In business the opportunities to improve efficiencies come and go through a slow revolving door.  It seems that not many new opportunities come into the revolving door.  They may go through a make-over and have a slightly different appearance, but the old favorites remain.  Sometimes we can grab these opportunities and do something special and other times they sail by only to be recycled again another time.

The topic of high performing teams has been popular of late.  Firms and their managers have taken two distinct paths in the latest move to build cohesive, highly functional groups.  Path one is about the doing.  Path one involves collaboration, honesty and intent.  This way requires consistent effort and a strong sense of purpose.

However, the key here is ownership.  Without someone driving this change it all goes back into the revolving door.  The elements that allowed a team to slip from the high performing zone did not form overnight.  Fixing things wont happen overnight either.  They wont happen at all if we stand at the revolving grasping at anything we can get.  Flopping around like a freshly caught fish is not the foundation for excellence in anything (unless you strive to be a flopping fish).

Path two in the journey of high performing teams is about hope.  If we talk about it, we hope it might happen.  We have a lot on so we can’t really invest much in this high performing stuff right now, but we agree this is where we want to be.  Path two has nothing to do with negativity.  Companies are resource constrained and who can step away from the headwind of “to-do” long enough to make change stick?

With the best of intentions we hope teams will ascend to the summit of high performance through sheer will.  After all, that’s how Hillary made it up Everest so we know it can be done.  We want to make the climb, but what path should we follow?  It is a big mountain and it’s easy to get lost.

You immediately see the problem with the path of hope is that no one is driving it.  We still have our commitment and we still want something better as individuals and as a team.  Many of us work to the task we see in front of us.  We may not be thinking about the big picture all the time.

If we could fix this ourselves we would have. We really need a leader to move us from hoping to doing.  We need someone to remind us that today’s endeavors are in service of a larger goal.