Developing your teams performance

Building a good, high-performing team is a key challenge for every manager. Just how do you successfully motivate a group of people to work co-operatively and effectively together towards a common goal?

If your team is not completing its tasks effectively and team members don’t seem to be cooperating well with each other, there’s no need to despair – it’s well recognised that all teams go through rough patches, and it’s part of their natural progression towards becoming an effective team. By understanding the phases of development that teams go through, you can guide your team through rough patches to help them reach peak performance more quickly.

There are three main aspects of team performance:

• content – what the team does
• process – how the team works towards its objectives
• feelings – how team members relate to each other

For teams to perform successfully, they must focus on all three areas. All teams pass through four stages of development, gradually becoming more effective in each of these three areas. At each stage, the dynamic of the team change dramatically from periods of inefficiency and uneasiness through to a period of high performance.

To help you focus on the three areas above, we have developed the under noted. Click on each to view more information:

• job families for each group of related jobs;
• performance appraisals;
• managing performance policy; and
• extensive learning and development opportunities.