Peak Team Performance: How to Align Team Goals and Norms

In this Team Psychology series, I previously highlighted the importance of teams building shared purpose, trust, and psychological safety for exceptional teamwork. But these elements alone do not guarantee peak performance. This article zeroes in on the crucial alignment of team goals and norms. Team research consistently reveals that aligning team goals and norms is essential for outstanding results. Just as precise wheel alignment is key to a car's optimal performance, aligning team members' roles with goals and norms is critical to reducing friction and maximising performance.

I recall consulting to a team who meticulously planned their meetings but were making sluggish progress on critical projects. After guiding them through a review of their processes they discovered only a fraction of their activities aligned with their team goals. This discovery led to a pivotal restructuring of their meeting formats and responsibilities to better align with the team’s goals. The team leader shared this significantly enhanced their productivity and slashed time spent on non-essential tasks.

Team Alignment Strategies

To bolster team alignment, I have identified the following pivotal strategies:

• Role Clarity: Crafting team roles with the precision of a tailor designing a suit, to ensure each role fits the team's objectives.

• Strengths-Based Role Assignment: Leveraging individual strengths in role assignments, the way you would cast actors in roles that highlight their best performances.

• Robust Accountability Systems: Using reliable accountability mechanisms to ensure each member keeps track of and fulfils their commitments, much like a safety net prevents a falling acrobat from harm.

• Task Alignment Checks: Regular check-ins to ensure tasks align with team goals, akin to a gardener pruning a tree to foster optimal growth.

• Milestone Tracking: Setting and tracking milestones towards goals, like setting checkpoints during a voyage to gauge progress toward the destination.
  

These strategies enable teams to establish processes that make the most of their capabilities, time and resources. However, effective team processes, such as customised meeting formats and collaboration norms, can be easily overlooked. A case in point involved a team leader who sought my assistance to address her team’s collaboration struggles. We identified a crucial lack of clarity when they needed to collaborate in-person versus on-line. With an agreed process in place, the team significantly streamlined their decision-making and collaboration.

Teams that excel have aligned processes that support well-defined goals.

The advantages of having well-defined team goals include:

• Meaningful Team Roles: All members know how they contribute to the team’s goals, preventing the feeling of being a mere cog in a machine.

• Directional Guidance: A roadmap for the team’s efforts, akin to a map guiding a traveller.

• Accountability and Ownership: Reduces the 'not my job' syndrome by fostering a culture of ownership.

• Progress Tracking: Monitoring achievements and identifying obstacles, like keeping score in a game.

• Organisational Alignment: Ensures team decisions are in sync with the organisation’s objectives, which prevents isolated actions.
  

The team needs to co-create their goals for them to be effective. While some teams, such as a design team, may believe it is harder for them to set tangible goals compared to a sales team, experience shows this is not the case.  For example, a sales team may have a goal to sell a certain number of products each quarter, whereas a design team can set a goal of meeting bi-monthly to resolve design issues.

For team goals to be useful they need to be:

1. Specific and realistic – everyone understands the goal and it involves a realistic level of challenge

2. Measurable with a timeline – everyone can track progress and deadlines

3. Important and relevant – the goal results in meaningful outcomes for the team, stakeholders and clients

Co-creating Your Team Norms

Equally important is the establishment of team norms—the shared behaviours and aspirations that guide team interactions. Without explicit discussions and agreements on norms, members can end up operating with differing assumptions, potentially leading to misalignment and conflicts. This why it is also important for the team to co-create their norms.

A practical approach to establishing norms involves every team member sharing their best team experiences and their hopes and concerns for the current team. These insights are used to shape agreed-upon norms. A team I worked with identified a shared concern, that their workload would not be fairly distributed across the team. By proactively discussing this concern, they established the norm to regularly check how work was allocated within the team.

Team leaders play a crucial role in establishing goals and norms.

Leaders must create an environment of trust and psychological safety that allows all team members to contribute to creating the goals and norms. Tips and strategies for this are covered in my article Trust, Psychological Safety and Accountability: The Blueprint for High-Performing Teams. Engaging an experienced team coach can also help navigate the subtle dynamics and unspoken concerns that emerge when establishing goals and norms.

Once established, the team collectively holds the responsibility to reinforce their goals and norms during meetings, collaborative tasks, and progress reviews. A simple yet effective practice involves the team regularly reflecting on and discussing its progress towards goals and norms.

In summary, teams that set clear goals and establish agreed norms not only set themselves up for success but also position themselves to outperform teams who neglect these key elements. Consider how these strategies can realign your team for peak performance. Next in this Team Psychology series, I delve into how to enhance team communication and inclusion to maximise.

References:

Boult, M. (2024). Team Trust, Psychological Safety and Accountability: The Blueprint for High-Performing Teams. https://www.boultpsychology.com/post/team-trust-psychological-safety-and-accountability-the-blueprint-for-high-performing-teams

Boult, M (2024). The Power of Purpose: How Team Purpose Transforms Performance. https://www.boultpsychology.com/post/the-power-of-purpose-how-team-purpose-transforms-performance

Mathieu, J., Maynard, M. T., Rapp, T., & Gilson, L. (2008). Team Effectiveness 1997-2007: A Review of Recent Advancements and a Glimpse Into the Future. Journal of Management, 34(3), 410-476. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308316061

Shapiro, M. (2015). HBR Guide to Leading Teams.  Harvard Business Review Press.