Create Team Clarity to Take Performance to the Next Level

“Having tripled in size and recently merged, LSA helped us to create team clarity on our executive team to increase our level of strategic alignment, solidify our new direction, and push our agency forward with clear goals, roles, and success metrics.

This is exactly what we needed to take our leadership team to the next level.”

Matt Britton | CEO | MRY, a Publicis Groupe Company

“LSA Global rocks! Thank you for helping our executives to create team clarity. Our executive team now has a clear and powerful strategic direction with clear metrics of success, accountabilities, and actions going forward.

From a sales growth perspective, I am really energized about the outcome and grateful for what I have learned throughout the process.”

Stacey Wong | Director of Sales | Servicon Systems

“The team strategy alignment session exceeded my expectations. It was great! We made a lot of important progress, made key decisions, and committed to important growth plans. It was much better than other leadership sessions that I have been involved with in the past. Thank you for helping with one of our most important teams.”

Nhieu Luu | Chief Financial and Operating Officer | Jamis Software

Create Team Clarity
We define a team as a group of people who depend on one another to achieve a meaningful common goal. Unlike individuals working independently, true teams combine complementary skills, perspectives, judgments, and experiences to accomplish something that no single person could achieve as effectively alone.

When the work requires high levels of coordination and interdependence, well-aligned teams can outperform even the most talented individuals. Think of championship sports teams, military special forces, surgical teams, or other elite groups where success depends not just on individual excellence, but on how effectively people perform together.

Teams Are Different than Working Groups
One of the first steps to create team clarity is understanding the difference between a team and a working group.

Working groups may share information, resources, or an overall objective, but their results are primarily the sum of individual contributions. Individual performance matters more than collective performance. Golf and gymnastics teams are good examples — athletes may compete under the same banner, but their individual performances largely determine their results.

A true team is different. Team members have a shared direction and purpose and collective work product, and their success depends significantly on one another. The greater the interdependence required to succeed, the greater the need for team clarity.

Teams Are Different than Tribes
Teams should also be distinguished from tribes.

A tribe is a group of people connected by a powerful sense of identity, belonging, trust, and shared purpose. Members understand why they are together, feel deeply committed to one another, and rally around a common cause. A close-knit family is a simple example.

While high-performing teams can certainly develop tribe-like levels of trust and commitment, the distinction matters. Teams are primarily defined by performance interdependence; tribes are primarily defined by identity and belonging.

How Do You Know If You Are Truly a Team?
Ask one simple question: How much of my success depends on the success of others?

If the majority of your success depends on other people delivering, collaborating, making sound decisions, and fulfilling shared commitments, you are operating as a team. And the more interdependent your work becomes, the more important it is to create clarity around goals, roles, priorities, decision rights, ways of working, and mutual accountability.

Create Team Clarity: Proven Ways to Improve Team Performance

Creating a high performance team starts with team leaders creating shared clarity, agreement, and commitment in the following areas:

Alignment
For a team to excel, it must fully align itself with the vision, mission, values, and strategic priorities of the organization. Ensure the team understands the corporate strategy enough to align with it.
Shared Goals
Clear goals are the hallmark of high performing teams. Ensure the fundamental purpose and goals of the team are clear, believable, implementable, and committed to by all key stakeholders.
Clear Roles & Responsibilities
High performing teams have a clear grasp of how each individual contributes to team success and what to expect from others. Ensure roles and responsibilities play to people’s strengths and desires while being clear, understood, and committed to by all team members.
Credible Success Metrics
For teams and individuals to thrive, they must know where they stand and hold each other accountable. Ensure individual and team performance measures are aligned, relevant, fair, accurate, transparent, consistent, timely and just possible.
Critical Processes and Practices
The way teams prioritize, solve problems, reward, communicate, make decisions, share information, innovate, and handle conflict directly impacts their level of performance. Ensure critical processes are understood, accepted and aligned with where you are headed.
Effective Interpersonal Relationships
High performing teams interact with each other in a healthy and supportive way. Build trust, openness, and acceptance to improve team dynamics and effectiveness.
Barriers to Success
Every team faces challenges. High performing teams identify barriers within their circle of influence and create solid action plans to overcome them in a way that makes sense.

Related Information

LSA is an excellent sales and leadership outsource partner! They listen to our needs, are responsive, and work at a pace that keeps up with our rapid speed.

We have found LSA to bring strategic, innovative, and practical solutions to meet our business priorities by partnering effectively with our key staff. I consider them to be an important external extension of our team.

Thank you!

