Creating High Performing Teams and Organizations

The most effective organizations deliver with incredible pace and precision, with almost effortless coordination. They make it look easy. All the pieces work in unison towards a common goal. Every component has its purpose, which it knows with clarity. Each purpose supports the next. It’s almost as if high performing organizations are living beings. As a leader, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a map to creating high performing teams and organizations?

According to Yunus A. Çengel (2023), there is a unique difference between “life” and “living beings”. While his detailed analysis of life allows some comparisons that can be drawn to teams and organizations, it are the characteristics he defines of a living being that I believe provide a good roadmap for high performing teams. In this post I’m going to review Çengel’s work as it relates to your work as a leader.

This will be a bit longer piece than I usually write (but I think also more valuable)… so buckle up! 🙂

Read more: Creating High Performing Teams and Organizations

What Is Life

In his previous work, Çengel (2022) proposed the following definition for the phenomenon for life:

“Life is a supplemental set of laws and influences that act over a confined space which constitutes the domain of life, superimposed on the universal laws and forces of physics.”

Applying this definition to the concept of an organization or team, we can consider the laws and influences as being the purpose, leadership, and operating norms of a team (the confined space) which operate within the market or broader organization which defines the external “universal laws and forces” that the team needs to interact with to be successful.

At the detailed level, the 18 characteristics that Çengel (2023) defines for life don’t universally apply to organizations, but at the highest level I think we can still interpret his earlier definition to ground our analysis of the characteristics of living beings to our teams.

The Characteristics of Living Things

To distinguish between life and living things, Çengel (2023) provides a list of characteristics of living things which I think apply extremely well to high performing organizations:

1. Adaptability
2. Exploitation of Resources
3. Diversity
4. Unicity
5. Autonomy
6. Purposefulness
7. Division of Labour
8. Collaboration
9. Symbiosis
10. Growth
11. Reproduction
12. Capability for Self-Healing

While there are some shared characteristics between life and living things, it is specifically these characteristics of living things that I believe provide us with a great roadmap to create our own high performing teams and organizations.

Creating High Performing Teams and Organizations – A Roadmap

Let’s work our way through each of the characteristics of living things to see how they provide instruction to us as leaders in building and creatin our high performing team.

Adaptability

“Adaptable teams succeed more often than those that are rigid and unwilling to change.The world needs business leaders who are friendly toward change.”

(Alvarez, 2024)

Change is inevitable in life and in business, and high performing teams need to be flexible and embrace that change in order to continue to thrive and succeed. From my experience, adaptability in your team has to come in two ways:

1. Adaptability of the Team as a Whole – External Change

As the business environment changes, teams and organizations need to adapt to those changes. Changes in the broader organization, customer demand, enabling technologies, trends, environmental issues, industry transformation, and even global issues like pandemics will constantly affect your team and business.

Working together, the team or organization needs to be able to adjust its purpose, develop new products and services, change working norms and delivery approach, and even adapt the make-up of the team to continually adapt to the changes in the environment.

This is often manifested by a focus on diverse ideas, receptivity to new ideas, a learning environment and culture, and a willingness to innovate through trial and error. As a leader, it is our responsibility to build this culture and environment in our teams that creates safety through change, rather than allowing change to create fear.

A team that is resistant to the changes in the external business environment will stagnate and fall behind.

2. Adaptability of the Individuals in the Team – Internal Change

While the external change is where most leaders and teams focus, one of the more critical elements of adaptability is of the team members themselves. High performing teams and organizations tend to grow faster than the average, and that growth drives changes to roles, structures, and the internal needs of the team.

At the early stages of an organization or team, you’ll find that people play more generalist roles as you “storm” the purpose or project you’re taking on and develop the “norms” of your organization. As you begin to normalize, there will be a natural shift toward functions and experts who lead in the various roles and functions of the team.

That shift and evolution in high performing teams, however, will continue beyond the “norm” stage for high performing groups and the individuals on the team need to embrace constant change and a level of ambiguity in their roles and responsibilities. High performing teams are no place for team members who need well defined roles and expectations. They will regularly need to “play out of position” (Monkhouse, 2020), leveraging their skillsets in new ways to create the desired outcomes for the team.

