Building and sustaining High performing Teams
Six elements of building teams that are high performing and leadership behaviours that sustain that performance over time
A NotebookLM generated Audio podcast of the article is available here :
Literature says High Performing teams are those who achieve exceptional results through strong collaboration, have high trust among the members who also keep each other accountable. These teams have clear goals to achieve and they practise continuous improvement through learning cycles.
Let us first understand what High Performing teams are all about in more detail. I would like to first present something from a non related field “Urban Planning” where Dr. Stefano Cozzolino, a City planner, refers to four distinct aspects of Urban Planning that makes a city well designed and effective.
These aspects are:
Layout of streets allowing people to move between the different parts of city swifty without congestion,
The diversity of people occupying the city and their vibrancy with activities, rituals and energy a.k.a. “vibrancy of people”
Certain set of aligned rules and guidelines followed by the people and what the city planning keeps in mind to keep the city safe and accessible for all, and finally
Incorporating the element of change over time when the city will have more people and change of demographic effectively the city plan that enables change.
Dr. Stefano Cozzolino argues that the above are four aspects that define a well planned urban setting. I want to use this analogy to also explain the key aspects of a high performing team.
The two aspects it borrows from urban planning is the vibrancy of people and the need to embrace change over time. The focus on layout of streets from Urban planning parlance can be framed as how people interact and collaborate on problems in a team setting. This means, a high performing team is also mindful and deliberate about how it is set up and its rituals to embrace its team members to work together and collaborate without being in silo. Lastly, the fourth aspect is that the teams are brought to effectiveness through an alignment of a common mission and purpose. So if you are building teams that need to be high performing, you need to keep in mind these four aspects and be deliberate about getting these aspects right all the time.
Now, let us dive deeper into the process of building high performing teams.
The first element is feedback and being candid is critical for the team to be high performing. I would like to bring two different pieces of literature here, which I believe, is well known for those who are familiar with the concepts of team building. The book Radical Candor and the Culture Map are very relevant and authoritative in their influence to modern teams. If you combine the learning from both these books, the message is clear : Be aware of culture differences when being candid. In a diverse team, when we have people from different cultures and backgrounds, there is a wide variety of interpretation of feedback between people. The goal here is to remain candid while being aware of cultural interpretations. For someone who comes from a high context culture, direct feedback is often seen as too threatening and may damage the working relationship with the other. Here, adapting the tone and method based on the culture is key. Often as leaders, we want to do the right thing by being direct as a sensible default, however it comes at a cost. The right thing to do here is to establish ground rules on how feedback is received and given, and acknowledge the fact that sometimes team members will interpret feedback differently based on their culture and therefore taking the time to process and follow up on feedback establishes a better norm on the culture of being candid.
Think before you provide candid feedback to others through the following reflection questions:
Have I worked with this person to give candid feedback ?
For the feedback receiver, ask if you are approaching the feedback from a curiosity stance ?
For the feedback giver, ask if the feedback you are about to give may be better to give it offline in an in-person setting ?
Am I approaching the feedback in a way that could break down the conversation ?
The second element demonstrates a deep care for everything around them and even extending to things that they do not own or directly influence. To build this ability to care, it is critical to inculcate the curiosity of the value chain. You can address this by instilling a few practices including holding KPI review meetings where all participate so that everyone knows how the business makes money.
We expect engineers to understand the health of the business and connect with the impact of their work on the business outcomes, and identify sensible trade offs when things go wrong. One other way you can build this ability to care, is by having engineers working very closely with the non technical stakeholders. Engineers should build capabilities that create moats for the business. Technology teams must focus on building differentiators for their area of business. Building for the sake of building is sub-optimal.
I remember vividly an example of such care when I joined a company to realise that engineers were testing the shoes that the company produces in their home and giving feedback to shoe developers, even though the engineers were far away from the process of shoe development. This reminds me of someone who advised me very early about having people who are passionate advocates and an obsessed critic at the same time. This is not a common skill, but something that can be groomed over time. One of the ways you can groom this is by enabling “Permissionless Serendipity”, a way for your teams to run into problems of their choice by enabling them to partner with other parts of the organisation freely without permission.
