High Performer Silos

Your Best People are Your Biggest Problem (And You don't Even Know it.)

When you hire high performers you expect magic. Sometimes you get it, at least for a while. More often, what you get instead is talented people working in parallel universes. Individual goals are crushed! Individual efficiency is high. Individual delivery you can always count on.

But somewhere between their desk and their teammates's desks the work fragments. As they used to say in my former organization, things fall between the chairs.

• Dual efforts.

• Missed handoffs.

• Great ideas that never see the light of day.

And, to add a little irony, the better the individual performer, the worse this usually gets.

High performers are doers. They drive to get things done. They own outcomes. They solve problems independently. These traits make them high performers. And these traits also keep them disconnected from the team.

I've seen this play out in teams a number of different times and a few different ways. Sometimes the star performer simply doesn't leave the space for collaboration. Each person is so engrossed in their own delivery that they don't see how they could be better together. They don't multiply; they collide.

Or, they take on the work of other team members because it's "not getting done." This builds a lack of trust in the team, a reluctance for other team members to step up, inhibits growth of the team and its individuals, and will burn out your high performer.

Many managers fall into the trap of thinking "high performing individuals lead to high performing teams."

But high performance isn't about individual brilliance;

it's about synchronized brilliance.

That requires

• Clarity on what "together" really means.

• Shared purpose that transcends individual goals.

• Explicit team norms that acknowledge high-drive personalities.

• A framework for when (not if) personalities clash.

But how do you "teach" your team to build these things? In my experience you don't.

They have to experience it themselves. And, in my experience horses are great at experience delivery. Working in a team with horses can teach this faster than any assessment ever could.

When a group of high performers try to move a task forward with the horses without alignment, the horses simply won't cooperate. Not because the people were wrong, but because their energy wasn't coherent.

The moment they synchronize, everything shifts.

Your high performers aren't really the problem. Disconnection is.

At Flying Changes Coach we go beyond traditional "let's have a fun and get to know each other a little bit" team building. You'll have fun and get to know each other. You'll also build trust, work together, and leave with a blueprint for team behavior, cohesion, and success. I call it The Conscious Team Blueprint. Ask me how I can help your team build one for themselves.

www.flyingchangescoach.com