High-performance teams usually don't die of natural causes

The conventional wisdom is that high-performance teams are fragile and don’t survive very long in organizations; they tend to die rapidly of natural causes. As a result, high-performance teams are not a large part of the organizational scene, constituting around 2% of all organizational teams, according one study.

That verdict on the death certificate is usually incorrect. In most organizations, high-performance teams die because they are killed by management.

Sometimes it’s murder—death by intent to kill: high-performance teams often achieve what they achieve by breaking the rules of the prevailing corporate culture. Managers can feel threatened and so they disband them, in order to preserve the status quo.

Sometimes it’s manslaughter—death by negligence: the management doesn’t understand the high-performance team or its mode of operation and so it does things that unintentionally eliminate high-performance, e.g. moving members of a high-performance team to other teams, ostensibly with the goal of creating more high performance teams but typically with the result of eliminating any high performance.

The reality is that the culture of the typical Fortune 500 company is at odds with an environment in which self-organizing teams can prosper. If firms want sustained life for high-performance teams they have to be prepared for a change—sometimes a wrenching change—in corporate culture. It’s the firms that have made this leap that have achieved the massive gains in productivity.

The study showing that high-performance teams constitute only 2% of all teams in the workplace is probably correct, if you look at all industries and countries. But the figure is low, not because we don't know how to create high-performance teams, or because it is particularly difficult, but rather because management practices either prevent them coming into existence, or kill them if they do somehow emerge.

When the management practices are right, then you have lots of them. That has happened in Toyota & Honda, and in software development. How much is "lots"? Hard to say precisely. Toyota/Honda constitute about a quarter of the car industry. In software, perhaps a third of all software development is now done in various variants of self-organizing teams, under the labels "Agile", "Scrum" or "XP", and many of these progress to become high-performance teams.

What's exciting is that these practices of managing through self-organizing high-performance teams are now spreading from those areas (software development, auto manufacture) into all aspects of organizations, such as sales, marketing, consulting, finance, and even entire organizations. Once you see the massive gains in productivity, and the increases in job satisfaction, that accrue from these practices, it is hard to see why managing through high-performance teams won't spread eventually to almost every aspect of every organization.

To learn more:

Listen to a recording of a teleseminar where I discussed this and many other aspects of high-performance teams with Seth Kahan here:

The teleseminar was a preview of the Masterclass that I will be holding on June 11-12, in Washington DC with Seth Kahan. It’s entited, “Getting Change Right Through High-Performance Teams”.

If you are thinking of attending, this would be a good week to register, because if you register by Friday May 15, you get the early bird discount and save $500.

For more information about the Masterclass go here.
http://www.stevedenning.com/Conferences/Masterclass.html

To register, go here:
http://masterclass2009.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there,
Warmly,
Steve