High-Performance Culture: How To Improve Efficiency of International Teams Without Hiring New Talent

Many managers believe that recruiting the most brilliant talent is the key to success but what really drives organisational and team success is a strong, cohesive culture. 

Making a whole team gel and own the outcomes of their work requires thoughtful support that takes into account the potential of everyone you have in your team. You don’t need to have a team full of stars, or a single high performer, if you make sure you are making the most of the potential of the people you are working with. 

So, as a global team leader, are you harnessing the full potential of your team's cognitive diversity? 

Team Culture and Dynamics Sculpt Success, Not Individual Brilliance

Your global team operates in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous and hyper-connected (VUCAH) environment where they need to think globally and act locally. Their operational areas constantly grapple with changing environmental, social, political, economic, and business demands. They must navigate through this diversity and adapt to survive.

The complex nature of these challenges means that individual decision-makers can rarely outperform diverse teams. 

Numerous studies have demonstrated that teams tend to make better decisions than individuals. One of the most prominent among these is the Cloverpop study. It found that decision-making processes that included diverse teams made decisions that were 60 % better than those made by individuals, and business teams also drove decisions twice as fast with half the meetings. 

This underscores that it's not about individual brilliance but about collaboration and joint value creation. In the right team culture environment, diverse teams can approach problem solving and innovation from different perspectives and angles without sacrificing as much time and resources as it would take one individual to explore different options.

“"Build a team so strong that nobody has to carry the burden of the critical player alone."

Jukka Jalonen, Finland’s coach for the World Championship winning ice hockey team in 2022.

The Whole Can Be Much More Than the Sum of its Parts with the Right Leadership, Team Culture and Dynamics

So what exactly does it take to achieve these results without attracting more brilliant talent?

Google's Project Aristotle, a comprehensive study of their employees, concluded that the most successful teams weren't those filled with top-ranked professionals. Instead, the most successful teams exhibited high levels of psychological safety, clarity of roles, and goal alignment.

This is actually great news for you. Competition for global talent is fierce and finding top professionals can be hard for any company. But success is not born only from recruiting individual star players. 

Instead, you can start building and fostering the right kind of team culture and dynamics today and create a high performing team that is more than the sum of its individual parts. But your team depends on you and your understanding of how to foster a high performance team culture to lead that process. 

The other side of the coin is that even if you have attracted brilliant talent, you need to take active steps to make sure they feel valued, motivated and aligned with the company’s and team’s goals. 

Your Role as a Global Team Leader

As a global team leader, your role isn't just to manage individual performance—it's to inspire and cultivate a high-performance culture by focusing more on leading and managing collaboration. It means building optimal practices, structures and systems for the teamwork and fostering psychological safety. 

Create the circumstances that allow your team to succeed with these practices:

• align team with the company's purpose, values, and strategic goals
• ensure clear roles and tasks
• build optimal workflows and practices like efficient meetings
• create team rituals that increase cohesion

Foster Psychological safety to increase intellectual friction while decreasing social friction:  

• help the team build self-awareness of their biases and awareness of others' cultural backgrounds
• build a culture of giving and receiving honest and respectful feedback
• set norms of behaviour and act as as a role model
• agree the game rules for the team

It's about fostering psychological safety for your culturally diverse team to use their cognitive abilities fully. To build a culture that encourages giving and receiving constructive feedback, you need to co-create and agree with the team on the game rules, set norms for behaviour and build the problem-solving capacity of the team. 

What team leaders for international teams should take away from this?

• While individual brilliance can contribute to success, the culture and dynamics within a team truly shape its performance. 
• The path to excellence lies not just in hiring the best but in harnessing the existing cognitive diversity of your global team and creating an environment where everyone thrives and grows.
• As a leader, your role extends beyond management. It involves building a cohesive, high-performance team that is more than just the sum of its parts. 

Just hiring more people is not going to help you change team culture. It is not going to show you how team members are feeling at this moment, where they feel they can’t express their ideas or reach their full potential or where communication issues and conflicts arise from. 

You need to shape your team’s culture and dynamics with some of the tools we use to help all our clients: effective, culturally aware communication, inclusive leadership, and shared purpose.

Here is another article you might be interested in reading on how to start:

Cultural intelligence - a blog article on how to add to your EQ by understanding and developing your CQ

You can also reach out to us for expert guidance on creating a diverse, cohesive, and high-performing team that can navigate the complexities of the VUCAH world - if you are looking for support in the form of tailored team performance or growth coaching or consulting, we offer a free no obligation sales pitch free call to discuss your questions and situation with one of our expert consultants. Send us an e-mail at [email protected] to book a call.