Team Excellence, Revisited

Back in August 24, 2006, I uploaded a post titled, "What Makes an Excellent Team?" in which delineated his six benchmarks that enable team excellence, according to Jesse Stoner, Ed.D. in his work called Benchmarks of Team Excellence:

1. Alignment - whereby team members share a common vision or purpose for the team's existence.
2. Processes - whereby the policies and procedures enable team members to coordinate their efforts smoothly and effectively (Stoner calls this Team Effectiveness, but I like using the term 'Processes' better as it's more about the infrastructure that required than the outcome resulting from it).
3. Empowerment - whereby team members feel authorized to do what's necessary to get the job done, and supported in their efforts in doing so.
4. Passion - whereby each member brings a high level of enthusiasm, energy, excitement, excellence, and confidence to the group.
5. Commitment - whereby each member feels a deep commitment to purpose of the team ... and to each other.
6. Standards - whereby the group purposefully raises the level of performance above and beyond what is necessary. (Stoner calls this Results.)

The day prior, I also referenced Stoner's work with respect to his five levels of team performance:

1. Excellence - Teams at this level produce consistently outstanding results. Meetings tend to be more about the future than on today's crises. Conflict is handled openly and directly.
2. Effective - Teams at this level produce consistently good results. Team member passion and energy is noticeably lower, though, and they sometimes fail to communicate with each other as proactively as they might.
3. Typical - Teams at this level produce good, sometimes even outstanding, results, but tend to do so inconsistently. Team members often do not understand the team's mission, how their goals align with that mission, or how their goals relate to other team member goals. As such, they're typically more focused on performing their own roles and responsibilities than they are on team performance.
4. Unfocused - Teams at this level tend not to function well at all. While the work often gets done, it is not through any coordinated effort, unless the group leader directly manages that coordination. Individual team members have very little commitment to the team.
5. Unconnected - Teams at this level are not really teams at all; they are just collections of individuals doing their work with little interest in, concern for, each other.

In the intervening two years, I've come to realize that it's not so much about where a team is, developmentally-speaking, at any point in time, as much as it's about where the team is currently headed.

Some times it takes time. But once everyone (most everyone) starts pulling in the same direction rapid improvements are possible in both the benchmarks realized and the level of team performance achieved.