What Makes High-Performance Teams in South Africa Truly Great?
High-performance teams in South Africa and across the world share identifiable characteristics. We usually know when we are in the presence of greatness. We recognise a great accomplishment when we see one. But greatness is difficult to pin down precisely.
Great sporting achievements are regularly surpassed, even if only decades later. Society’s frame of reference also shifts. History forces us to re-evaluate great political leaders through a clearer lens. Catherine II of Russia dragged her country into modernity. But she ruled in a ruthless manner that would never earn her the mantle of “Great” today.
Still, certain characteristics of high-performance team excellence appear consistently. They appear across disciplines of human endeavour, including at work.
One of the leading thinkers on work-related performance is Morten Hansen. He is a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His seminal book Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better and Achieve More draws on research of 5,000 managers and employees across various industries. It captures the principles adopted by the very best workplace performers.
Many of these are individual behaviours. But the concepts apply equally to the high-performance functioning of teams and entire organisations. A good place to start is to examine the power and potential of great teamwork.
What Does Teamwork Look Like When It Works?
“It’s a completely different psychology swimming on a team [to] swimming as an individual,” enthused the commentator after the Australian team surged to victory in the women’s 4x100m freestyle relay at the Tokyo Olympics. “We’ve seen so many times over the years [that] the best times – hugely best times – within a team environment can’t be repeated when they swim on their own!”
Sports-science studies confirm technical reasons for this. But they also acknowledge the influence of affiliation-linked motivation and inspiration.
What drives this is what Hansen calls “P-Squared.” It is the combination of energy and willpower that ignites when passion meets purpose. The purpose of chasing victory heightens each individual’s performance. Hansen’s context differs from sport, but his words apply perfectly: “They feel what they do is more meaningful because it’s not only about themselves — it’s about what they contribute. They’re more dedicated to their job every hour. And they’re paying more attention. Also they’re more in flow.”
Being inspired to help others in a meaningful way pushes us to perform at our absolute best. It propels us to do great things. Like the world record the Australian women set in that remarkable swim.
"100% of myself is nothing compared to 1% of the team."- Eliud Kipchoge, world recordholder and the only man to ever run the marathon in under 2 hours .
Who are the people on my team ?
The very nature of what it means to be part of a team is changing. Organisations move away from hierarchical structures. They adopt flatter or networked ecosystems. As a result, teams and teamwork continue to evolve. The goals are better collaboration, faster problem-solving, rapid scaling of innovations and stronger customer-centricity.
There is an important watch-out. These objectives are not automatically met. They require cohesive leadership. And cohesion and leadership together cannot be assumed.
A story from the world of medicine illustrates this clearly. In March 2005 in Birmingham, England, Victoria Bromiley went in for routine surgery. She never returned home. The subsequent investigation revealed fundamental but human flaws in the behaviours and protocols of the surgical team. Three areas stood out.
In any team, knowledge is dispersed.
Every team member should contribute fully. Leaders must create an environment of openness and trust. Even the most junior member must feel safe to speak up. In this instance, experienced surgical ward nurses did not feel adequately respected or trusted. They did not voice what they observed, nor suggest intervention options early enough.
Clear authority leads to decision-making responsibility.
As the situation escalated, three senior surgeons and two anaesthetists were present in the theatre. They did not all know one another. No clear seniority ranking existed. Decision-making became increasingly haphazard. Some suggestions received immediate action without due consideration. Others took too long as consensus was prioritised over action. No natural leader existed, so no doctor took responsibility.
The importance of basics.
The enquiry underscored the importance of physical checklists. Every instrument and the surgeon’s preferred options must be at hand, in the right order.
Working cohesively is a baseline requirement for delivery. Cohesion and leadership are intertwined. How a team functions connects directly to an organisation’s culture. Culture is the sum of all the ways in which its people are expected to behave.
“Perhaps the most important role of a leader is to know the goal and shape the team’s direction, and then to listen – without ego or fixation – in the collaborative quest to do what must be done.”
How Does Team Cohesion Pull High-Performance Teams to Success?
Weekend cyclists who ride in a small group know the power of working together firsthand. Professional cyclists have perfected this in the peloton. A massed group uses its collective momentum to chase down breakaways. It resists heavy crosswinds. Riders take turns at maximum effort to conserve individual strength.
There are multiple teamwork lessons from this. Even in pursuit of individual rewards, we benefit from others. When we pull in the same direction, we pull one another along.
Notice also that the peloton demands cyclists ride within centimetres of one another. This adds danger. Yet they maintain extremely tight formation. It requires absolute faith. Cyclists must trust one another completely to achieve high performance.
How Do High-Performance Teams Create a Safe Environment for Trust?
