Leaders want their teams to be productive, and to do so, they need to create an environment for their people and the organization to flourish.
Want to know how one of the best organizations in the world does this?Google recently did a study on what strategies work with teams that lead to greater innovation and happiness. (These are the same practices that we use at SME Strategy when we help teams with their strategic planning, alignment and organizational development!)
According to the study called "Oxygen" run by Google to determine common factors of the highest performing teams, the most important factors to performance are related to how the team interacts.
The most important aspect of a high performance team is psychological safety:
- This is the feeling that team members can share openly and feel like everyone is listening to them
- People feel like they can fail openly and not worry about being judge, which leads to higher levels of innovation in the end.
- Team members support each other instead of undermining and competing against one another.
These factors can be developed through fostering a supportive culture within the organization, which must be reinforced by management and leadership.
The other four factors relating to high performance teams are:
- Dependability- Can you rely on others to get done?
- Structure and clarity- People should know what everyone's job is, and that should be a shared understanding across the team.
- Meaning- Is the work personally meaningful to everyone in the room?
- Impact- Team members need to believe that their work matters- and actually creates change.
When we work with teams on their strategic plans, we work through the process of culture change, which embraces all the aspects found in this study to improve performance within the organizations:
- The session itself allows for clear and open communication; breaking down communication silos that exist to help teams rely on one another.
- Roles and responsibilities are outlined clearly, and teams know where the buck stops for each specific initiative.
- Because we assemble all members of the leadership team in the session, and solicit feedback from our pre-meeting surveys, all designated members of the team feel included in the process of creating change and a strategy that is meaningful to them.
- When creating strategic priorities with teams, we find strategic areas that everyone in the organization can do their part to move the needle on. This helps get buy in organization wide, because the team members all know how their work contributes to the mission and purpose of the organization.
For the full podcast interview below
Learn more about the benefits of strategic planning with your team:
