Case Study – Building High Performance Team from turning around a Dysfunctional Strategic Group

High Performance Team Index’s purpose is to help team members identify collective strengths and gaps, and then engage the team in a productive dialogue about improving business performance. Once changes are made based on the dialogue, the tool can be used to stay on course. Also see, an insightful Mckinsey’s read on the eternal need for building high performance teams

To gauge your team’s degree of capability effectiveness, try The Brew’s High Performance Team Assessment & Team Trust Index

Senior Leadership testimonial on pain points & post deployment of High Performance Team Index

We have a team of strong, independent leaders and we needed them to be as high performing in a group as they were on their own, as against the current reality of being dysfunctional teams – The HPT tool took more subjective, emotional elements impacting team effectiveness – and consequently, business performance – and consolidated those areas for improvement in an objective, data-based format everyone could utilize. What was implicitly playing out below the surface was openly put on the table in a fair but explicit way. This helped team members engage in transparent communication and embrace personal ownership for the team’s performance, transforming dysfunctional teams at work to a high performance one “

The High Performance Team Index Improvements

The Pain Points

The organization is one of the high growth retail organization. It has missed its financial targets over the prior two years and was facing another miss unless significant changes were made.

Senior executives had different opinions about customers, competitors, and sales channels; there was little consensus on key goals; roles and responsibilities were unclear; executives complained about ineffective meetings, and finger-pointing was routine. In fact, there were a high incidence of turf protection, mis-trust, and save-the-back behaviors which were common occurrences on the team and in the respective functions

This senior leadership team was aware of their role and responsibilities in the success of the department and the organization. They knew they needed to change the way they worked together, in order to change the organization around them. The “silos” weren’t serving them and were creating counter-productive sentiment on the team, getting in the way of the results they knew they needed to achieve.

The Brew’s Approach

Creating a shared vision, alignment as a team, and shared goals for the department, in addition to improving trust, collaboration was the need of the hour.

A team diagnosis was completed with High Performance Team Index. Post deployment of HPT Index, these were the outcomes:

• gained alignment on the situation facing the organization
• identified the vital few goals that need to be accomplished to achieve budget
• restructured its decision making, accountabilities & ownership paradigm
• clarified roles and decision-making responsibilities of team members
• significantly reduced the number of meetings and established a new operating rhythm
• and built quarterly action plans

The Impact

As a result of taking High Performance Team Index the Leadership group transformed from a disjointed group of functional leaders to a high performance team, collectively staying focused on a common set of business outcomes & objectives. The members experienced a definite shift from the earlier ‘Us v/s. them’ /’mine v/s. yours’ to a shared set of clear vision, aligned goals & focussed commitment to collaborate & back each other.

A follow-up administration of the High Performance Team Index showed dramatic improvement in team trust & effectiveness (reflected above in metrics table), culminating to improved team functioning, and being able to successfully achieve its year-end financial goals.

To gauge your team’s degree of capability effectiveness, try The Brew’s High Performance Team Assessment & Team Trust Index