How to Build a High Performance Team
in Banking
Chris Droussiotis
2013
Building a High Performance Team
Executive Summary:
 High-performing teams can provide businesses with a significant
competitive advantage and function as an engine of innovation within
the organization.
 Building and sustaining such a team requires strong leadership
capabilities, good communication skills and a willingness to foster an
environment of collaboration and openness.
 The payoffs associated with high-performing teams results to
significantly higher ROI, greater productivity and higher retention rates
of key employees.
Leading a Developing Team's Relationship
It starts with the leader
Behind every great team is a strong and visionary
leader. A leader whose job is not to control, but to
teach, encourage, and organize when necessary.
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Bonding
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Building Trust
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Confidence
Manage performance problems
Make yourself available to the group when they need you
Communicating
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Set shared goals to establish a common purpose and vision to unify the team.
Provide team activities other than working on the task at hand
Establish more familiarity as a group by creating fun traditions for the team to participate.
Constant communication about goals, tasks and the team mission are important.
Don't limit communication to work-related goals; seek feedback and input on the team's developing
relationship.
Develop the team needs, clear expectations, defined roles, and specific responsibilities.
Managing Conflict
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Established teams know the strengths and weaknesses of each participant
The leader must step up to manage conflicts as early in the process as possible
Active conflict management by the leader requires much more hands-on management in the early stages.
Introduction: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts
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Effective decision-making
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Conflict resolution practices that focus
on positive outcomes
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Skill at recognizing and correcting
errors
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Culture of mutual support
Building a High Performance Team
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Cultivating Peak Performance
– A well-oiled and disciplined team, one in which the whole is greater than
the sum of its parts allows members to achieve results far beyond their
individual abilities.
– Building a high performance team takes a lot of hard work and skill, to
blend the different personalities, abilities, and agendas into a cohesive
unit willing to work for a common goal.
Define the need.
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Define the need. As a leader, you must establish the broad, compelling purpose for
the team. What is the large, desired outcome? What do you want to improve?
Eliminate? Change? Don't be afraid to dream big. But resist the temptation to
handcuff the team by writing a detailed prescription in advance of the diagnosis. Your
vision, properly articulated, will be the engine that drives and inspires your team. It
will determine who should be on the team, what resources are needed, how quickly a
conclusion must be reached, what falls within the scope of the team, and how
success will be measured and rewarded.
Recruit the right people
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Recruit the right people. Now you have to find the talent that is willing to commit to
your vision with missionary-like zeal. Choose members who represent a wide range
of backgrounds, skills and abilities. Try to limit participation to three to seven
members. Any more and each individual's contribution will be compromised.
Also look to imbue your team with a wide mix of cultural and professional viewpoints.
Such diversity should give life to ideas and opinions that might not otherwise have
been aired.
Shared values
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Not only must team members embrace your mission, they must share your values.
Effective teams demand close collaboration, trust, honesty, passion, and genuine
appreciation for each member's contributions. You don't want somebody that has a
different work ethic, moral compass or commitment than you do. To develop that
value system, challenge the team to read books, give them magazine articles, watch
movies - anything that might challenge their conventional thinking.
Develop Common Goals
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Develop common goals. A high performance team thrives in an environment where they can
unite behind a common and compelling purpose - a cause everyone can understand, identify with,
and commit to. Ideally, these goals should be developed by the team members themselves; this
tends to create ownership, buy-in and commitment. Goals should be formalised through a written
charter - an agreement that clearly states what the team wants to accomplish, why its goals are
important and how the team will work together to achieve the desired outcome. Consider an offsite retreat, free from the routine pressures of the office, to set the goals. Such an event has the
added benefit of injecting a spirit of camaraderie among the team members.
Set ground rules
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Set ground rules. Make sure team members understand why the team exists and
know the roles each member plays. They need to know how decisions will be made,
how to deal with conflict, how to communicate, and how results will be measured. The
success of the team depends upon creating an environment in which team members
openly contribute ideas while recognizing and respecting the differences in others.
Above all, they need to understand how long their commitment will last.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
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If a statement of purpose is the engine that drives the team, communication is the oil
that keeps the engine well lubricated. Fail to lubricate the engine and it will lock up.
