How to prevent teams from failing

Companies do not fail because their products are inadequate, the competition is too strong, or their employees are lazy. Companies fail due to the inability of the decision-makers at the top to get along.

After analysing a PrinciplesUs assessment of a leadership team at a company facing 

financial distress, I became painfully aware of something: For all the professionalism and strategies and processes, PERSONALITY determines all things of significance in business. Characters are like poles of a magnet: Some attract and create value, while others repel and run into destructive conflict.

This is the process by which business value is destroyed: a clash of personalities within teams leads to unresolvable conflicts. Consequently, the team stagnates and fails to resolve outstanding tasks. The team wastes its energy, the company's resources, and time engaging in conflicts and searching for strategies to affirm their egos and assert personal preferences.

But the truth is that when the conflict has become chronic, the team itself can do little to get out of it. The team finds itself ensnared in the conflict and requires restructuring. This article describes how a manager can develop a high-performance team based on leadership archetypes that complement each other instead of fighting or silently sabotaging each other.

Long before the Slack messages and emails turn passive-aggressive,

Communication problems in the team

First of all, it helps to take a step outside the team.

From an external perspective, all teams always have the same two tasks. 1. to understand and solve the task at hand, such as completing a project or making a decision. And 2. to coordinate themselves.

Next, we look at the distribution of weekly working hours.

If the working time for each team is more or less constant, let's say between 40 and 50 hours per week, then this time is typically divided up like this:

• 60%–80% of the time goes to actual task solving in well-organized teams.
• Coordination consumes 20-40% of the time, and for more extensive teams or complex tasks, this proportion can rise to 50%.

So if a team is poorly coordinated, it needs more time for coordination and has less time for the actual task solution. It is then unable to achieve its goals. As a result, individual team members become frustrated and express their feelings, which leads to further friction.

This sets off a downward spiral.

This can only be stopped and reversed if the axe is laid at the root of the conflict.

People form high-performance teams

What exactly makes high-performance teams? Project Aristotle at Google has produced an excellent summary, which you can read in 20 minutes.

The key question is: What is the secret superpower of successful managers? How do they put together top teams? A team is only as powerful as its weakest member.

Often, the team's growth or downward momentum hinges on its composition. It is crucial not just to look at one person but to consider the right team and how the team members work together. We conduct the analysis along these dimensions.

1. Technical competence: Does the team have the necessary experience and skills for the task at hand? A perfect match of requirements and skills is often not feasible for difficult, complex tasks. It is then more advantageous to use a combination of "we've already done it" and "we're still learning the rest". Diversity and different experiences are an advantage for particularly complex tasks.

2. Knowledge of and respect for others: The strength of a team comes from a combination of knowledge and experience. The individual does not need to know everything. They just need to know whom to ask. This is the "transactional team memory", but the team must communicate in a balanced way and bridge social or cultural differences. Respect for differences or even sympathy are enormously helpful here.

3. Structure and leadership quality: A high-performance team finds a structure that fits the task and makes optimal use of the personality, experience, and skills of individuals. If the team cannot find a suitable structure, it is often easier for a leader to assert themselves and define a functional structure. The task's structure and the team members' personalities and skills should guide the leader in this process.

4. Opportunities and risks: In the management of companies, risks are often not viewed positively. However, there is no team that is successful and ignores opportunities and risks. A team that has "blind spots" or aversions to opportunities or risks due to the combination of certain personality types will fail due to untapped opportunities or dangers that are not tackled in good time.

5. Ability to grow: A team is often not immediately at its maximum potential at the beginning. Every team has to go through the usual phases (storming, norming, forming, and performing). High-performance teams reach the performing phase more quickly and can analyze why goals are achieved or missed. It is essential to celebrate successes. However, openly and honestly naming and admitting mistakes and defeats is equally important, as these mistakes provide the best opportunities for learning. Only teams that are able to do this can become high-performance teams.

How do you determine whether you have a high-performance team?

