.

During that discussion we talked about what makes a high-performing team, starting off by looking at Jim Collins' approach to first get the right people on the bus, and then figure out where to drive it. The counter point was: with the right product in the right market, any team can do well, so that's where to put the focus.  Finally the discussion came around to one of the most basic building blocks of a high-performing team, which is to start by building trust.

On November 29th we will continue the discussion from there, bringing in Patrick Lencioni's framework from 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. The opposite of a dysfunctional team is a healthy, cohesive, functional team, which starts by building trust, then leverages that trust to bring passionate, healthy debate to the table, and once the debate has been resolved, to bond together and commit to the decisions that have been made, hold each other accountable and put aside politics to focus on results.

To add to the debate we will look at recent research reported in Harvard Business Review (see  5 Things High-Performing Teams Do Differently) on traits that High Performing Teams have been doing during the pandemic to foster their elevated team performance. Interestingly, the first trait listed was to pick up the phone and talk! In this age where technology tools are increasingly being seen as solutions to distributed, WFH or remote teams, it turns out the human connection of a traditional phone call beats hiding behind belting out email after email into the ether, or worse yet, "slacking" your team-mates.

I have explored the HBR research in more detail in my blog The Link Between High-Performing Teams and EOS, where you can read more detail prior to the discussion.

— Steve Morris