Building High Performing Teams
The Three Pillars: Individual, Team, and Organisation
When I launched this newsletter, I knew from prior similar endeavours that for me to launch this successfully, I’d need to develop a backlog of content upfront that I could publish - the reason being that it would give me a buffer for any weeks that I have competing priorities and also set me up for success from the start rather than risking feeling overwhelmed and falling back before I get going.
Well it’s week 2(!) and already I’ve decided the articles I pre wrote don’t feel right for my second week (put this down to me discovering and refining a writing style I’m comfortable with). Instead I’ve chosen to write what’s top of my mind and hit the publish button straight after - probably further from my comfort zone that I’d like to be, but being comfortable is boring so here we go!
I was talking to someone recently about my take on building high performing teams. This is a big topic and something one could write a book on and still have words to share, many have!
I thought I’d use this week’s writing and reflection slot to break down how I approach the opportunity to build high performing teams. As an Engineering Leader, this is perhaps one of the most enjoyable parts of the role - it’s equal measures of challenging and rewarding.
The 3 levels - Individual, Team, Organisation
The framework I’ve developed fits into 3 levels. Each of these need to be optimised to support the development of ‘high performance’. In isolation these create pockets of excellence, but when focusing on high performing teams, all 3 need to be aligned and considered.
What is a team?
At its most basic level, a team is a group of people with a common purpose and mutual dependency.
A group of people with a common purpose and mutual dependency.
If you have a common purpose but no dependency, you have an association or a coalition.
If you rely on one another but have no common purpose, you have a network or community.
This presents an interesting lens on a team when discussing goals and mapping/developing skills. For a team to hit the criteria of a common goal and mutual dependency, there needs to be an ambitious enough goal that it takes the collective efforts and skills of the team to deliver it. If the goal could be delivered with half the team, the mutual dependency is diminished and they’re unlikely to work as well as a team unit.
Team of teams
Describing a team using common purpose/mutual dependency is useful as it means, at least in a work environment, that most people are likely members of multiple teams.
Why is this relevant? For leaders, you’ll have squads working to deliver team goals, you may also have multiple squads working to deliver department goals. You may have multiple departments working to deliver organisational goals. Following the prior description, each of these units are in theory a team and should be supported in this way.
At each of these levels can you/they answer - Who am I? Who are we? What are we here to do?
Does everyone answer these questions in the same way? Is there organisational clarity and alignment?
Are the goals at the individual, team, department and organisational level in alignment and amplifying one another, or are they creating conflict? When this happens, how easily is it managed?
Start with the individuals
A team starts with a group of individuals. It’s the collective contribution of those individuals and the way they come together that makes a high performing team.
At an individual level, when considering how to develop drive and motivation and thus performance, I default to the work of Dan Pink who proposes we focus on - Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Autonomy
There’s 2 places I start. First - flooding individuals with CONTEXT. I’m a strong believer that context is king and I have lived experience of working with both an excess of and a lack of context. I’ll always choose the excess - it enables far better decision making, less rework, less frustration and more innovation.
Share context on the business, on company performance, on strategy and change, on the wider market, on things happening across the team and department, on your own internal thoughts. Anything I have access to as a leader, that isn’t sensitive (there should be a high bar for this) should be shared with individuals/teams. With context, individuals can work autonomously without constantly checking they aren’t missing important information or asking for permission because things are being withheld without good reason. They’ll be less likely to doubt themselves and more likely to take calculated risks which could pay off.
Secondly - Situational Leadership. Simply put, adjusting my leadership style to the individual. Autonomy shouldn’t feel like abandonment. For some individuals, having strong direction from a leader can still sit alongside the feeling of autonomy. For others, it’s appropriate to delegate and if you don’t, you’ll be stealing away autonomy for no good reason.
With fluid context and effect deployment of situational leadership, the first key steps to creating autonomy are in motion.
Mastery
My experience suggests the vast majority are motivated to work for good reasons. They’re working to learn, grow, spend time with interesting people with shared interests and work on things that make an impact and create meaning/purpose.
I approach Mastery in a couple of complementary ways:
Working with individuals to understand their goals and dreams and agree challenging development objectives that enable them to develop mastery in the areas they’re most interested.
With the understanding garnered from (1), creating opportunities via business objectives/projects to support the development of these skills/experiences through real life work. Marrying the individual and their motivations and goals with the opportunities available across a business is where the magic happens :)
Purpose
Often, an individuals ‘why’ will come out through conversations about the skills they’re working to master. Ultimately, it’s hopeful your team members have joined your organisation and team because the organisational purpose aligns with things that matter to them. Even where this is clearly the case and indisputable, it’s still important to help clarify and tell a story on how the individual is making a contribution to the organisations purpose (picture the janitor saying they help put a person on the moon). Often, particularly in large organisations, the wider organisations purpose can feel quite abstract at an individual level so exploring this can help surface ways to effectively frame this so it still supports individual purpose.
