Best Loser Wins

You’ve probably heard the phrase High Performance Team a lot. It’s an overused phrase that gets thrown around, often in a context that should invite scepticism and mostly in a way that is neither useful nor informative.

But if you are interested in teams, the competitive advantage they can gain your business and how teams develop then reflecting on the idea of a high-performance team is useful.

Performance is Always Relative

Firstly, whether something is high performing or not is relative to a metric or reference point. Performance can be relative to expectation – yours or the company’s. It could be relative to a target or goal or the performance of your opposition. Or your reference metrics could be internally orientated to the quality and consistency of key team behaviours such as feedback or accountability. Numerically, high performance should exceed the average – probably by at least x2 standard deviations, which in turn necessitates the ability to quantify the average! My point is that the term lacks meaningful precision and that matters. You might reach all your targets but if they were so easily achieved it tells you little about what numbers you might have hit or your actual potential. You might be winning because of all round excellence or because you are the only player on the pitch.

Higher Performance

Rather than talking about high performance teams it’s more useful to think about higher performance teams. Higher performance is a journey to exceed what we are currently capable of, to strive to achieve more tomorrow than we did today.  Renowned athletic coach Frank Dick put it very well;

Winning is being better today than you were yesterday…everyday

and this rather brilliant little interview clip from him encapsulates the whole idea. Performance in this context is focused inward (crucially, on what you actually control). What might also be teased out of this is the idea that the best loser wins.

Best Loser Wins

In the arena, teamwork is continually challenged by friction. It could be the internal dynamics of the team, your relationships, communication or ability to decide and act in a timely, effective way. It could be the headwinds of external competition or the vagaries of a shifting legal framework or macro-economic environment. All of which is to remind that competition is messy and riven with setbacks. Remember that Roger Federer, the most dominant tennis player of his generation, who won around 80% of his 1,526 singles matches won only 54% of the total points he played. Winning and losing are all part of the same game but for higher performance Nelson Mandela’s quote is a guide;

I never lose. I only win or I learn.

So What?

If you’re serious about team performance, don’t focus on the likely abstraction of being a high-performance team. Focus on the day-to-day work of being a higher performing team. Learning and adapting in the pursuit of excellence; and if you are curious to know how we can work with you to build and develop higher performing teams, let’s talk.