More on High Performing Teams

Last month Prasoon posted thoughts on high performing teams - what is a high performing team, what are their foundational qualities and behaviors.

Here are few more thoughts on what can we do to create high performing teams:

• Focus on Team Composition:
  
  • Ability: Generally, IT project team staffer / manager focus on this well
  • Personality: Mostly ignored, but very critical to reach to high performing state. Right mix of Personality Types (Introvert vs. Extrovert, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, Judging vs. Perceiving) is required to complement each other.
  • Size: With Scrum, we have increased focus on not exceeding the optimal size. What about the minimum team size? Can I say a 2 members team (even if both are generalists) is optimally sized?
  • Diversity: Put all Java "gurus" on one project for 6 months and ask them to do pair programming. They may not literally fight, but will definitely get fed up and prefer to work individually!!! Diversity is key to gel the team and to establish trust and respect within the team
    
  • Roles: Leaderless team is hot these days... But, lets not mistaken it with team without any roles and responsibilities. A high performing team should have at least one or more people playing each of the following roles:
    

• Focus on sustaining and improving motivation level of teams. It's a well established fact that motivated team perform better.
  

Motivational Potential Score = [(SV+TI+TS)/3]*A*F
where,
SV= Skill Variety
TI= Task identity (is it ideal for me?)
TS= Task significance (does it make difference in organizational affairs)
A= Autonomy
F= Feedback

So, what should we be doing to increase motivation level of our teams? Thoughts?