Particularly under pressure and in teams who are most efficient, you will see team members routinely stepping in for their teammates when help is needed, filling gaps as they emerge, and volunteering for additional responsibility to help push the team forward.

This adaptability requires leaders to build a culture of trust, where it is safe to speak up, and where it is normal to bring your whole self to work. Hierarchy flattens and team members become personally invested in the success of both the team and each other when they feel safe and have trust in each other.

This internal adaptability also needs to survive changes in the players on the team, as your growth and success will necessitate the movement of people in and out of the team as the needs of the team and organization change. That change needs to be celebrated and seen as success rather than mourned for those that leave the group. Trust and safety are key here as well.

Stagnant team priorities and purpose, or structures, or teams who devolve in to specialties or who can’t embrace the evolution of the members of the team as priorities and needs change will stagnate and fall behind their competitors and peers. Red tape and process will overwhelm the outputs of the team. Job descriptions will become prescriptive constraints to growth.

Adapt or die.

Exploitation of Resources

MacGyver was a fun 1980’s TV Show starring Richard Anderson as Angus “Mac” MacGyver who’s quick wit and genius level intellect allowed him to escape from certain death in almost episode using only a paperclip, ball point pen, some duct tape, and his Swiss Army knife.

While resourcefulness is helpful, as a leader you need to recognize that your team needs more than a Swiss Army knife to be high performing. At the same time, unlimited resources can lead to waste and inefficiency because of the natural tendency of living things to exploit the resources they are given.

Your job as a leader is to ensure that your team has sufficient resources to achieve their goals, but not so many resources as to create complacency and waste. This can be a delicate balance to achieve, and requires the trust of your team to understand why you sometimes say no to their requests for new resources, or why you remove unproductive resources to strengthen the team.

Your team needs to believe that you will provide them with what’s necessary to be successful, but also be aware of the challenge to be creative and innovative to drive outcomes that exceed the sum of the inputs.

Don’t starve the team, but don’t overfeed it either.

Diversity

Unfortunately, diversity has become a charged topic again lately in business. The concept of encouraging diversity seems to have once again become a political topic rather than a simple performance discussion.

Let’s start by saying that diversity doesn’t mean specifically a focus on diversity of skin colour, race, gender or sexuality, religion, or any other physical characteristic of your team members. Diversity also means diversity of experience, skills, personalities, perspectives, and ideas (Cooks-Campbell, 2023). It just happens from my experience that if you focus on diversity in terms of these non-physical aspects of your team members that you are likely to wind up with a diverse “looking” group of people as well.

Not embracing and focusing on diversity can quickly create a uniform perspective and a lack of new ideas or challenges to the status quo. People with the same experiences and backgrounds often share the same outlooks on a problem or planning for the future. New ideas are lacking. Ethical questions don’t get challenged.

Part of building a high performing team needs to be the encouragement of open dialogue, differing opinions and ideas, and an ability to predict the potential changes and needs of the team for the future. That culture necessitates diversity and it has to be a cornerstone of your team building approach.

By focusing on bringing together people with different work and life experiences, who belong to different parts of your market and community, who have different skillsets and interests, and who have different ideas and personalities who can trust each other and feel safe to share their diversity with the group, you will multiply the new ideas and opportunities for exceptional team performance.

Bottom line – diversity drives performance.

Unicity

According to Oxford Languages, unicity is defined as being united as a whole, and of the quality of being unique.

There are two key components to that definition which both apply well to high performing teams and organizations:

1. Being United as a Whole

I just discussed the importance of diversity in your team and how it can drive new ideas and higher performance, but it is also critical for the team to be united in purpose and to operate as one unit when delivering outcomes.

Teams need to consider the diverse ideas and opinions that come forward, but then unite together around the purpose and priorities and drive toward them together.

Your team can not pursue everything all at once, and it is imperative to have alignment of the team around your priorities to drive performance. Everyone must embrace diverse ideas, then converge together on what to try and when.