There’s a forth lens on the individual, which is self awareness, introspection and meta-cognition (thoughts about thoughts). Perhaps these loosely fit under the ‘Mastery’ heading - mastering self. Coaching has been a great way to bring these topics into focus with individuals and is often the most appropriate means to manage performance challenges at an individual level.
The Team
I could argue that the team level is more complex than the individual. At an individual level, you have a known entity. You have direct feedback channels, single brains to interpret and a 1:1 communication channel. At the team level, you’re unleashing these unique individuals and aiming to define an environment that gets the best out of them as a group. Suddenly the communication isn’t directed back at you, there’s unseen events and behaviours, patterns are forming and preferences getting embedded.
Focusing on the environment and culture within the team, here’s where I first set my sights:
Feedback. I see this as the cornerstone of growth and improvement. My job is to encourage regular and ‘radically candid’ feedback (high in both care and challenge) and normalise this across the team.
Learning about and respecting individual differences. I want team members to understand themselves and their preferences, but also understand the same of their team. Knowing that one responds best to data, another likes to focus on the creative experiences of solving a problem and another thinks people first before anything else means team members learn how to interact and bring the best from each other rather than finding it an annoyance.
Creating an environment where all voices are equal. This means ensuring everyone gets a chance to speak and be heard, conversations are respectful and the backgrounds and experiences of the team are celebrated and used to their competitive advantage.
Psychological safety. Communication is the critical dialogue of a team and members being comfortable being themselves and avoiding the cognitive load of masking unlocks this. In an environment where psychological safety prevails, ideas are aired and celebrated without fear of negative consequences. Problems are surfaced and discussed openly - leading to continuous improvement and innovation.
Clear Metrics, Goals and a team relevant Strategy. Metrics and goals can be used as a means of focusing minds and efforts, creating a multiplying force where team members are pulling in the same direction. A team relevant Strategy comes from understanding team challenges and opportunities, where they fit within the organisation, how they can deploy their strengths to create advantage and can be used to build energy, motivation and momentum towards a better future.
Playing to Strengths. There’s far more variety in humans than there are role descriptions on a typical Org Chart. Whilst having clear roles and responsibilities are helpful, I like using them in combination with deploying people to where their natural strengths and interests are. If a PM is naturally great at Design, or an Engineer is naturally great at interacting with users, celebrate and enable this. Equally, where there are tasks in a team that no one wants to do, creating fairness by distributing these on a rota is a good way to cover all bases without individuals carrying the load.
Recognition. Building in room for recognition and praise from the outset, with variety and surprise is a great way to develop high performance and nurture more of the high performing behaviours being sought. Getting this right is hard. Work is busy and recognition is often the first thing that gets overlooked. Equally too much praise without substance waters it down, hence the need for relevant praise, and variety so it get’s noticed and is meaningful. I love asking managers “When’s the last time you took specific time out of your day to say thanks to someone” - the answer often takes a while to surface which suggests recognition probably isn’t in the place it needs to be.
Work-life balance. Particularly in creative problem solving roles, healthy minds and bodies are absolutely critical to developing high performance. This doesn’t come from repeatedly working 16 hour days and working until people are running on empty. Teams are typically long term constructs and whilst surges of energy and focus can be effective and rewarding, a deliberate approach to a sustainable work life balance is far more effective over the long term.
This isn’t a conclusive list, but it’s not a bad start :)
The Organisation
It’s worth noting this article isn’t ordered by priority of execution. Whilst individuals and team is the obvious place to start, understanding organisational goals, dependencies and opportunities likely need to happen in parallel to ensure the individuals and team are being configured relevant to the environment they exist in.
I’m not going to go so deep on this element - I’ll save this for a future article. However under the organisation heading my focus is typically on the following key areas:
Wider organisational goals and metrics/performance. This helps inform team strategy and ensures the team is adapting in a way that makes sense for the organisational direction.
Dependencies. Which other teams are critical to my team’s success. How closely do they operate together? How easily are communications flowing? Are there any teams dependent on mine and can I frame them as a customer to ensure we’re satisfying their needs?
Networks and relationships. Where and who do I need to be influencing to support my team’s success? Where do I focus to ensure stability and ongoing investment? What stories do I need to tell to ensure continued interest and excitement about their work? What relationships do I need to encourage at a team level?
What organisational opportunities exist that I can pursue to drive change for the benefit of my team? Perhaps there are processes owned by alternate departments that are slowing them down or conflicting projects that need alignment.
Organisation wide ways of working and ceremonies. Setting a team up in a way that complements the cycles (planning, learning, delivery) an organisation typically goes through to create a more seamless flow.
Across all these levels, Organisation culture plays a big part here and that’s often difficult to change from the ground up. This is where a leadership role is so critical. It offers the ability to read what’s happening across teams, combined with the influence to nudge culture in the direction that unlocks more success. Whilst this article isn’t a comprehensive run down on high performance team building, my experience suggests that starting from these first principles and not overcomplicating the challenge often gets you 80% of the way there. The final 20% falls into organisation and individual uniqueness and often needs a tailored approach.
I’d love to hear your take on this challenge! What works for you and are any one of the points I referenced here particularly relevant for your current context?