High Performance Teams

            Hi performance teams are interesting, in my opinion it seems like they have been around longer than we have known to even call them a high performance team. These teams are very similar to the teams that people form in a community, people are in high performance teams because they want to be not because they are forced to be in them. Like a team which is formed in a community people on high performance teams have a passion for what they do, they also take on the moto of “all for one and one for all”. I see high performance teams as a group of people that want to come together for the greater cause.

            There are many elements to a high performance team, one element is that they all have a “shared passion”(denning), this reminds me of the many little league baseball teams that I have been on in the past. I remember how strong a bond we all had as kids wanting to attain the same goal of being champions, we all knew what we wanted and on separate instances we would all rise to the occasion.

            When I was Thirteen years old I was part of a championship team that went undefeated that year, no one could match our teams skill. A big reason for this was that we would rapidly adjust to the shifting needs of the team, I see this as an important element for a high performance team. It is important because we would never let the next man down, when one of us failed the other person was there to pick them up. Another important element to our team which resembled a high performance team was the fact that we got better as the season went on, we saw our few mistakes and worked hard to get better at our sport each day.

            My time on that team was very meaningful, it was an incredible year and to this day; sixteen years later I will never forget the good times and the friends that I made that year. It seemed like we were all so passionate about the same thing and winning was the top agenda for all of us. We shared the same values, this was what started our amazing bond, without these values which we shared we would not have had the strength to come together and do something so special.

            Being on such a powerful team at such a young age showed me what it truly meant to be on a successful team, it was going to be hard for any other team to ever compare to what I had just experienced. Later on in life I had been part of what our text calls a work group, this is a group that even though they might be labeled a team; they are far from it. A work group has people that report to the same person and do work together but they do not depend on each other. It is more of an everyman for themselves type of work environment. I see work groups as people that are part of a team but are only interested in their own advancement, needless to say that I never really liked work groups.

            It was not until many years later when I joined the NAVY that I felt like I was in a real team again, the only difference was that the NAVY was more like a community. I was never asked to join this team I just became part of it by volunteering, I knew I wanted to do something different and this community accepted me in. Every person in this community had a different job; on our boat which we called home it took everyone’s skill to survive each day. We had people who would navigate our boat, people that would cook for us, people that supplied us and people that would defend us in case the need for that came. We all shared responsibilities and we would take turns standing watch; I had once again found what it was like to truly be on a team by joining this community. I will never forget my experience in the NAVY, it changed my life and molded me into who I am today.   

 

Reference:

Denning, S. (2011). The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.