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 tried to reduce variables to find causality or correlation we found much of it to be one or two-dimensional, and once again all saying slightly different things.
3 / Lunchtime Studies
Also, we looked at academic studies, but most of this was conducted with volunteer students, at lunch in artificially created teamwork 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 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 on 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 organisational system and there was little consideration for why the team existed and 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 couldn't find an answer to our clients' asks. We needed to start from scratch and decided to create our own. We started by defining team performance, identifying all the possible factors of team performance by drawing from popular published models and an extensive literature review of hundreds of academic research articles.
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 rigorous statistical modelling.
9 / A Proven Approach
This culminated in working with Monash University to create a structural equation model that allows us to understand what factors drive which outcomes – using data not experience or intuition. And that is Top Teams.
Want to hear the full story from our founder, Katie O'Keeffe. Click below.