Understand where the behavior is coming from.

It's the challenge of every manager and supervisor: making sure your teams perform at their best. Team members who function as a unit from a positive energy, where everyone knows what is expected of him or her and pursues the common goal. Also described in Tuckman's theory as the Performing Stage. The ultimate is also when different high performing teams work together in this way to achieve overarching organizational goals. However, you don't just come here. The right management is essential to develop teams in this direction. The primary focus is often on turnover, because this is concrete enough to keep a grip on. However, I believe that you achieve much more effect by controlling behavior. Because in my experience, team performance can always be traced back to this. By understanding what happens and where people's behavior comes from, you can influence and direct them much more efficiently and intuitively. As Johan Cruyff said: “You only see it when you realize it.” The focus on behavior creates space for interaction and dialogue, which encourages people to dare to be transparent and vulnerable. If these conditions are met, teams are able to make independent and autonomous choices. That's that sweet spot for every manager.

You cannot steer without data.

You can only manage based on the right insights. You want to be able to see and understand what is happening and why which choices are made. That is why data is so essential, because without it you cannot steer. Then you go purely on your gut feeling and you will see that you are missing just that one crucial detail that makes the difference. It is no coincidence that our society is becoming more technological and data-driven. For me personally it was an eye opener when I attended a Business Intelligence fair in the United States in 2005. A whole new world opened up for me about what you can do with data. It was right after Hurricane Katrina and a few Microsoft employees shared onstage that in one evening they had brought live a platform where families could find each other. Technically, it wasn't much of a deal; there were purely logical cleverness in it to match relevant data with each other. As it turned out, the chairman of the fair had found his partner through this platform! Not knowing that those guys had developed this platform, he spontaneously came on stage and dropped to his knees to thank them for this. Then the impact of what data can mean really hit me for the first time. Collecting data alone is not enough. It is also about making the data transparent. Tools abound, from flat tables and excel sheets to online SCRUM boards and planning software. However, my experience shows that these kinds of data views create little energy. It often feels clinical and very target-driven. This while a positive energy is really a condition of Tuckman's model for developing high performance teams.

Gamification as an accelerator for positive energy.

That's why I started experimenting with gamification. At a former employer I once translated the roadmap with objectives to Spanish villages. The goal was to be the first team to arrive in Torremolinos, with the winners actually allowed to go that way. You immediately saw that people's behavior changed by integrating the game element. There was a positivity and new energy that took the mutual cooperation and the team feeling to a higher level. I knew I had something that I could make a difference with. That's why I continued with experiments. I have gained learnings and gathered passionate people around me to develop my own business game. This eventually led to TeamNow. A super cool business game that provides insight into behavior and improves team performance. Are you curious about what TeamNow can do for you? I will address this in my next update. Stay tuned!