Welcome to Building High-Performing Teams! Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course will help you understand the problems that hurt productivity and give you tools for creating positive change. This course will help you create the ground rules and structure to set your team up for success. You will gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink, and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You will also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

In this first module, we will talk about how to get your team started off on the right foot with a process called team chartering. This is where you lay out the rules that your group will follow to give them the best chance for success. In particular, we will talk about how to create the right goals, team roles, and group norms to get the most out of each person.

In this module, we’ll look at why good teams go bad. We’ll focus on those process losses I mentioned, and dig into the different problems that can derail your group from its goals. Since it can be hard to really pinpoint team problems and even harder to talk about them, we’ll look at some methods that will help you do both.

In this module, we move from discussion to action. After getting a sense of what is going wrong with your group, we will give you tools for making effective behavioral changes so that you can close the gap between how your team says it wants to work together and what you actually do.

In this last module, we will look at common types of teams like global teams and committees. We will discuss the challenges that each one is most likely to face and give you some tips for how to combat and overcome those challenges. We will also hear practical insights on managing startup teams from Anthony Maher, an entrepreneur, former professional soccer player, and a co-founder of Benjamin’s desk, which is the largest co-working community in Philadelphia.