So, too, will the team fail without effective communication. Your job is to ensure that
team members communicate openly and honestly, refrain from personal assaults,
and stay focused on the task. Communication is more than talking; it's about listening
intently, and asking questions to get clarification.
As Stephen Covey relates in his bestseller Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,
"Seek first to understand, then to be understood." Face-to-face meetings work best in
a team environment, supplemented by telephone, e-mail and faxes. It's a good idea
to circulate meeting minutes to track progress and keep others in the company
informed of the team's progress.
Promote curiosity
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Curiosity and the search for new solutions, fuels every great group. Members don't
just solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that serves as its
own reward. But they also have another quality that allows them both to identify
significant problems and to find creative, boundary-busting solutions rather than
simplistic ones: they have hungry, eager minds.
Establish Urgency
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Establish urgency. Virtually every great group defines itself in terms of an enemy.
Sometimes the enemy is real, such as a budget cut or a hostile takeover. Often the
threat is more arbitrary, such as self-imposed deadlines. Tell the group it is up
against tremendous odds and watch the wily resourcefulness kick into high gear.
Keep score
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A team can't perform if it doesn't know what it's doing. But that's not enough. There
must be a commitment to constant improvement. To accomplish that, you have to
measure performance. Don't wait until the end of the season to address performance.
Feedback should be immediate. Practice openbook management and make sure
team members have those numbers that are important to them in tracking their
success.
Reward
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Reward. Even though their contributions may not be exactly equal, it's
important to recognise the team's efforts. Acknowledge individual
achievement during group meetings and compliment the team as a whole on
working well together. Highlight interim successes with a team lunch or food
brought into a meeting. Such mini-celebrations are a great morale booster.
People repeat performance that garners reward and recognition. When you
focus on the positive, you develop the habit of doing things right.
Back Off
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If you've implemented the above steps correctly, then get out of the way. As the
leader, your role will change over the life of the team. In the beginning, you may have
spent a lot of time developing the mission, identifying what the team was setting out
to accomplish, and, more importantly, helping develop interpersonal and group skills
such as conflict resolution and meeting management.
Now comes the time to let go and let the team become performers and the leaders.
Trust the team process, even if you think you know better. Nothing undermines a
team faster than for their moves to be trumped. Teams must be empowered to
achieve the results, without fear of being overridden by the top floor.
Team-Based Compensation Vs. Individual
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Team Compensation Overview
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Team compensation is typically used when teamwork is mission critical.
These teams are judged corporately as to speed and accuracy.
The compensation of the group is typically scaled in percentages of the maximum pay scale depending on when or how well the team completes
the task. Individual Compensation Overview
Individual Compensation Overview
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Every employee is typically measured and compensated based on his contribution to the team.
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Team Compensation Advantages
In team compensation, employees may perform better in hopes of not letting down the team. This is especially so in project-based jobs
which require every team member to complete a task before the rest of the team can advance to the next stage of work. Information is
shared more freely when teams are reviewed and compensated as a group because the incentive to withhold information for personal
gain is reduced. A 2010 study by University of California, Santa Barbara, states workers will try to perform in a way may make them
"willing to make sacrifices for teammates ("take one for the team") that they would not otherwise make."
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Individual Compensation Advantages
Individual compensation pays specifically based on individual performance regardless of team performance. This provides more pay to
higher-achieving employees and less pay to lower-achieving ones. It allows for competition among employees for prestige and pay which
provides a strong incentive to perform. It also avoids punishing employees based on the poor performance of fellow team members,
resulting in better morale for the individuals. This compensation may also seem more personal, especially to higher-performing
employees.
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Team Compensation Disadvantages
Team compensation can lead to individual employees carrying too much burden and others being compensated for poor performance.
Arguments among the team in these cases may diminish morale and harm the quality of the deliverable. Power struggles for credit when
a task goes well or blame when it goes poorly can arise in a group compensation model.
Individual Compensation Disadvantages
Individual compensation can breed unethical competition as in commission sales when staff members fight over a customer or a sale.
Employees posturing for a better positions or rankings at the exclusion of teamwork can come from this method. Information and work
techniques may pool with motivated employees to the exclusion of those who need to be trained.
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Team-Based Compensation Vs. Individual
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Team Compensation Overview
– Team compensation is typically used when teamwork is mission critical.
