Understanding 4 Levels of Team Performance and How Leaders Can Move Their Teams Forward

Summary: Teams’ results are based on three aspects of their performance – how they communicate, how they recognize opportunities, and how they overcome challenges. In this article, we contrast four levels of team performance and show how leaders can shift their teams to achieve sustainable success through catalytic leadership.

In our previous article, we introduced the concept of catalytic leadership. We shared what’s distinct about how catalytic leaders motivate and mobilize their organizations and the four essential elements of catalytic leadership – foresight and intuition, ownership and accountability, adaptability, and resilience.

While the goal of catalytic leadership is to drive catalytic performance, the truth is most teams operate far below their optimal capacity and potential.

Through our work with hundreds of leaders and their teams, we’ve seen how the four elements of catalytic leadership determine how a team performs in three critical areas:    how they communicate, their capacity to recognize opportunities, and their ability to overcome obstacles. 

These, in turn, determine the results they achieve and their ability to sustain high levels of performance in the face of ongoing disruption and constant change.

Level 1: Depleted

• Communicating: Communication among depleted teams, to the extent it even exists, focuses on resentment and blame directed at others, leadership, or their current situation. Leaders may also hear frustration and futility when their teams are in this state.

• Recognizing Opportunities: In the face of unrelenting change, depleted teams are too exhausted and disengaged to perform and pursue new opportunities. Opportunities go undetected, or they are passively or actively overlooked.

• Overcoming Obstacles: People resist change due to fear, and/or the lack of trust and belief in the ability of the organization and team to perform. They have a fixed mindset (“we tried that before and it didn’t work,” “we’ve always done it this way,” etc.). They believe everything that they know is everything that is knowable. There is no new learning from past successes or setbacks.

Results are hard to come by for teams at this level because their past experience becomes an anchor instead of a springboard. Teams don’t believe they can do anything to overcome challenges or change their situation. In other words, what happened in the past is doomed to happen again, so why bother? Depleted teams remain stuck in their current state with no vision or path forward.

Leaders can help their teams break through this level by reinforcing learning from past experiences instead of dwelling on setbacks. It’s vital to focus the learnings and experience gained instead of feelings of failure for not reaching a desired outcome. Leaders play a key role in helping their teams reframe past challenges as opportunities for incremental growth.

Level 2: Reactive

• Communicating: Communication among and within reactive teams focuses on monitoring and detection, responding to crises, and complying with directives.

• Recognizing Opportunities: Reactive teams function in a perpetual crisis state with their heads on a swivel, looking for the next problem to fix. Reactive teams are adept at fighting fires but not preventing fires from breaking out. Operating under significant stress, reactive teams are satisfied with averting the latest crisis and surviving until the next one occurs.

• Overcoming Obstacles: There is no planning or institutional learning, which prevents reactive teams from implementing systems and processes that enable them to successfully navigate change.

Reactive teams can and often do achieve results. They may even be enthusiastic or optimistic about a new challenge. But the constant pressure of fighting yet another fire inevitably shifts their engagement to ambivalence or even disappointment, creating the risk of falling back to a depleted level of performance.

When leaders prioritize identifying and eliminating what causes breakdowns instead of measuring success simply by how quickly they put out fires, they establish more stability and predictability in achieving successful outcomes. Increased success and less time spent remediating defects grows a team’s capacity to spend more time in forward-looking planning and other key strategic activities.

Level 3: Proactive

• Communicating: Communication is focused on collaboration, planning, and prevention. Operational or organizational silos are few, if any, and information is accessed, shared, and evaluated openly and readily.

• Recognizing Opportunities: Unlike dysfunctional reactive teams, proactive team performance is functional. They’re prepared to identify and take on new opportunities and even drive disruption, whether internally or in their industry.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Proactive teams can be held back by complacency. They lose their strategic and predictive focus. They begin to believe the myth that what has worked is good enough, and methods for solving today’s problems will be sufficient to address tomorrow’s challenges.

These teams achieve results reliably, but their path to success may be their undoing over time. While it’s clear in today’s environment that, change and disruption are unrelenting, many leaders and teams overlook the reality that “good enough” fades the moment a competitor or another idea proves to be better. Proactive teams may not recognize the cost of their own complacency until another company closes the gap and takes the lead.

Leaders should instill an unshakeable connection between the team’s mission and the roles, actions, and performance of every individual on the team. Emphasizing continuous learning and seeking ways to achieve incremental gains prevent teams from falling back to “maintenance mode” thinking and keeps their perspective focused forward on identifying and capturing new opportunities.

Level 4: Catalytic

• Communicating: Communication among catalytic teams shifts from collaborative to committed. Everyone recognizes the mission criticality of their own contributions, and there is strong alignment at all levels within and across teams.

• Recognizing Opportunities: With clear priorities, robust alignment, and connection to long-term vision, individual and team performance are primed, optimized, and unstoppable.

• Overcoming Obstacles: Catalytic teams have the systems, creativity, and confidence to capitalize on new opportunities and overcome obstacles that would derail most teams.

Sustainable success is simply the product of how the team functions and not solely the desire to achieve a goal. Catalytic teams are intuitive, aligned, adaptable, and resilient.

Leaders can maintain their team’s catalytic potential by recognizing that work is not done even when goals are achieved. Ongoing optimization, self-assessment, and improvement are essential. The core beliefs and behaviors of catalytic performance and leadership must cascade down and become ingrained in the organizational culture.

Regardless of their team’s current potential, there are steps every leader can take right now to bring their team’s performance to new levels by focusing on improving foresight, increasing accountability, driving adaptability, and building resilience.

Take Our Catalytic Team Performance Assessment to See Where Your Team Stands

By completing our brief Catalytic Team Performance Assessment, you’ll learn how well your team performs in the face of unrelenting change, build insight into what holds them back, and receive recommendations to help them break through.