Wendy Chinn
Sr. Director, Global Sales Enablement

We have had a very beneficial partnership with LSA. Their recent Leadership Development Program helped us to identify, develop, and retain top leaders. It was instrumental in helping take our company and our key people to the next level. I would recommend them to anyone looking to truly develop and retain top talent.

Steve Janowsky
Vice President of Operations

I continue to be impressed by the level of leadership development training and management expertise and quality of advice and facilitation that LSA has to offer.

What a smart and client-centric group of great people who really know how to help assess and develop high performing leaders.

Tracy Esposito
Director

The customized leadership styles and coaching program was the best training that I have ever attended. The facilitators were phenomenal. They have a wealth of experience and knowledge coupled with compassionate and caring styles. I’d highly recommend this leadership training program to any manager, director, or executive looking for a life changing leadership program.

Shoaleh Ghaffari
Director, HR

You have become our premier change leadership strategic partner. Your expertise in the human side of change is unparalleled and enabled our company to successfully implement our ERP Solution under challenging and ever-changing circumstances.

Thank you for your practical and outcome-oriented approach.

Ted Ramlet
CIO & SVP

It was a challenge to find a consultant with an approach to performance improvement that fit our unique performance culture and style. We were pleasantly surprised to discover LSA’s depth of expertise in the fields of motivation, developmental coaching, performance management, and measurement.

LSA seamlessly integrated those components without our folks feeling like the intervention was forced. They understood what we were trying to accomplish, helped us clarify our objectives, and created a solid, refreshing approach that quickly got us moving and engaged at all levels across the organization.

Overall, I couldn’t be happier that we found a true strategy and implementation partner in LSA.

Doug Hansen
President and Director

At the onset of our engagement with LSA, I was skeptical that an outside firm would be able to understand and dissect our organization’s highly complex and technical business challenges.

However, through the leadership team interview and strategy retreat processes that LSA utilized, they provided a fresh, innovative, and practical perspective that created tremendous strategic value and focus for our executive leadership team.

As a result, I would highly recommend LSA Global to any leader struggling with building the strategic alignment and high performance teams necessary to generate sales growth, in a way that fits their unique corporate culture.

Robert Laudati
Managing Director

LSA worked with our Executive Leadership Team to help create strategic clarity and alignment as we look to increase our growth rate and unlock innovation. They masterfully handled very complex, challenging, and high stakes leaders, decisions, and cultural nuances to help us identify what matters most and move toward one unified direction.

Their practical, straightforward, and client-centric approach to strategy was refreshing. I highly recommend them to any executive team looking to get aligned to create even higher performance. They are lights out awesome!

Patrick Resk
Chief Financial Officer, Partner

We partnered with LSA Global to help us invest in our people. LSA custom designed an impactful management curriculum to help upskill our key managers and leaders.

We consider LSA to be our trusted learning and development partner and a valued extension of our team as we rapidly scale. Thank you LSA!

Lisa Bruun
SVP Human Resources

As a high growth agency with cutting edge talent, we hired LSA Global to help clarify our strategy and work with our executive leadership team to help implement strategic changes in a way that made sense for our unique culture.

The work was so successful that we also hired them to coach our key leaders. LSA has been instrumental in helping us transition to a new leadership team and triple revenue. In this age of useless consultants, I highly recommend their practical and business-oriented approach to strategy, culture, and talent.

David Bentley
General Manager

Over the years, both at 3Com and now at Redback, I’ve found LSA Global to be a valuable partner. The recent management programs that they delivered for Redback’s executive and management teams was the right solution, of the highest of quality, and customized to fit our unique business and culture. I would highly recommend LSA to any company looking for top quality solutions.

Gina Fulton
Vice President of Human Resources

LSA Global has been a great partner in helping us move toward being “the leading developer of talent in the service performance management industry.”

I have engaged LSA to help develop best-in-class programs in the areas of: Executive On-boarding, Manager Training, Sales Training and Coaching, Employee Engagement, and Instructional Design.

They have consistently met or exceeded my (very) high expectations and are always responsive to my needs to increase performance, engagement, customer satisfaction, and sales growth.

Mike Normant
Senior Director, Training & Development

LSA consistently delivers for me and my team. Recently they demonstrated the criticality for executives to look beyond current ethics topics and focus on applying fundamental values in everything they do to demonstrate true leadership. They successfully delivered in two hours what most leadership development facilitators would spend an entire day trying to communicate.

Nick Voyvodich, SPHR
HR Manager

The strategy and alignment work with our leadership team was absolutely transformational. The decisions we made combined with the transparency, communication, and accountability were exactly what we needed. Thank you!

Dr. Raphael B. Merriman M.D
Medical Director, Liver Transplantation