At Capacity Group, we work often with top leadership teams to help them improve engagement, decision making, and overall team performance. While there are many aspects of teaming to consider and diagnose in order to determine how to elevate performance, one that stands out to us these days is around team energy.
Team energy or vitality is an important aspect that contributes to team performance. It has a reciprocal impact: when it is low, it continues to reinforce a low level of performance, and the opposite is true as well. To see this in practice, watch a sports team during a game. It’s possible to perceive (by both seeing and feeling) the energy on the field between players, and notice how it affects their performance, both individually and collectively. In business teams, vitality is rooted in the capacities, abilities, and related energies available to team members to tackle the challenges and discussions that are central to their work. Team vitality is evidenced in the team’s dialog quality, decision-making effectiveness, and overall cohesion and relationships. Over time, vitality can also be witnessed in the resilience of the team as a whole and its individual members.
If you notice your team’s energy is waning, or you are unsure of your team’s vitality, consider checking a few of the factors we commonly see that drain teams:
- Stress that goes unmanaged or unaddressed
- Poor decision clarity (unclear rights, process, poor data)
- Low decision pace (not making decisions in a timely fashion)
- Low trust, low relationship quality
- Skill gaps in collaboration, dialog, and candor
- Lack of meeting discipline and efficiency
- Missing or low-value team purpose (team meanders through discussion topics)
Maintaining team vitality relies on core factors such as a solid team purpose and levels of trust and care, as well as other elements like meeting design and decision framing. If you want some help with your team’s performance or vitality, reach out, we are happy to help.