High-Performance Teams

Recently on LinkedIn, one of my past colleagues posted a question that made me share my beliefs and learnings from being part of as well as creating, tendering and fostering high-performance teams.

Following was my answer to the post. It seems to have resonated with quite a few people.

Give a clear goal, provide autonomy in execution, create a psychologically safe environment, build a sense of team and support them in their pursuit. Do this and your team will get anything that they set their minds on.

I called this my mantra for high-performance teams.

Given it resonated with quite a few people, I thought there is worth in further explaining my thoughts about each of these parameters in creating a high-performance team, so as to validate my learnings as well as help others to align what they understood and benefit each other.

Word of caution

You know what, it is not that you can create such teams just like that - like one day I walk into my office and with my new realisation over the weekend reading a LinkedIn post, I will today create a high-performance team. We all know that it does not work that way.

So, let’s get to it.

The Significance of Clear Goal

At the crux of any high-performance team is the goal. Without a goal, the team need not exist. But where it gets tricky and often gets lost is making the goal clearly understandable for everyone.

I personally find the monetary goals to be a very tricky but common practice for businesses. Sometimes they don’t get accompanied by any context that emphasises on what the business values.

I don’t think organisations lack context, I think they just fail to make it clear.

Consider this goal; Generate revenue of $500,000 in the next one year, set by the company that is scaling and dreaming of exponential growth. It lacks crucial context that guides a team to make decisions.

While it might be obvious for the higher ups in the business that it is not acceptable to achieve it by taxing existing customers, unless this is clearly stated and communicated, chances are people are going to miss it. And we all know Murphy’s law is so true.

And there is this that I keep repeating to my business people,

we all hire smart people to solve problems in our business, if we are not making the problem obvious, damn! they are smart people and they are still going to solve some problem. You can only pray that the problem they solve helps the business.

So spend the time to ask why to business outcomes, when people want something, they have reasons. Sometimes it is easy for them to assume people know them or just that they are obvious.

In my experience, It surely pays to reason out and comprehensively describe the purpose of the goal. At the end of day people who work to achieve the goal take decisions every day in an effort to help achieve it and you don’t want to leave there decisions subject to interpretation.

Autonomy in Execution

Once a goal is clearly defined, how a team executes this goal should be completely under the control of the team.

To make a sense of it, let’s take a step back, Gone or those days where people are considered homogeneous resource. Successful leaders have learned that every individual is unique, each have their own strengths, weaknesses, opinions, preferences, personalities, values and culture.

Similarly, when a group of individuals come together, depending on the culture, background, individual qualities and personalities norms are formed. While they need to be fostered and cured towards a healthy culture, it is fairly obvious that the strengths and weakness of these teams vary.

So, a similar problem may require dealing different differently with different teams.

Individual or team, they have unique qualities and personalities. To be successful one has to play to their strength. Giving that freedom to play any game for the personalities strength is what autonomy in execution is about.

Care has to be taken to define the boundaries of Autonomy. In my experience, I found the boundaries of the problem has to be clearly defined as part of defining and discovering the problem. While autonomy is about execution, it should not be misunderstood as autonomy to negotiate the value of the organisation or flexing the value of the organisation to the team’s qualities.

It is important to understand that the companies have its own purposes, value and culture. While they ideally are aligned with team’s values, a learning organisation will have forums and channels to continuously align them. Given that, an autonomous team should only ensure such misalignments are surfaced effectively while defining and discovering the problem.

I have seen where an incorrect understanding of this leading to teams becoming rogue - taking decisions and not being transparent in communication. They are very dangerous.

If Uncle Ben were a team lead, the saying will go as - with great autonomy comes a great responsibility.

Psychologically Safe Environment

Have you been in a situation like this before,

I used to have a colleague who constantly establishes his superiority in conversations. Every time after we finished a problem-solving discussion or coding session, I always felt insignificant or plain dumb. I felt agitated and frustrated coming out of the conversations. I, in fact, can see how silly I have been and see how they are totally unlike me.

I took me a while to understand that there were several forces playing in such sessions. I seem to be constantly getting caught with trivial parts of conversation where superiority and sense of pride were being manipulated triggering by my survival instincts and threat responses that I lost my nature and tried to hold ground for things that are petty and useless.

While in the hindsight, I consider such cultural misfits should be straight away avoided in teams - and organisations should hire for culture, it could have well been the organisations set up and incentivisation that lead to this.

It is important to keep in mind that in any situation a team strength should be greater than the sum of individuals. Clearly not how it was with my experience above.

Organisations and hiring managers should also take a note that there are cultures wherein educational systems could lead to this behavior, e.g., overly competitive individuals may have arisen from school systems that force rank their students and award individuals based on those rankings. These practices – ingrained at an early age – are many times detrimental to team-playing behavior. So in such environments, organisation should facilitate a healthy coaching, mentoring and team developments programs as part of bringing individuals upto speed. Doing so ends up as win-win for both the organisation and the inviduals.

