Team Performance

Founder-CEOs frequently ask us – “Why can’t we grow?” Is it our team performance?

Have you ever asked that question? Despite having all the right ingredients—opportunity, customers, cutting-edge technology, a stellar team and ample capital—Do you come up against a wall, stretched thin, on edge and burning out?

With investor funds fueling your ventures, the pressure to accelerate growth can be intense.

Founders are frequently caught in a maddening cycle of hiring and losing talent, the need to pivot fast as changes come on board, and to keep their eyes on the prize. Owners wonder: What’s missing? Why can’t we find and retain the right people and work together toward this goal?

A crucial but often overlooked aspect is team dynamics. On top of the background impact of team dynamics, keeping your cool so you can remain agile problem solvers can feel hard to do; especially when investor expectations are mounting higher and capital is at risk.

The stakes feel very high for teams and companies.

Fulfilling responsibilities to our stakeholders is at the core of what keeps us up at night as leaders, owners, founders. Our stakeholders include our employees, our boards, our investors, our customers, and even our families!

Team Performance Dynamics

The invisible obstacle that undermines our ability to fulfill those responsibilities is actually always fraught team dynamics. Oh yes! Take a beat on that one. It’s not the systems. It’s not the marketing, or sales, or product updates, or even the technology direction … those are the symptoms of friction in the team dynamics.

Just like an unnoticed tendon injury that is tearing quietly under the skin, causing mild but chronic discomfort and weakness—Frictions beneath the surface can block a team’s ability to wow your stakeholders! When that (team) tendon finally tears, the dysfunction is catastrophic. And often, we are blind to the underlying problem.

When your team dynamics are healthy – ALL those symptoms get handled. To be sure, there may be passionate discussion while they are addressed, however, when your team is aligned, healthy, connected, and on the same page about your organization’s goals, values, and mission – your team will rally to do what your business needs for success! Just like when you are hungry, you will naturally feed yourself, so your teams will solve the problems that need solving.

Neuroscience of Leading High Performing Teams

The key is to cultivate Positive Team Synchrony. If that is a new word for you – you are not alone. Neuroscience research has recently recorded this phenomenon within groups like teams.

Synchrony in individuals refers to the coordinated timing of neural activity across various brain regions. This type of coordinated activity underpins mastery. Consider a musician: the motor cortex activates to recall movements, emotional centers spark ‘musicality,’ and the audio-visual cortices engage to read, listen to, and fine-tune the performance – all at the same time.

Their neurons fire in all those different regions simultaneously to facilitate mastery. Those separate brain regions communicate, collaborate, process information, and form both connections and memories to drive the musician’s mastery. Achieving mastery both creates, and relies on high levels of positive synchrony.

Synchrony

The most exciting thing this new research has uncovered is that high-performing teams demonstrate an intra-brain team synchrony. Individual human’s brains ‘fire’ in synchrony with the other people’s brains on their team – under certain conditions. And these teams – when the synchrony is positive – are proven to be the highest performing teams! These teams are characterized by deep trust, cohesion, creativity, and focus. At FLC we call it “positive team synchrony”

 

and that fosters dynamic team performance. Certain conditions foster this state, just as others can lead to “negative team synchrony.” Neutral team synchrony is characterized by individual contributors who don’t really act as a team. Much potential performance is lost to wasted time and effort in such teams.

Leadership of High Performance 

Leadership plays a pivotal role in steering team synchrony. Yet, many leaders are unaware of their influence or leave it to chance. Our mission is to equip leaders with the awareness and skills to cultivate positive team synchrony, transforming their teams into powerhouses of dynamic performance.

The first step in the deliberate cultivation of positive team synchrony is to identify and dissipate any negative team synchrony. It is not possible to cultivate a high-performance culture on top of unresolved issues. When we have done this work, the friction that once sabotaged performance and retention disappears, and is replaced by teams that laugh and work through challenges together. We’ve seen these shifts create extraordinary bottom line results to the tune of $587,000,000 increase in valuation in just 2 years.

Team Building for Performance

It is far easier to cultivate strong positive synchrony, and the awesome performance we experience with it early on, before any negative patterning has taken hold.

You might ask, “So, what are the things that can keep your team dynamics healthy?”

Here are three tips you might try to make your team’s performance more robust, and to move a neutral team to cohesion:

1. Clear And Consistent Communication

• Embrace The ART of Conflict communication model.
• Established a system for clear, timely communication.
• Leaders focus on how your communication styles influences others.

  

1. Trust And Positive Relationships

• Hold periodic team retreats to address underlying resentments and foster reconciliation.
• Leaders can, and should nurture a culture in which speaking up is safe and encouraged.
• Refine decision-making protocols for fairness, speed and transparency.

1. Empowering And Supporting Team Members

• Delegate responsibilities based on strengths and collective capabilities.
• Tailor training and development to individual and team needs.
• Recognize and celebrate successes and learnings to reinforce a culture of achievement and growth.

These shifts allow teams and leaders to not only meet the expectations of their stakeholders but blow those standards out of the water!

Questions To Consider

Some questions to consider:

• How can you develop positive team synchrony on your teams?

• Do you have a take on how positive or negative your team’s environment is?

• What impact would that have on your effectiveness and results in 2024?

Want to know where your team’s synchrony falls? Take our quiz.

Remember, leaders have a huge impact on the quality of their team’s performance, and fostering team synchrony is like watering and fertilizing your garden. Your plants can hardly help growing when the soil is right!