High-Energy Teams

Creating a high-energy, high-performance team starts with addressing eight fundamental areas that shape team success. These include understanding identity and purpose, assessing current performance, setting direction, planning execution, clarifying expectations, identifying support needs, measuring effectiveness, and recognizing contributions. Together, they form the foundation of the High-Energy Teams (HET) Model, a research-based framework from Team Management Systems.

Eight strategic questions of the High-Energy Teams Model

The HET Model promotes a culture of continuous formative assessment, enabling teams to track progress and recalibrate every six months. This regular cadence of review ensures ongoing alignment, strengthens accountability, and sustains employee engagement by turning insights into actionable improvements.

1. Who Are We?
Understanding individual strengths, work values, risk orientation, and team role preferences creates trust and collaboration. Teams thrive when differences are harnessed rather than avoided.

2. Where Are We Now?
Evaluate team balance, risk appetite, and values alignment. Use a SWOT analysis to understand current capabilities, spot gaps, and ensure resources are in place to reach your goals.

3. Where Are We Going?
Align team goals with the organizational mission. A shared team purpose statement provides clarity, energizes action, and defines outputs and outcomes.

4. How Will We Get There?
Strategic planning begins with identifying the critical types of work needed. Action plans, objectives, and performance indicators help teams move from vision to results.

5. What Is Expected of Us?
Clarity around roles, responsibilities, and ground rules is key to team success. High-performance teams define expectations and build accountability structures.

6. What Support Do We Need?
Effective teams regularly assess their support needs. This includes training, coaching, mentoring, and systems that enable continuous team learning.

7. How Effective Are We?
Formative assessment helps teams benchmark their performance, conduct reviews, and implement improvement strategies that avoid complacency.

8. What Recognition Do We Get?
Recognition sustains motivation. High-energy teams celebrate achievements through feedback, rewards, and promotion systems that make members feel valued.

Linking Skills

The processes that ensure all eight questions are integrated and coordinated are known as 'linking'. Team members and particularly the team leader need to be effective at a whole range of Linking Skills.

When all these strategic issues have been addressed to the satisfaction of the team, the team will be in a 'high energy' state ready to work optimally to deliver excellent performance.

Track Team Energy with Team Signals

The Team Signals Report allows team members to assess both the importance of these strategic issues and their satisfaction with how well each has been addressed. This data-driven approach offers a holistic view of team effectiveness and employee engagement, guiding actionable improvements.