Personally, it took me a while to handle such personalities. But I don’t think they are necessary for the modern workplace - the threat response, the animal instinct. We want individuals to be able to give their best - threats and animal instincts are not how we want to stimulate them.

It is true that animal instincts and threats do enable living beings to deliver beyond their normal capacity like a Gazelle escaping a Leopard. One has to keep in mind though that Gazel and Leopard do not have any commonality in their goal nor do they work together.

Having members of the team playing like that means that the net strength of a team falls below the sum of the individual strengths. This quite obviously does not help build a high-performance team.

So, what do we do? It is worth ensuring that people are not threatened in their workplace. They need to feel comfortable to share their thoughts, their opinions without feeling that they are manipulated of made fun of or being noted/ignored. They need to be able to present themselves without any concern, fear or worry. Only then they can bring their best.

It definitely requires moderation and coaching especially if this is fairly new to the team or organisation, It does take its norming time between members of the team.

Hiring for culture and Leaders in the organisation have an important role in making it possible.

A psychologically safe team is one where _the net strength of a team is not just greater than the sum of their individual strengths but where it can even be exponential. Diversity plays an important role in enabling this exponential strength.

Building a sense of team

Providing Psycologically safe environment is a start. It is like a tendered and a cured ground where diverse seeds are just starting to grow. They need moderation, they need to understand their roles in the game. They need to know that they are going to hunt together. They need to form that relationship. They need to understand each other. They need to be able to pick up, what is to be ignored when said by an individual vs another. Learn and adapt to understand how individuals express their thoughts, what is their norm etc. This happens in every relationship but teams are not an exception.

If not supported, they will still form given a clear goal, good environment and good hiring practice, but it will take its own time. This stage is pretty much a curing stage - where it is only about enabling the teams.

Scrum and Agile processes excelled in these areas at the beginning of that era. Team building exercises, team outings, social functions, ceremonies help build them. They expedite the process of forming and norming.

An observer plays an important role in understanding the stages of forming and norming and facilitating that process - commonly labelled as a responsibility of scrum master or agile coach.

When they are ready, they know how to hunt as a pack. They will know how to get work done leveraging individuals strengths and organise themselves around it.

Supporting a team in their Pursuit

Here is a role of leader, who has established a clear goal and set up a team that is pursuing it. Like any story goes, the team goes through challenges. Challenges that sometimes question the purpose of the team, sometimes test the fabric of togetherness in the team, that sometimes tries to swallow the team.

They require help. Sometimes they know exactly what they need, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, they can explain what they need and sometimes they can’t explain it clearly. Even sometimes what they think they want can’t be taken at a face value.

This is where a Leaders ability comes to test. Like a child, they sometimes look up for help. I knew a leader who is just amazing in this quality. He plays an entertainers role in the team and fixes things.

Let me tell about him. We were working on fix bid time sensitive project at that time. The team has been awesome and getting things done at a great pace. But as pressure against the delivery date started building, there was a sense of tension that built up on the floor. You can sense people getting frustrated, tired and are going to break. This Manager who has least knowledge about the technology, business domain that we are working on was very innovative. He started involving in the day to day ceremonies more activity, bringing humour and fun was the only objective he played. Within the matter of a few weeks, there were many random, impromptu treats and celebrations and fun.

While there were reservations at the beginning on how it was not helpful, at the end everyone enjoyed it. In the hindsight, It helped loosen the pressure, relieved tension and let the team keep firing at the rate it was doing without breaking down. Overall the team delivered a high value leading to a multi-million business to the organisation.

It taught me that there is not just one way to support a team. The narrative is important when the team is struggling - they need support and the leaders support them.

Here are few things, I have seen or did to support a team,

• Be entertainers when tension builds up in the team
• Support by providing training
• Support by providing some perks and incentives to keep them motivated
• Bringing external experts to help the situation
• Organising team activities
• Moderating incentives and KPI’s
• Most of all staying and checking in with the team.
• Ensuring they understand the importance of work they do for the business
• Share motivating and tell them how valuable they are for the organisation
• Negotiating the scope and outcomes

This list is not definitely exhaustive.

Do Anything That They Set Their Minds On

This may sound like a bit exaggeration, I agree, but you know what we are humans. We have learnt in several times in the past that nothing is impossible.

We just need the time, effort, support and the environment to get there. Sometimes they are viable and sometimes they are not viable. That is all the difference is.

Let’s go conquer!

A Piece of Request

If you find any piece of this write up doesn’t stack up, confusing or not clear, please let me know. I am happy to learn, correct, explain, understand and ensure the content written makes sense.