Why we created Top Teams

1 / The Ask

For 10+ years clients have been asking us how do we create a high performing team, what is the secret sauce, what magic beans do we need to plant, what do we need to work on most?

2 / Narrow Academia

We looked at the academic research. Given academic research tired to reduce variable to find causality or correlation we found much of it to be one or two dimensional, and once again all saying slight different things.

3 / Lunchtime Studies

Also, we looked at academic studies, but most of this was done with volunteer students, at lunch in artificially created team work scenarios not with real world teams solving real world problems, and that didn’t sit well with us.

4 / So Many Models

So we went looking for a teams models or popular approaches for building high performing teams that we felt confident to use with our clients. We couldn’t find one that was based off evidence rather than experience.

5 / Teams As Islands

We also found that, most models looked at teams as single units, rather than parts of a larger organizational system and there was little consideration for why the team existed, what was their purpose.

6 / Inconclusive

There were so many models out there, they all said something slightly different and intuitively all of what they said made some sense. But which one was right?

7 / Start From Scratch

We drew a blank. We needed to start from scratch and decided to create our own. We started by defining team performance, the different factors from the different models and academic research and all the literature – PhD levels of reading and research.

8 / A New Assessment

We then built a comprehensive assessment tool, used it with real world teams to improve their performance over multiple measurement points, iterated and refined the tool with Monash University using a comprehensive rigorous statistical modelling.

9 / A Proven Approach

This culminated in working with Monash University to create a structural equation model that allow us to understand what factors drive what outcomes – using data not experience or intuition. And that is Top Teams