High-performance multicultural teams are primarily shaped by effective management. Research shows that managers greatly influence team performance and engagement. To create a high-performing team, consider the following elements: psychological safety, CQ-powered cognitive diversity, reflective practice and strong leadership.
The key to high performance?
A failure to perform is a failure of management.
It’s obvious when you think about it. The reason a manager is paid the big money is to make sure that the group of individuals in their charge function at a high level, collaborate effectively and deliver shared objectives.
If a team underperforms, we should look primarily at the manager.
The role of a manager
And the data supports this view:
- Gallup's research shows that managers influence at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores.
- McKinsey research also finds that companies with strong managerial capabilities can outperform their peers by up to 25% in productivity.
- A Harvard Business Review article, "Why Good Managers Are So Rare," states that only 1 in 10 people have the talent to manage effectively, but those who do can significantly enhance team productivity and performance.
So, this could be a short article – if you want to build a high performing team, start with a great manager.
Creating a ‘super-team’
But suppose, we were to intentionally put together a team designed to push performance to the limit? If we were to create a recipe for a super-team, what would the ingredients be? After all, the manager isn’t going to do all the work themselves, are they?
Purely based on research of the factors that define outstanding teams from plain ‘good’ teams, here are some suggested ingredients to look for:
- Psychological safety
- CQ-powered cognitive diversity
- Reflective practice
- A great manager
Psychological safety
Psychological safety as a concept has been around a lot longer than you think. It was first talked about in the 1960’s and a brief resurgence in the 1990’s, but it wasn’t really until the COVID pandemic that it became part of our everyday vocabulary.
Be kind, be nice and don’t argue – this is not at all what psychological safety is. It is in fact, creating a context in which we can argue, experiment and fail and express ourselves authentically. In a psychologically safe team, innovation comes naturally because mistakes are treated as learning and opportunities for growth.
Overcoming disruption, building accountability
It doesn’t remove accountability or responsibility for them, it doesn’t mean that we tolerate incompetency or lack of capability. And it doesn’t mean that we ignore difficult or disruptive behavior.
Psychological safety means encouraging disagreement, normalizing different perspectives and views and having tools to work through those discussions. We don’t have to compromise, but we do need to find a way to accept the outcomes even if we don’t agree with them.
It means that each person trusts that they are valued and respected as individuals and as contributors. The team has a default position that each member’s intentions are collaborative and that each is working towards the same shared goal in transparency and authenticity.
Inclusion through psychological safety
And the key factor for inclusion is that I can share or not share as much about myself as I want. I have agency in revealing my personal life – and even if I do choose to share, it won’t change my value to the team or the respect I deserve.
Google’s project Aristotle set out with the goal of finding what common factor their most productive and profitable teams shared. Across every function, the single common factor was high levels of psychological safety. Where teams were comfortable with their colleagues, where they could argue without jeopardizing relationships, challenge their leaders, teams performed. The opposite was also true. Teams which lacked psychological safety were very familiar to the HR team – teams on life support, teams with high turnover and attrition, teams which consistently failed to achieve targets.
CQ-powered cognitive diversity
The more observant readers will have noticed the word ‘multicultural’ in the title of this article and will also have noticed that we haven’t yet talked about culture.
And that’s deliberate. Because every team is multicultural. Without exception.
You don’t work with clones – everyone of us has slightly different values and experiences. We have unique personalities. And that combination means that we bring a slightly different style and perspective to our work.
When you put 10 strangers in a room and tell them to work on a common process, they first need to work out some of the basic rules of the group – they actively co-create a cultural style for the team.
Co-creating culture
And that involves some negotiation. Some want to get straight down to the work; others want to spend time getting to know each other. Some want to define a specific detailed process; others want to be more spontaneous… This is happening all the time in every team already.
And that’s why in our aspirational high performing team, cultural intelligence is essential. We need to be aware of the different styles each of the members of the group and understand what their values are. Identifying the cultural profile of the team as a whole is a great way to do that.
The contentious statement, ‘if it can’t be measured it can’t be improved’ is certainly true for culture. When you measure your culture, when you can deep dive into how your team is managing those differences – have they become a blocker preventing collaboration? Or have you managed to harness them into innovation, creativity and performance?
The power of difference
Because in the team that we are creating, we will have different people, perspectives and ways of doing things. And we all need to push ourselves out of our comfort zones, adapt our way of doing things and move into growth. And as we reveal the team culture, we can start to target skills development into the places which will add most impact.
