The 3 Esteems to Highly Productive Teams

Focus: Team Management, Performance Management, Management Success

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The 3 Esteems of Highly Productive Teams     

Transcript - print now

Wc: 535

Read time: 2 mins.

Here’s a useful concept to know as a manager or supervisor to understand what it takes to have a highly productive team. I’ve coined this The Three Esteems.

As I traveled across the country working with teams, nurturing and developing managers and leaders, it’s been very apparent to me that one of the things we talk about a lot is self esteem. We know people as individuals need to have it to be a happy and functioning.

So what about “esteem” as it relates to teams being happy and functional? I’d like to add a couple of other esteems that need to be present to be able to have high functioning teams. I’ve coined these The Three Esteems.  I believe there needs to be three esteems in place in order for a team to function at a high performance level. 

First: every team member needs to have their own strong healthy self esteem: that means they like themselves - they feel comfortable in their own skin.

Number two: every team member needs to have good work esteem. What’s work esteem? Work esteem is how someone feels in the context of their role and their job. It means they like what they do at some level, they enjoy the job functions of their role, they feel like they are actually contributing to the greater good and they have a sense of accomplishment in their role as well.

Finally: the third esteem is team esteem. Team esteem can be defined as every team member feels like as a group they are able to meet collective goals and that as a group they are able to function with a productive rapport.

You know this doesn’t mean they necessarily have to love each other and be crazy about each other, but it does mean that there is a healthy respect among each team member and that they are able to work together productively in order to get their outcomes collectively as a team. It’s having the knowledge and appreciating the fact that the goal(s) could not have been met in the way they were met, unless everybody was present doing their part.

So there you have it, what I call the three esteems to a high performance team. Again its self esteem, work esteem and team esteem.

Let me suggest as an action item that you as a manager begin to monitor where you see each of your team members related to the three esteems. In fact, I suggest that you put together a survey of some kind to get a sense of how they feel. It might comprise something as follows:

 -questions about their own self esteem (you can do it on a scale of one to five with five being the highest.)

-questions regarding how they feel about their job functions and how they feel about their work esteem

- and also their team esteem as well (this will gauge their perception of whether the team can and is working together.)

That information could be very telling and very useful as you work to cultivate a high performance team and a healthy team culture. Good Luck!

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