As an individual we are inherently prone to evaluating personal growth as opposed to team growth. So I began studying teams to identify what would characterize a ‘high growth team’. This is one of the things that are often overlooked by novice managers also. Some of the fundamental questions we would want to ask is how do we say that a team has grown or deteriorated over the course of a period of time (an year for say).

To tackle the easy part first, some of the false positives when it comes to identifying high growth teams are below:

1. A high performing team need not essentially be a high growth team.
2. A highly mature team need not be a high growth team.
3. A poor performing team…..

So now that brings us back to the question, what is the profile of a high growth team. We need to understand the characteristics associated with the word ‘growth’ to start with.

From wikipedia:

Growth refers to an increase in some quantity over time.

So for growth to be present, there has to be ‘increase’ of some ‘quantity’. Identifying the quantity and ascertaining whether it is increasing or not is the key to this evaluation.

To start with I take the teams current composition as a baseline, the management involved in the team is not considered to evaluate growth since that function is viewed as an organizational overhead rather than a value add & i get something like this:

Since we are discussing growth, we consider the base state to be ‘good’ and worry about how this changes progressively. We ascertain an evaluation window in which the team is given the opportunity to evolve, say a year.

Growing Team

Evaluation

This ‘good’ trending is based on an evaluation of the change in their skill sets & experience. The above trend shows a ‘growing team’ since it is getting top heavy.

1. For this to happen there has to be a downward flow of skills, leading to cross skilling of the team.
2. When this happens team members move up the experience ladder causing upward movement of team profile wherein senior members are created either through internal growth or external hiring.
3. The team is performing more specialized and highly skilled tasks as compared to their previous year.
4. This causes existing skill sets to mature and new skill sets to appear in the team portfolio.

Declining Team

Evaluation

The above profile is the that of a decaying team, wherein the team is growing towards becoming ‘bottom heavy’. This has many serious indicators associated with it.

1. Experience players have been leaving the team.
2. Skill sets are not being transferred downwards, shows that cross skilling is not happening.
3. The team has been degrading tasks to perform hence specialization is declining.
4. Low level players are being added to the headcount since team does not require high skill sets.

I would advice every manager to evaluate his team on a periodic basis on these trends and see if his team is high growth or low growth.  This exercise is very vital because a person grows only when he is in a high growth team and a manager is only as good as how good his team grows under him.

Tags: cross skilling, experience, growth, indicator, profile, skills, team, trend

Related posts:

1. Psycho-Social profile of a ragger.

Filed under: IT trends