Matthew Syed, in his book, ‘Rebel Ideas’ talks about the value of cognitive diversity – the idea that the more difference you have in a team, the better able the team is to solve the challenges it faces. But this is only true when the team is united by cultural-intelligence powered skills – where there is an understanding of difference as standard and the need to adapt is default.
Cultural difference needs to be part of the team lexicon, included in conversations and discussions. When culture is made explicit, it’s no longer frightening or a barrier – we can see it for what it really is: a valuable commodity that helps us align our values to a global market and a global customer base within a global organization.
Reflective Practice
Psychological safety and cultural intelligence don’t happen by themselves. Psychological safety gives you the space and context to experiment; cultural intelligence gives you the tools to conduct the experiment. But if you don’t learn from your experiments then you add nothing to the team.
That’s why formal reflective practice is so important. Part of our daily conversations, weekly meetings and one-to-ones must be set aside for reflection. Not navel-gazing, blame assigning and criticizing. But learning – and learning not just from mistakes or things that didn’t go to plan, but from the successes as well.
This should apply to the small interactions as well as the big decisions. When a meeting goes well, reflect on what made the communication gel in ways it hasn’t before. When a disagreement results in a great idea that everyone can buy into, ask yourself how you got to that point? When you completely misunderstand the tone and meaning of an email initially, go back and identify how you could make sure it doesn’t happen again.
A difficult message
And here’s something you may not want to hear, but you need to hear it (read it!): you need to write the reflections down – preferably on paper, and not digitally. The physical act of writing down learning greatly aids retention and activation of learning.
You can use a very simple model, such as the What/So what/What now method:
- What: a description of facts and objective truth without analysis or judgement. This helps to agree outcomes as well as processes
- So, what: what makes this interesting? What was the outcome? What were the factors influencing the outcome? What could have been done differently or improved?
- What now: What are you going to do about it? What have you learned? What do you still need to learn?
A reflection can take five minutes for something simple or a couple of days for a major project, but there is ALWAYS something you can learn from your interactions with others.
A great manager
And to come full circle, a high performing team – a high performing multicultural team – need a great, culturally intelligent manager. A team without a manager is a group of loose disconnected individuals. The manager provides the connection horizontally and vertically within the team.
That’s not to say they are the conduit, but they are the enabler that boosts and gives life to the interactions. They unite the communication with a common theme and motivation, providing structure and shared belonging. And a manager is the primary cultural interpreter and director.
Intentionally creating team culture
After all, your team has a culture whether you actively shape it or not, so best to do it intentionally and in alignment with your objectives. The manager needs to be able to pick apart the cultural preferences of team members and create a team culture that takes the best of all, without dulling the sharpness of the cognitive diversity. That requires a whole new level of cultural intelligence.
It requires empathy, agility and patience. The manager will need not just listening and team building skills, but they will be a mediator and arbiter. They will have to coach and mentor the team, cascading cultural intelligence throughout each member.
High performance is not something that happens accidentally and it’s unlikely to stick around if it’s not actively maintained. To ensure that high performance is sustainable, each member of the team has a responsibility to power up with cultural intelligence. Not only will they get the best out of themselves, but they’ll also learn to adapt to combine with colleagues to achieve even more.
Measuring success
And how will you know you have a high performing team?
Even if you can’t access the data immediately, a high performing team is a noisy team, where disagreements are common, where passion is high and where enthusiasm to achieve is almost visible. It will probably be a happy team, with high engagement and belonging. But you’ll notice it most when someone new joins the team – the new joiner will be welcomed, challenged and enthused to achieve as well.
In an age of marginal gains, ignoring the resources you already have is a recipe to underperformance, disillusionment and failure. Psychological safety, CQ-powered cognitive diversity, reflective practice are free – there is no direct cost associated with them. And if you need to invest in helping a manager move from good to amazing, that’s a worthwhile investment, which will bring measurable return quickly.
Aristotle defined a team as a ‘whole, greater that then sum of its parts.’ A high performing team is the living representation of that. Each part is aware of its difference from the others but has learned how to leverage that in a way that enhances each part and the whole.
With more than 30 years of experience supporting over one million people globally, we are committed to driving meaningful change. Start your free trial today to access Worldprism and more training programmes.
Alternatively, fill in our form below and we'll be in touch:
Comments