Creating High Performance Teams

Excelling At Lean Product Development

Lean is the “buzzword” but how can “lean” be applied to product development to help your business. It’s all about removing the excess fat or waste and a team with exactly the team members required to meet all your immediate and long term goals.

The team focus is getting products to market fast, with minimal direction, and superior results.

High performance teams are the core of success for any project, any organization and address each of these key areas:

  • Goals and Objectives – They have short-term, continuous high-priority goals and objectives and strive for continuous improvement from both a technical/technology and interpersonal perspective.
  • Roles and Responsibilities – They have clearly defined roles to ensure no turf wars and eliminate issues that affect team cohesiveness and performance.
  • Barrier Identification – They identify barriers to people, processes and structures, and develop contingency plans around the barriers.
  • Interpersonal Relationships – The teams value differences and develop versatility plans. They understand behavior styles and personalities, and utilize that understanding to better communicate and work as a team.

The key is finding the right team members, with the needed skills and the desire to stay with the team for an extended period of time, often measured in years and not months.

It is possible to have high performance teams which have new participants often, but results and performance can often be half of a cohesive team.

Success with LEAN or any process is all about creating “high performance” teams, because “high performance teams” provide better and faster results with fewer resources.

Building Better Leadership Skills, Creating High Performance Teams, Managing Change, and Interpersonal Influence.