Trust is essential for great teamwork. Trust allows team members to share their vulnerabilities. They voice concerns about challenges. They contribute their intuitions. This openness prevents problems and minimises damage when issues arise. It heightens mutual accountability. It also facilitates respectful conflict rather than avoidance. And it fosters deeper collaboration over time.
Trust sits at the heart of individual self-belief and collective team belief. Our Boys in the Boat: Rowing for Gold and Toto, Lewis, Mercedes! Full-throttle Performance case studies illustrate this vividly.
In business, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings demonstrates trust in action through how he devolves decisions.
“With the company’s density of talent in place, innovation is best served by allowing people maximum autonomy,”
Hastings also shares strategic and financial information with all employees. These methods have built Netflix into one of the world’s leading entertainment companies, with revenues of $25 billion in 2020. The title of his book says it all: No Rules Rules.
Why Diversity and Inclusion Are Catalysts for High-Performance Teams in South Africa
The missing dimension in many organisations is diversity. This means more than demographics. It means a range of skills, capabilities, passions and cognitive approaches that add layers of expertise.
The pandemic accelerated an already urgent debate. Inclusivity is the foundation for improved and more equitably distributed economic growth. Studies confirm the performance and growth gains that inclusivity produces. McKinsey’s April 2021 report The case for inclusive growth highlights striking figures. In the US alone, narrowing wealth gaps between white and Black or Latino households could add $2.8 trillion to GDP. Expanding employment opportunities for women could add another $2.1 trillion by 2025. The global numbers are even more compelling.
Genuinely diverse teams blend skills and styles, knowledge and experiences, identities, demographics and perspectives. They consistently outperform teams without these characteristics.
“Truly great performance is more likely to occur when the organisation also goes the extra mile to embed inclusivity in its culture and actions.”
How Does Collaboration Within High-Performance Teams Drive Success?
Friendly with your colleagues? Great.
Approximately 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens survived through prosociality, according to anthropology professor Brian Hare. Amicability as a vital adaptive trait established the basis for cooperation. Early cognition, eventually including language, developed from that starting point. Collaboration is an anthropological driver of human progress.
But even with good intentions, collaboration can go wrong. Hansen points out something counterintuitive: over-collaboration creates its own problems. Discipline matters. “Find the few things that matter the most and collaborate on them,” he says.
Culture also constrains collaboration. Financial Times editor-at-large Gillian Tett, in her book Anthro-Vision, tells the story of General Motors’ late-1990s attempts to design smaller vehicle models. GM tried to spur innovation through collaboration across geographies and with an external partner. But the team could not agree on the purpose of their meetings. The American unit wanted to solve technical problems. The headquarters representative wanted to explore options and drive timelines. The German partner assumed the meetings would simply rubber-stamp an already-reached consensus. The lack of a unified culture created different internal teams. Collaboration, like cohesion, is never automatic.
Why Great High-Performance Teams Never Stand Still
“A by-product of being great at work is that success breeds success.”
As individual self-belief grows and organisations accumulate collective accomplishments, ambitions stretch further. The motivation to perform even better intensifies. Leadership invests in augmenting resources, sharpening talent capability and incubating innovation.
Irish rock band U2, the subject of another LRMG case study, shows this in practice. They keep solidifying success, rebuilding and reinventing. Lead singer Bono continues to find new edges. He even founded an investment fund, TPG Rise, with a mission to drive economic inclusivity and upliftment. He recognised that the global investment community holds vital financial levers for meaningful change.
How Does Great Work Affect the World Around Us?
In its recent book Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies, the World Bank breaks down a sobering reality. Even before the Covid pandemic, global labour productivity had slowed for a decade. The deeper concern is that productivity growth in emerging markets and developing economies drives lasting per capita income growth. That income growth, in turn, is the primary driver of poverty reduction. The book emphasises social and infrastructure investments and the critical role of human capital.
In a very real sense, we should aim for excellence at work as a contribution to global economic and social progress.
Why Building the Right Environment Is Vital for High-Performance Teams in South Africa
Building something great starts with solid foundations. Great work starts with an enabling environment. This means appropriate tools and technologies, access to relevant information and systems to monitor and provide feedback. Then add good leadership, a strong strategy and a healthy culture.
Tying all the dimensions of great together, we see that teamwork depends on cohesion and co-ordination. Co-ordination hinges on effective leadership and a compelling direction. Work reaches its highest point when the organisation is diverse and operates a high-performance culture.
What is this all for? Great work produces great outcomes. Great outcomes change things.
As Helen Keller, American author and disability rights activist, said: “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” African proverb
At LRMG, we believe that high-performance teams in South Africa are built, not born. They develop through deliberate talent development, strong talent advisory and a culture that makes trust, diversity and collaboration non-negotiable. To find out how LRMG helps South African organisations build high-performance teams that deliver breakthrough results, contact the team.