You can have the team rated on a five-point scale for each of the five dimensions. A top team achieves 4 or 5 points on each dimension. Each dimension is a killer criterion: if the team cannot achieve at least a three, then the team is not working and needs to be reorganized.

Replace individual team members with those who are more suitable. We will now explain how to find them.

How harmony of characters is created

Many individuals in teams with demanding tasks, such as boards, claim a leadership role.

However, if a board or executive team spends too much time trying to figure out who is assertive and who is in charge, it will not be successful. This has serious consequences for the company: Decisions are made sub-optimally, projects for growth are delayed, operational excellence suffers, and strategies are not implemented.

This phenomenon is caused by the inertia that arises from the harmony among the team members' characters.

Every person has specific ways of thinking, values, beliefs, and habits that shape how they feel, decide, and act, and by which we define a person's character. People often assert that there are no inherently good or bad characters.

In practice, however, it feels different.

We know that some people work well with certain personalities but run into conflict with others. This is also easy to explain: If two people share the same values, then this can lead to synergies or positive inertia. But if two team members simultaneously claim team leadership, this inevitably leads to conflict or negative inertia.

People are different. And that's fundamentally an often overlooked thing.

If team members know their personality and how it affects others and at the same time understand how it affects the other people in the team, then they can form a high-performance team.

But how can we optimally combine characters?

There are various data-based methods for identifying and measuring personalities: Big Five, Myers-Briggs, EPQ by Eysenck, 16 Personalities, etc. PrinciplesYou is currently the best on the market due to its free nature, design for industry purposes, and ability to combine personalities.

PrinciplesYou generate a profile of 28 archetypes: We identify one most likely archetype for a person (shown here on the islands), two likely archetypes for each team member, and two less likely ones. This profile is well illustrated, gives indications of strengths and weaknesses in three aspects (thinking, implementing, and interacting), and can be reflected on by everyone for themselves.

But it gets really interesting when you look at which personalities you can or cannot work with.

Synergetic personalities

Different combinations of personalities work well together spontaneously or run directly into conflict. Other combinations need to be actively managed (e.g., through a clear structure and responsibilities) in order to be creative and productive or to recognize "blind spots" (e.g., for opportunities and risks or operational execution).

This results in four areas.

• Certain personalities naturally complement each other, creating strong synergies. They do not need additional structures but understand each other blindly.
• Creative tensions occur when certain personalities are in a natural state of tension; however, they can be productive if the situation is managed effectively, such as by establishing clear responsibilities.
• The risk of conflict arises when different characters encounter disagreements due to their varying values and perspectives. The severity of the conflict changes when individuals recognize and respect this fact.
• Blind spots occur when certain combinations of characters fail to take into account or overlook certain aspects.

This illustration provides examples of the combinatorics of different personalities. For other combinations, we use the PrinciplesUs AI, which we developed in-house.

Developing a high-performance team

With the right tools and the necessary resources, any manager can develop their team into a top one. Here are the key points summarized once again:

• Minimize the time it takes to coordinate the team. Reduce the time it takes for a team to actually perform. Put teams together so that they can perform.
• Measure and quantify. Scoring systems and quantitative methods provide orientation for the growth process and are better accepted by managers.
• Record the different characters systematically. Give time and space for reflection. Analyze the combinatorics of personalities.
• Act decisively and do not hesitate. Give high-performance teams what they need: Resources, decision-making authority, and "head space." Reconfigure teams if they are not growing and spend too much time coordinating and resolving conflicts.

European cultures often mistakenly equate team performance with the "absence of tension". However, conflicts and creative tensions in particular are, alongside natural synergies, THE growth opportunities for a team and should not be avoided but rather reflected upon. Respect and diversity have a catalytic effect here.

To be clear: team members don't have to be friends. Don't confuse likeability with performance. Teams must be successful.

Even if this necessitates a power play by a team leader or an outsider, it's necessary. Because sometimes that's the only way to get to the root of a dysfunctional conflict.