As the Three Musketeers said, it’s all for one and one for all.

2. Being Unique

One of the key reasons that organizations and teams are successful is that they differentiate themselves from the competition in a way that is meaningful to their stakeholders or customers.

Even in a commodity market where there are multiple teams or squads in an organization that are responsible for similar things, or where you play in a market space that is considered commodity, there is a need to create your own unique identity to stand out from the crowd.

Often it is easiest to think about uniqueness in terms of marketing and how you brand or represent your team or organization. As a leader you need to be the one that leads the team to that identity, and you can use ideas like those presented by the Forbes Agency Council in their Leadership post, Defining What Makes A Business Unique.

Once defined, make sure your team aligns to that unique brand and personality together. Rally your team around the team brand.

If you can unite the team around their unique value proposition and brand, they will embrace, promote, and protect that identity in their work. By giving the team the ability to see themselves as unique and associating that uniqueness with high performance, they will strive to fulfill that promise in their work.

Autonomy

Many industries today operate at a speeds that limits the effectiveness of traditional scientific management approaches, rigorous processes and controls, or top down management approaches. Autonomy in teams has spawned from the Agile development methodology, and we are now seeing the concept of autonomy in organizations and teams happening right across the organization.

It’s important to recognize though what autonomy is and isn’t, however. Autonomy applied incorrectly creates confusion and lack of clarity and purpose. Done right, it drives exceptional performance and team engagement.

Smruti Patel (2021) offers a great view of how this autonomy fuels high performing teams by learning as a leader to delegate scope, leadership, and authority, while focusing on your key roles of providing sponsorship and support as well as the guardrails for the team.

Autonomy needs to mean something to be effective and it is foundational to building trust with your team. If your team sees that you trust them to set priorities and scope in their sprints, to lead and make decisions through their delivery, and to have the authority to make even some tough calls on their own, they will reciprocate that trust by not abusing their autonomy.

Employees thrive and engagement soars when they feel like they can control more of their work, the approaches they take, and the ways to solve even the big problems and challenges. Additionally, a strong diverse team that has unicity will work together to find innovative and creative solutions, while maintaining focus on the outcomes that they are all working toward.

As a leader you have two key roles in making sure autonomy is successful.

1. Sponsorship and Support

Not all parts of the organization will understand the idea of an autonomous team and their authority to make decisions and drive work. Not all customers will understand the autonomy of your organization and your trust in them to make the right calls.

There will inevitably be times where you are called upon to review the decisions of your team or on an escalation from another team or customer. It’s here where you need to shine.

Provided your team is working together to make the best decisions possible towards the common purpose and goal and within the guard rails you have set out, then you need to be the one to back them up, to defend and sponsor their hard work, and to support their decisions.

Not every decision will be right, whether it’s made by the team or centralized at the top, so you need to focus on whether decisions are being made for the right reasons rather than whether the outcomes of the decision is what was desired.

If you don’t provide the sponsorship and back up your team with the autonomy you have granted, you will quickly eliminate any trust you may have built and destroy the momentum of the team.

Publicly support. Privately review and coach. Never the other way around.

2. Set the Guard Rails

Autonomy doesn’t mean that the team can do whatever it wants in whatever order it pleases against whatever goals it feels are right. There needs to be a common understanding of the outcomes you’re trying to achieve together, the operating norms and risk appetite of the team and organization, and the level of decision making authority that lives in the team vs at the leadership level.

First, make sure the team has clear expectations around their work, the expected outcomes and deliverables, the high level priorities, and the key operating norms (risk appetite, work styles, etc) for the team. The team needs to be clear on what are the must-haves, the nice-to-haves, and the will-no-haves (out of scope) in the work to be able to self-organize.

Then, be there with the team to help them unblock constraints and challenges while allowing them to make the calls on how to proceed. I regularly join stand-up meetings and planning meetings to listen in, but I don’t speak up until I’m asked for help with a blocker. If the team asks for help with something I’ve delegated autonomy to them for I will remind them that it is their call and then leave it with them.