– These teams are judged corporately as to speed and accuracy.
– The compensation of the group is typically scaled in percentages of the maximum pay scale
depending on when or how well the team completes the task. Individual Compensation
Overview
Team Vs. Individual Performance Appraisals
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Performance appraisals, whether team or individual, provide feedback to workers or organizational teams. Traditionally, performance
evaluations provide information to help improve performance, increase efficiency and define management's expectations. Performance
appraisals compare work performed against measurable objectives that the employee and supervisor agreed to at the beginning of the
appraisal period. As work has become more team oriented, performance appraisals now measure how a team of workers perform rather
than just how an individual performs his job.
Definition of Team Performance Appraisals
As jobs become more intricate, organizations must rely on teams of people to accomplish tasks. To evaluate job performance by teams of
people, organizations institute team performance appraisals. Team performance appraisals assess the performance of teamwork on
organizational performance. Team performance appraisals can range from recognition of individual performance and its contribution to
group outcomes to only an assessment of the organization's performance. When only an organization's performance is evaluated, no
individual appraisals are completed and individuals do not receive performance ratings.
Types of Team Performance Appraisals
The culture and organizational structure of the workplace environment influence the type of team performance appraisal best suited to
evaluate and measure performance. If work teams exist in the organization, but are used only occasionally to accomplish projects,
individual performance measurements are used to determine a final rating of the employee. When an organization uses teamwork more
frequently, performance appraisals still emphasize individual performance but introduce an assessment of the worker's contribution to the
team effort. If an organization uses a significant amount of teamwork to accomplish its objectives, team performance appraisals link team
productivity measurements with individual performance measurements. Organization's with only a team approach do not utilize individual
performance appraisals. Team performance measurements determine monetary rewards.
Elements of Individual Performance Appraisals
Individual performance appraisals are the traditional appraisals that measure individual performance against measurable objectives.
Individual performance appraisals provide an opportunity for employees and supervisors to share ideas and reach mutually agreed upon
objectives. Individual performance appraisals focus on the skills required to perform the current job and skills that must be acquired for
promotion. Individual performance evaluations are tools to determine monetary compensation. This type of performance appraisal
provides feedback and recognition to the individual.
Comparison of Individual and Team Performance Appraisals
Individual performance appraisals measure an employee's work against standard performance measures. Standard performance
measures are derived from individual job descriptions. Often, a direct link exists between performance and pay based on an employee's
job rating from the appraisal. Team performance appraisals assess an individual's contribution to the team. Team performance appraisals
are appropriate to support an organization's efforts to transition from an individual-based organization to an team-based organization.
Team performance appraisal, for example, assess whether the team met its goals, produced a quality product and worked well together.
Strategic Objectives in Performance Appraisals
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Improving Morale
Morale is an important factor in creating a productive workforce. According to the article "Performance Appraisal"
on the managerial resource Changing Minds, when performance appraisals are properly executed they can
improve company morale and create motivation for employees. By working with employees to identify the weak
points in their job performance and then helping to create a plan to combat that weakness, managers are setting a
tone with employees that can create a positive feeling toward the company and its goals. This is why it is a good
idea to emphasize the positive in performance reviews, and then turn negatives into positives by developing a
course of action to assist employee development.
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Budgeting Tool
According to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, a performance appraisal should be
used as an important budgeting tool for a business. Through the analysis of performance appraisals, the company
can determine which employees are due for a raise, and which employees are not. These considerations need to
be added to the following year's budget. Other performance appraisals may require the termination of employees,
and that causes two budgetary considerations to come into play. First of all, the money associated with having the
terminated employees is put back into the annual budget. However, there are also budget considerations for
replacing terminated employees as well. The company needs to decide if the employees will be replaced, and if
there would be a benefit in paying a higher salary to a more experience candidate, or if hiring a lower cost entrylevel employee will better serve the company's strategic goals.
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Set Goals
One of the important parts of strategic objectives is reaching company goals. These can be metrics established for
performance, or a percentage increase in revenue dollars. A performance evaluation should be a time for the
manager and employee to discuss the professional development of the employee, and establish strategic goals
that will be used to measure that development. The employee and manager can work together on the success of
the employee and raise the employee-manager relationship to a more effective working level.
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