Building a high performing team is like a marriage

Average reading time: 2 minutes 20 seconds

Creating and leading a high-performing team is a lot like getting married.

When we commit to marriage, very little appears to change at a surface level. When in reality, we are entering into an entirely new relationship that requires much more effort and commitment.

The same is true of teams aspiring to go from good to great.

Just as you have to work hard at building and sustaining a strong marital relationship, you have to work hard at building a truly world-class team.

You have to invest time and energy into the team continually if you want sustained peak-performance.

This is why the phrase “team development” is such a misnomer.

It implies that we develop the team once and then sit back, having ticked that box, and enjoy the ride as a high-performing team. The truth is, it simply doesn’t work like that.

That approach is like investing vast amounts of time, energy and cash into your wedding day to ‘develop the marriage’. After which you sit back and enjoy the next 40 years, perhaps going ‘off-site’ to a nice hotel for your 25th anniversary to spend one day on ‘marriage development’.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it!

But is it that far from the truth when it comes to our approach to building a high performing team?

“Building a great team is not something we work on once a year, off-site at a nice hotel. It is something we work at every single day, through the day-to-day, seemingly mundane activities and interactions.”

Ben Morton

I recently spent some time with an executive team who really needed to work well together. They’d been under intense pressure for several years from every imaginable direction. If ever there was a team that needed to ensure the sum of the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, this was it.

They said all the right stuff.

They made all the right noises.

They said they were ‘committed’ to being a high performing team and that becoming so was critical to their organisation’s success; even its future existence.

And yet, the total time they spent working on the team in a four-year period, was limited to two, one-day off-sites. The second of which was forced upon them by the group CEO.

But let me be clear here. Developing and sustaining a high-performing team isn’t solely done via an off-site at a nice hotel, that’s just one small part of the puzzle.

Building a great team is something we work at every single day, through the day-to-day, seemingly mundane activities and interactions.

It’s done by always keeping ‘team-development’ on the agenda and constantly looking for ways to get just a little bit better.

That’s the route to developing and sustaining a truly world-class, high-performing team.

If you’re up for the journey and committed to doing whatever it takes to unlock your team’s true potential, I’m here to help.

Schedule a free 30 minute call here.

Good luck!

Ben

#LeadOn