It’s easy to slip back into the role of decision maker and priority setter when you stay close to the work (which is also critical), but it’s vital to maintain your leadership role and protect, sponsor, and support the autonomy of the team to drive the work if you want to drive towards exceptional team performance.

Purposefulness

Purpose driven companies see higher growth than the competition and drives increased sense of purpose and employee engagement among team members (Brower, 2022). It also appears to be a pretty good driver of improved employee health.

Your team or organizational purpose ties closely with the unique brand we discussed earlier in the section on unicity. Your brand, identity, and purpose are tightly intertwined, and your ability to connect your team to that purpose is your key to unlocking higher performance.

Sometimes that purpose will come from a critical project, like a major acquisition or a major market shift resulting from a global or external market shift. Sometimes it will be driven by a BHAG (big hairy audacious goal) for the team or organization. Either way, it’s easy to connect your team to the purpose when that purpose directly improves the lives of your customers and where the benefits of success are large in scope.

But the purpose doesn’t need to be world-changing to drive engagement and performance. When there isn’t a major program underway, as a leader you still need to create a purpose for performance. Look at your priority outcomes and try to craft a story that connects them with something of meaning to your team members. Listen to the individual priorities of your team members and try to connect those to the priorities of the organization as a whole.

Whether the purpose is world-changing or dreaming small, your ability to tell the story and align your team to the purpose, brand, and identity of your team or organization will go a long way to creating the high performance culture you seek.

Division of Labour

While it might seem obvious that you can’t have a team who all play the same role, it is important to think about how you divide the work in order to support the autonomy of the team, embrace the adaptiveness and growth of the individuals, and unlock the creativity and new ideas of diversity.

When we think about teams who have been consistently successful in sports, it is common to find blurry roles, creative strategies, and innovative approaches to the sport. Teams have rewritten expected behaviours and plays to become harder to play against. Traditional roles shift and evolve to stay ahead of the competition.

I was recently speaking with a college student I play hockey with and he was explaining the approach he was learning from his hockey coach at a Division 2 school in the US and which was being reinforced in his practices at home for the summer with a group of professional players he was working out with.

Traditional thinking has specific roles for each player on the ice. The Center drives the play and is responsible for winning faceoffs, setting up plays, and being the most defensively responsible of the forwards. Left and Right Wingers are often more responsible for either digging the puck out of the corner, or being in position to take shots in front of the net, often being the top scorers of a traditional team. Defenseman are more responsible for the play on the defensive side of the ice and in keeping the puck in the zone on the offensive end.

New strategies are seeing these positions disappear once the puck is dropped with players referring instead to F1, F2, and F3 for the forwards or even P1, P2, etc when in the offensive zone. Positions are numbered based on when the player enters the zone and where they are positioned. Responsibilities shift around the team members as the puck moves around the offensive or defensive zone.

Instead of the Center being the playmaker, they may become the shooter or the one tasked with keeping the puck in. The defense can shift up and take responsibility for digging the puck out of the corner or getting in position for a quality shot.

It’s hard to defend a team that executes with this level of flexibility, because from the outside, you’re never sure who will be responsible for the next step in the process.

When you unshackle yourself from the bounds of traditional roles and responsibilities, you can unlock a new level of performance in your team. Salespeople can become your secret weapon in operations. IT developers can provide front-line sales and engineering support. Finance specialists can drive risk and compliance priorities.

The Jobs To Be Done Framework (Link, 2022) provides a great way to think about the work in your team. Instead of thinking about the specific roles you need to staff your team or organization, think instead about the outcomes you are trying to achieve and how to measure success along the way.

When you shift your thinking to the OKRs and outcomes, you can also shift your thinking about who is needed to make it happen. Allow your teams to organize around the outcomes and fill the jobs to be done without being dictated by their traditional roles.

You’ll be amazed at the efficiency you can create, the cross-functional experience and growth you can drive, and the purpose and autonomy that you can drive by simply changing the way you think about division of labour in your team.

