Investing in your teams is essential for business success
“Nothing of significance was ever achieved by an individual acting alone. Look below the surface and you will find that all seemingly solo acts are really team efforts.”
From Gestalt psychology we know that teams are more than the sum of their parts. For businesses they are the engine room where value is created. While many companies invest in developing individuals, few focus their efforts effectively on ensuring their teams are fine tuned for performance.
Teams are the engines of business and need regular servicing to drive performance
Some teams have a bigger impact on how a business performs… the critical cogs or lynchpins that everyone else depends on or who are at the front line where failure or poor customer service can have disastrous consequences.
Whether it’s about taking one of these teams from good to great or about rescuing them from dysfunction, it’s worth investing in them to maximise their performance.
Team dysfunction can significantly cost your business
As managers we often know intuitively or by hard business metrics, which of our people need a boost but often find it hard to justify the spend on the “soft” stuff. The reality is that not investing in this is like not servicing the engine of your car for years on end. If you don’t service your car, it won’t perform and leave it long enough and it will blow up.
Teams performing less than their best can cause a slow slide in the company culture, eventually leading to distrust, presenteeism, avoidable errors, breakdowns in communication, burnout and high turnover across the business. This can significantly influence the bottom line, often in the $100,000s from the costs of recruitment (estimated to be 3 to 4 x a position’s salary once training and lost knowledge and productivity have been factored in).
In addition, managing a dysfunctional team can significantly add to the stress burden already felt by managers, with countless additional meetings needed to deal with performance and interpersonal issues. This can also add to the HR budget, as business partners deal with everything from bullying and harassment claims to unfair dismals. When it goes wrong, it can really go wrong.
People want to work in a great team
On the flip side, taking a team from good to great can pay significant dividends. Most people want to be part of a high performing team and will often make career choices based on whether they feel good about the team they are in and whether they want to commit for the long term.
A strong team identity is a powerful psychological motivator and essential for sustained high performance. It feels good to be part of a great team and there is decades of evidence to show that this can be more important to staff loyalty than pay or any other factor.
Common initiatives to improve performance are often focused on one-off learning and development sessions, superficial recognition programs and fun but not impactful team building exercises. These can be expensive and fail to deliver lasting value as people forget about them when returning to the office to a mountain of emails, meetings and other more pressing demands.
What is needed is an approach that effectively measures the team dynamics using robust and reliable tools; time, facilitation and coaching to galvanise a team to commit to specific behavioural shifts that they believe will drive improvements; and then a light-touch system to keep them accountable and measure change.
Taking action now
Addressing this business need is easier than ever before, with robust tools and decades of research on how to enhance team performance. From a cost perspective, an entire team can have an embed program for around the same cost as a typical leadership development program for a single individual.
Prometheus People Ignition helps you take action through our Team Ignition Program. We’ve designed this service offering to create a seamless process to ensure your teams have a strong culture of performance that is both sustainable and measurable.
By investing in the Team Ignition Program, you can comprehensively service the engines of your critical and underperforming teams. Utilising the absolute best team and individual behavioural diagnostic tools on the market from Human Synergistics, I’ve developed a program that will deliver value to your business far in excess of your investment.
