Three off-beat ways to build a high-performing team

It is like sunshine, that feeling when you are part of a team, and everyone is firing. Ideas are expanding, tasks are down at record time, and what comes out, in the end, everyone feels genuinely proud of. That is a dream team.

Unfortunately for most, this isn’t an everyday situation, is it occasional. 

To get to that place of team flow a few things need to click, and they aren’t the most natural combo to bring together. Everyone needs to feel like an essential part of the team, all need to be able to move into a state of flow, and be able to connect with their fellow team members. This is what I call accessing their inner leader. 

Everyone needs to feel like an essential part of the team, all need to be able to move into a state of flow, and be able to connect with their fellow team members.

Today I want to explore three off-beat approaches to making that dream team scenario more common in your team.

Acting As If Morning Tea

This is where you all get together for morning tea, and you act as if the project that you are working on has been completed and it a huge success. You all talk and act as if it has already happened; talk about what was great, how the success is having a positive impact, how wonderful it was to work together, what the break-through moments were. 

What this does is get everyone feeling like the high performing team that you want them to be. That your team wants to be. And from that feeling, it makes it easier to become that team. At the same time, everyone feels they are an essential part of the team

The other thing that often happens in this exercise is a wave of insightful ideas drop in. It is great to do some brainstorming after this morning tea. 

Group Journey

To hit that high-performing mental state, you need to get into a state of flow. One ingredient for flow is to shift your consciousness. You want your brain to enter into a low alpha or theta wave. One way to do that is through an imaginative journey. 

One way to do this is through a shamanic journey. Doing this as a team can help everyone to learn how to shift into this expanded consciousness that allows for flow. In this expanded place, intuition, creativity and systems thinking is heightened. After the journey, sharing experiences entice creative ideas and greater group connection. 

Edgy bonding

Your team needs to get to know each other beyond the groove of the jobs that they do. Creating get to know each other scenarios where everyone needs to draw on different strengths and step out of their comfort zone can really step this up. 

Here are some ideas, and I am sure that you and your team can come up with more.

• A combine art project – take turns to add to a painting or collage – at the end get together to discuss the process
• An office treasure hunt – each person to hide an item and give the rest of the team clues to find it
• Team Trivia – Each team member writes an unknown fact about themselves. They then get correlated and everyone guesses who each fact belongs to.

While these ideas may seem a little like a party game, the idea is to expand how the team relates to each other. This builds connection beyond what is possible in everyone’s current organisational roles.

Share your ideas for more activities in the comments below.

At the end of the day, to build your team’s capacity for high performance, connecting each team member to their inner leader is essential. With everyone acting from their inner leader they can access a place where they come together to burn brightly.

I encourage you to think outside of the box today about how to create a highly functioning team.