Collaboration

We’ve talked a lot at this point about collaboration within your team; creating unicity, aligning your purpose, creating autonomy, and adapting to change together, but there is another aspect to collaboration which is important to consider for your team which is external collaboration with other teams or organizations.

Being able to leverage these external collaborations or alliances effectively can create a collaborative advantage (Kanter, 1994) that can help drive even more team performance. Your ability to form effective alliances with other teams or organizations that create new value can help unlock even more performance from your team.

Within an organization, you will likely find many opportunities to collaborate with other departments to deliver value to the broader organization. Project work is the most common structure where we see this with business, technology, marketing, sales channels, and corporate systems all working together to deliver a new product or service to the market.

But you can also look for alliances that allow you to grow and adapt your team, working together to develop skills, expand experiences and diversity, and grow understanding of your business and market.

Externally you may find value in aligning to other parts of the customer value chain, unlocking customer value by working together with an alliance to simplify the customer jobs to be done rather than leaving it to the customer to piece together their own solutions.

Both internal and external collaboration will be important to unlocking team performance as a leader. Look for ways to foster collaboration and trust within your team at every turn. Similarly keep your eyes open for external collaborations and alliances which can help to grow your people and align to your team purpose.

Symbiosis

According to Merriam-Webster, symbiosis is a cooperative relationship between at least two people or groups, and other definitions add the concept of that relationship being mutually beneficial to both groups or organisms.

Building symbiosis into your team culture recognizes the importance of our personal and individual relationship with our work, coworkers, and organization, and creates value through reciprocity (Dravida, 2018).

For many of us, we spend more waking hours with our coworkers and at work than we do with our families and friends, so if we don’t feel like we have a symbiotic relationship in that setting it is incredibly demotivating.

Historically, it was common for a worker to start at a company right out of school, then grow with that company throughout their career until retirement, when they would enjoy a strong company pension recognizing their years of work and commitment.

More recently, we have seen more of a “free agent” type relationship between organizations and the workforce with both employees and employers playing off against each other to create individual value. Job loyalty is gone. Employee loyalty is gone. Pensions are gone.

But the best performing teams and organizations have found the balance between these two extremes, building loyalty and symbiosis between team, organization, and employee around common goals and mutual benefit, and transparently stepping away from each other once that mutual benefit is achieved.

There is a reality that in many cases the relationship between you and your role, team, or company is likely not life-long as both the organizations and teams will grow and evolve over time, as will your own priorities and needs from your work.

But there is a need for some commitment from both sides to work together to create mutual benefit that aligns your own personal growth with the desired growth and development of the team or company, at least for a mutually agreed set of outcomes. This is more than a 12 month contract – it is an alignment of goals which may last 3 months or 3 years, but which is rooted in the alignment of benefits that both parties are expecting to achieve from the relationship.

To create this symbiosis with, and amongst your team members, you need to make sure you align on purpose and outcomes, provide transparency in expectations and what you’re giving back, and be open about the fact that once the relationship is no longer symbiotic that you should both be free to walk away.

These are more personal and transparent conversations than many “old school” managers might be comfortable with, but it is through this vulnerable and open communication that leaders create the best performing teams. Find the mutual benefits, align on the outcomes you’ll achieve together, then reset once they are achieved to see if there is still a symbiotic relationship available at the next stage of growth.

Then be willing to walk away to find the next team member or role for yourself once the symbiosis is gone. If you’ve been open and transparent all along there are no surprises, no hard feelings, and no threat to the overall trust within your team. People come in to the team when they can contribute value, they leave once they are no longer needed. Loyalty is a shared responsibility tied to alignment of goals.

Find the balance of symbiosis with your teams to achieve long-lived success with your team culture and performance (even once you’re gone).

Growth

There’s a long standing believe in business rooted in a quote from William S. Burroughs that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. If your organization plateaus and stops growing, it is only a matter of time before you start losing market share or fall behind the evolution of your market. If your team stops growing its capabilities and performance, it’s only a matter of time before it is broken up and distributed among other teams and roles.

