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.
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