The demands on teamwork are boosting in organizations, due to tougher competition, increasing complexity of stakeholder relationships, new labor contracts and arrangements and participation in (international) networks and alliances. This also raises higher expectations about the flexibility, learning capacity and performance of teams and team members in these organizations. The call for appealing examples of teams surviving and excelling under extreme circumstances, thus, increases as well.
Organizations working with teams, therefore, constantly search for best practices and benchmarks to compare their ways of working with those of others to learn from and to improve. Traditionally, heroic examples about teamwork such as in successful companies and fabulous sports clubs attract a lot of attention. Teams and managers often like to hear the stories about those teams. At the same time, they also believe that the teams in those stories are difficult to compare to their own work teams in daily business.
Performability has started a study of so-called extreme teams to learn lessons for teams working in private and public organizations. The first step of this study resulted in 12 lessons of a premier league volleyball team, a football team in the highest amateur league, a fire brigade, a rescue brigade of the coast guard, a hip-hop dancing team participating in the national competition and a team at the gynecological department of an academic hospital.
In the near future Performability will publish these lessons in a specially designed team calendar.