We have a new essay published in Deloitte Insights, Building the peloton: High performance team-building in the future of work.1Watson, Jessica, Peter Evans-Greenwood, Andy Peck, and Peter Williams. “Building the Peloton: High Performance Team-Building in the Future of Work.” Deloitte Insights, July 1, 2020. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/high-performance-team-building.html. Jess Watson is the lead author of a report that looks into how we need to think a bit differently about teams, team work and leadership as the drive to create more agile organisations breaks down established organisation structures.
The report uses the analogy of a cycling peloton—the team-of-teams that competes and cooperates in a road cycling race—to integrate current research on team formation and operation in a world where firms function as a team-of-teams.
Highlights from the work include:
- The factors long recognised as key to creating successful teams—of all types—have evolved as business has become more complex, driving organizations to work across departmental and organisational silos rather than within them.
- It is important to establish a supportive environment and a clear, consistent, and compelling direction for a team if it is to be successful.
- A team is built around its vision and it’s critical that all members of the team share the same vision and goals.
- Diversity is also important. Business teams have long consisted of a range of different roles, but in addition to diversity of roles, identity diversity and cognitive diversity (or diversity of thinking) are now emerging as a clear differentiator between mediocre teams and those that are highly effective.
- Effective practices are similarly essential to high performance in both a cycling and a business peloton.
- Finally, the research is now abundantly clear that psychological safety is a powerful differentiator of effective teams.
You can find the entire text over at Deloitte Insights. Feel free to leave a comment here with your thoughts.
Endnotes
- 1Watson, Jessica, Peter Evans-Greenwood, Andy Peck, and Peter Williams. “Building the Peloton: High Performance Team-Building in the Future of Work.” Deloitte Insights, July 1, 2020. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/technology-and-the-future-of-work/high-performance-team-building.html.