Cultivating Effective Teams

Moving at the speed of…

The most misaligned person on your team.

Few people will argue that one of the holy grails of leadership is high-performing teams. And few people will agree on how to create those teams.

Building healthy team dynamics is a topic that has been researched extensively (e.g., Guzzo & Dickson, 1996; Katzenbach & Smith, 1993). But research and application are not the same thing.

For a team to achieve group flow, all members must possess the mental frameworks that are conducive to it. Simply stated, each individual must be at their own individual best and open to connecting with the other team members.

Organizations reap direct results from teams in flow. Employees who experience flow states at work are more highly engaged and intrinsically motivated by the experience. They have greater psychological well-being and experience a stronger sense of self (Bryce & Haworth, 2002; Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989; Fredrickson, 2001; Hektner, Schmidt, & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007; Massimini & Carli, 1988; Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001 ))

Group flow requires:

Clear and specific goals
The spoken & unspoken coordination of activities within the group
Shared goals and shared risk
Total concentration
Complete participation
Open communication and a collaborative mindset

Group flow occurs when the individual team members share flow experiences together in a highly synergistic fashion.

You can identify group flow by:

A sense of unity

A sense of joint progress

Mutual trust

Holistic focus

Improvisation

the music of teams in flow

When Jazz musicians improvise they will often talk about the session as if the individuals were playing as one. This is a flow state. When business teams achieve flow, there is that similar feeling of loss of sense of separation, abandonment of ego, and need to be right. When teams achieve flow they are able to operate at a higher level of productivity without the burnout usually equated with that elevated level of action. Because a flow state is intrinsically rewarding, teams in flow are eager to put in added effort to get back to that state.