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to leverage the power of diversity, collaboration, and purpose to continue to evolve and grow. You are the shepherd who has to listen, guide, ask challenging questions, and tell the stories that align you team or organization to continue to grow. You are the one that has to decide which people and roles are needed for the next step on the journey, and which are not.

Never be complacent in your success. Always find the next growth opportunity.

If you’re not growing… you’re dying.

Reproduction

The concept of reproduction is traditionally unique to living beings, but I think it can also apply to our teams and organizations if you (like me) consider your role as a leader as being to build a team or organization that can exist and thrive without you.

Building a strong culture and a high performing team or organization can and should spawn new high performing teams and organizations through a number of mechanisms:

1. Sexual Reproduction

We typically think about reproduction in terms of the way that humans and animals typically reproduce which is sexual reproduction. In sexual reproduction, offspring is created by combining the genetic material of two other organisms.

In teams or organizations, this is most common when we think about collaboration or external alliances. There are times where we find such strong alliances which generate so much value as a result of the alliance that it is of value to create a new team or organization based on that successful alliance.

The resulting team shares some of its makeup with both of the parent teams, but it takes on its own unique purpose and autonomy as it separates from the parents as its own entity.

As a leader, we need to recognize when there is value in letting the alliance team go, and be proud of what has been created. Often this is just as hard as a parent letting go of their children as they grow as the new team may take some of your best resources.

2. Asexual Reproduction

There are several different patterns of asexual reproduction where we can draw parallels to the way your work as a leader can spawn new high performing teams:

Fission and Budding

In nature, fission is where an organism divides itself into two or more smaller organisms that share the same characteristics as the original parent. Budding is similar except that the new organism starts out dependent on the parent until it grows and matures and can separate away.

Our teams can follow this same pattern, sometimes growing to a stage where they can be more effective by splitting into two or more similar teams which start off with a reduced scope, but which can grow and build independently. Alternatively, we will sometimes spawn a sub-team around a new product or idea which is dependent on the parent for support and feed and caring during the development stage, but which eventually becomes self-sufficient and separates away from the parent.

Again, as a leader we need to be aware of these opportunities and make the right decisions about our teams and organizations to drive future success.

Spore Formation or Fragmentation

As a leader, one of the things I am most proud of is the number of team members who have worked with me at one time or another throughout my career who have gone on to build their own exceptional teams, sometimes at multiple organizations.

I look at this reproduction as being similar to spore formation or fragmentation where your team casts off spores (individuals who leave the team on their own) or fragments (multiple individuals who “find each other” at other organizations after being on the same team), and which grow and form their own new high performing teams based on the learning and development they did while in the original team.

I’m proud when I hear from some of the people I was lucky enough to work with in the past as a leader, but who have now built their own successful leadership careers. It’s rewarding to hear that some piece of advice, some approach, or some off the cuff comment that I made changed their thinking and helped shaped their leadership style and success.

Ultimately, whether it is a conscious decision to create a new team or organization through an alliance, subdivision of the existing team, or development of a new idea or concept, or whether it comes from the spore distribution of our ideas and leadership through the distribution of the people who leave our teams, it is our commitment to leading high performing teams that allows us to reproduce that performance elsewhere.

Your history and track record for building high performing teams should be your calling card. If you’re responsible for hiring leaders, look for those that come with a history of building and multiplying teams. Simply delivering results only shows an ability to understand the task at hand. Building and multiplying high performing teams will bring you long term benefits if you can recruit those with those skills or help build it into your own teams through coaching and development.

Capability for Self-Healing

Finally, the highest performing teams and organizations demonstrate the characteristic of self-healing capabilities. This doesn’t mean that teams can’t be wounded, or that failures or setbacks don’t hurt the team in the short term, but it does mean that, as a group, the team has the ability to rally, heal, and push forward.

Sometimes the setback can be related to a decision that doesn’t work out or an innovation or trial that fails. These work related setbacks can make a team second guess themselves and slow their decision making in the future. If we refer back to our role in building our autonomous team, it is our job at those times as a leader to provide the support and sponsorship to ensure your team recognizes the transient nature of these types of failures and your trust in them to continue to push forward.

