Unifying to High Performance Team creates clear focus

The Client

As the EdTech industry grows by leaps & bounds, helped by digital & mobility disruptions, this funded EdTech organization poised for hyper-growth drew a couple of critical realization working with The Brew – one of them being ironing out the dysfunctionalities within the core group i.e laying foundations for high performance team, paving the way to transform to tightly knit purpose aligned team to pursue a set of clear priorities and goals & leading the hyper-growth from the front. (Building high performance teams is one of 6 essentials identified as the first principles of high performance workplaces)

The High Performance Team Index Improvements

The Pain Point

The core leadership group was good, but not a high performance team (here is a quick check for it – High Performance Team assessment). Although leaders met their deadlines, they functioned in silos & in spite of being in a disruptive domain, some amount of complacency/comfort zone had set in (Can you relate to this?! Well, we got to the root cause early in the organization’s journey. The later the more difficult it becomes, as the perceived normas become part of the culture) .

That seemed ok while the organization was smaller and predictably paced (though highly underutilized). But now, with the industry seeing tremendous potential, the leaders & founders saw a greater industry-leading potential, the organization could play if it got things right. This meant shaking & stirring itself from it’s comfort zone, high change management, deeper commitment to purpose & too many disruptive goals on the table for the team to be merely good. The group got to be great to be even thinking realistically about these.

Members needed to build a shared larger purpose, insanely ambitious BHAGS, draw on their collective intelligence, collaborate on cross-departmental projects, and use each other as resources during the busy months ahead. The costs of not having right fundamentals could be great: leadership burnout, quality gaffes, missed opportunities, and inconsistent messages to the workforce, investors, industry & peers

The Approach

The Founders & Leaders realized that getting the team to high-performance mode would require much more beyond an offsite solution. This group had to be ingrained with habits that members would fall back on in times of stress. With an overall direction, objective measure of improvement & roadmap to nudge observable behaviors to habit, Members needed ongoing support in order to change embedded behaviors. The Leaders engaged with The Brew to work closely with the team leveraging it’s High Performance Team Index (a uniquely designed instrument, based on a proven model that objectively highlights the necessary strengths for high performance teams which are as well sustainable & inspiring

Each member began by taking a comprehensive, data-based assessment to measure the team’s effectiveness. Over meeting, the group identified its major gaps and created team development goals. Over the next three months, the team worked on their development goals and after three months, the team took the initial assessment again to measure progress. 

Results On their second assessment, the team outperformed on all the parameters vis-a-vis the earlier scores on High Performance Team Index. They went from average to exceptional in trust, goal clarity, commitment, and implementation. The achievement wasn’t just theoretical. 

This was evident in numbers as well – the team members were more effective (different from being productive), more successful, playing to their strengths, focusing on aligning the workforce to the overall purpose, with steady sustained improvements in outcomes. The team members as well reported significantly greater pride and satisfaction in their accomplishments.

The Outcome

A purpose-driven, highly compatible, functional & aligned leadership team, working towards the pursuit of purpose fulfillment & clearly defined goals (i.e. High Performance Team so to say), rather than being another ‘cool’ EdTech company is where we got to. Being able to vision the shared reality of the value, impact, purpose and focus on specific, measurable performance indicators for tracking progress against their goals.