Team Orienteering

High performing teams spend a significant amount of time orienting themselves. As they work toward their goals the team will periodically check in to see how well they are performing. When teams take the time to stop to reorient themselves, and re-examine their assumptions against the their end result, they often become energized by seeing their progress. This opens up the possibility of new and vital conversations.

Reorienting removes slack, identifies necessary course corrections, creates multiple opportunities for feedback, and eliminates waste. The work involves three keys to high performance that naturally reside under the orientation stage of the team's journey.

The Keys We identify three critical key to resolving Team Orientation.

Purpose - The reason we exist as a team. The team purpose is not as fixed as we think it might be. As we all know, things happen. Purpose helps each member answer the question Why am I on this team? Team members aspire as the team's purpose inspires. Stated well, and understood by all, the purpose becomes a statement of the collaborative effort of the team.

Team Identity - one of the paradoxes of group life is willingly giving up some of our self to fully contribute to the team. Resolving this paradox is continuous. Purpose helps to keep the reason for our efforts before us. Teams do have very real identities. The more confident team members become and the more they move toward high performance, the easier it becomes to see them identify their work with their team.

Membership - Individuals make up teams but the sum of the individual efforts does come close to what teams can accomplish. Membership is that feeling of connectedness to the other team members and the incredible joy that comes from accomplishing the extraordinary together. Membership is the glue that great teams create.

Reorienting doesn't need to take long. It's a bit counterintuitive. Team leadership is about heating up team membership. Peter Drucker once quipped: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." Believe it.