Sometimes the setback can come in the form of the departure of a critical or popular team member either through retirement, movement to a new organization or team, or even as a result of a break in symbiosis. High performing teams tend to form strong personal bonds with co-workers, so there can be a profound sense of loss when you lose someone who you spend so much time with. Your role as a leader is to help refocus the team on the work and the outcomes, help them find their new roles that combine to fill the gaps of the loss, and help them see the opportunities that come with the change.

Ultimately the best teams I have been lucky to be a part of always found ways to heal through change. They supported each other personally when things got tough. They stepped into fill gaps and roles when the need was there. They rallied around failures or negative outcomes to push forward toward the ultimate goals.

The culture of self-healing is critical to your success as a leader and unlocking the highest performance possible from your team.

42

Ok so only some of you will get that reference, but in some ways as I reflect on all the linked insights I’ve shared in the preceding paragraphs, I am proud of the roadmap I’ve been able to follow as a leader in unlocking performance and building exceptional teams.

Understanding your team or organization as a “living being” and treating it with the same care and feeding as you would any other living being will allow you to become a leader of choice in your organization. Your willingness to take responsibility for this “living being” the same way as a parent does their child will unlock rewards you can only dream of.

One thing I can’t stress enough though, having worked in many different industries with teams of all types, sizes, ages, demographics, and backgrounds, is that while every team and company is unique in its own way, your commitment to the “living being” model applies universally.

While there is a lot here, I strongly believe that the most important predictor of success of a leader in building high performing teams and organizations is embracing this concept of the “living being” in our teams. I’d love your thoughts on the concept and how you’re applying the components of the “living being” team in your own roles!

Note: I did not include two characteristics that were outlined in the article related to living beings. Specifically I did not include organization or unpredictability. While I think that both concepts apply well in the “living being” concept when it comes to teams and organizations, I felt that the concepts were sufficiently covered under other characteristics that I had already covered.

References:

Alvarez, J. (2024, January 31). How to create a team that is adaptable and change-friendly. Charleston Southern University – CSU Blogs. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://www.charlestonsouthern.edu/blog/how-to-create-a-team-that-is-adaptable-and-change-friendly/

Brower, T., PhD. (2022, January 13). The power of purpose and why it matters now. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tracybrower/2021/08/22/the-power-of-purpose-and-why-it-matters-now/?sh=52d85b5f163a

Çengel, Y. A. (2023). Eighteen distinctive characteristics of life. Heliyon, 9(3), e13603. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e13603

Çengel, Y. A. (2022). A novel theory of life and its implications on viruses and robots. Journal of Future Robot Life, 3(2), 183–205. https://doi.org/10.3233/frl-210011

Cooks-Campbell, A. (2023, May 24). What Diversity in the Workplace Means and Why it’s Essential for Teams. BetterUp. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://www.betterup.com/blog/what-diversity-really-means-and-why-its-crucial-in-the-workplace

Dravida, S. (2018, March 9). Symbiosis can enrich office relationships. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/symbiosis-can-enrich-office-relationships-sunil-dravida/

Forbes Agency Council. (2019, September 24). Defining what makes a business unique: the secret sauce of successful marketing. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2019/09/24/defining-what-makes-a-business-unique-the-secret-sauce-of-successful-marketing/?sh=348dd248341a

Kanter, R. M. (2014, August 1). Collaborative advantage: the art of alliances. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/1994/07/collaborative-advantage-the-art-of-alliances

Link, J. (2022, June 28). What is the Jobs to be Done Framework (JTBD)? Built In. https://builtin.com/articles/jobs-to-be-done-framework

Monkhouse, D. (2020, November 20). Why high performing teams need to be flexible and adaptable. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-high-performing-teams-need-flexible-adaptable-dominic-monkhouse/

Patel, S. (n.d.). Fostering autonomy and trust to lead high-performing teams. LeadDev. https://leaddev.com/culture-engagement-motivation/fostering-autonomy-and-trust-lead-high-performing-teams