The third element is one of my favourites and is something I learnt quite late in my leadership journey. In fact, I would have given you different advice in my early years in my leadership career. Often as leaders, we are quick to jump into a conflict with the intention to resolve, and we see our successes through the number of conflicts we resolve. However, each conflict is an opportunity for your team to grow their skills in constructive resolution. I often see early intervention from a leader in a conflict as a sign of coddling - a behaviour to overprotect your team members and seeing a conflict as a bad thing. Healthy conflicts are a true sign of your team members working with each other, and with a vibrant team, healthy conflicts are expected. I am not saying to let conflicts brew constantly, and have it affect the morale of the team. But rather, acknowledge that disagreements are welcome and constructive debate on topics that matter are extremely important for the functioning of the team. The team also needs to know how to recognize moments where conflicts that need external intervention and escalation to instil a bias to act. This enables conflicts to not distract the team towards acting and moving forward, rather than being paralysed by the heavy lifting of a conflict.
The fourth element of the puzzle to make teams high performing is to break the notion of what engineers are particularly asked to perform as their role. Some say Talk is cheap. I add that Code is expensive, so focus on solving problems and see code as a means to that end, but not necessarily the only means. In high performing teams, while swimlanes exist for different roles that have their expectations, a strict adherence to those expectations at all times affect the functioning of such teams. Engineers influencing the Design, and Design influencing Product and all the permutations and combinations is how great teams operate. So consider Roles being fluid, where each role has a weak influence on other role’s outputs, and strong influence on the output of their own role.
A quick break to selfishly promote my leadership bootcamp…….
I run a Leadership Bootcamp on Maven, a 2 day 6 hours live course for leaders looking to sharpen their skills and folks who are just starting. The course is rated as 4.8 with around 100 students so far. Join here : https://maven.com/vivekjuneja/inyourshoes/
Rituals are central to making high performing teams to function. These rituals represent habitual occurrences in the team that enable productivity and bonding. Rituals are essentially tools to build the connective tissues for your teams, and reassert why they work together to solve hard problems. Whether the ritual allows your team to plan days to do something out of the ordinary to recharge (Slack does Customer Love sprint) or a regular trip with the whole team for a hike, small or big, rituals may seem pointless, but teams often treat them vital and sacred for their success. The fourth element of building high performing teams involves setting up rituals - big or small does not matter. Name your rituals, celebrate it and embrace the periodicity of it.
High performing teams perform as a sports team, and care as a family member. Netflix, as part of their culture, models themselves as a sports team and not like a family because family is about unconditional love. Operating teams as a family makes it harder to make tough choices when members are not performing and accepts low performance without any actions. My take is that while teams should model the behaviour of sports teams, they must care for each other like members do in a close knit family. To operate as a sports team, team members must constructively challenge each other, keep them accountable, and should have comfort with conflict. When the performance of a team member drops, they need to be given the opportunity to improve through support and coaching before asking them to step out by finding another opportunity. While being a sports team, each member should be empathetic and an active listener to the other members, be generous with their time and offer support to the other in the time of need. This is the fifth element of high performing teams.
Digital and Physical spaces both matter. In the world of return to work (RTO) mandates, often teams get into debates of which model to pursue and which is better. High performing teams leverage the digital and physical spaces to its best use, and is the sixth element behind it. Physical spaces allow people to bounce back their energies, and build authentic relationships, while Digital spaces allow people to develop and embrace the rhythm of getting things done at their own time. Both spaces matter.
What can leaders do to build and sustain high performing teams ? First, hire people who are attracted by problems and not just the prospect of perks and opportunities. Leaders share the hardest problems and challenges to potential team members, and evaluate how they react to that. They look for how the candidate responds to those problems, the questions they ask, the approach they take, often noticing what they say they do when dealing with problems potentially outside their influence areas. Secondly, leads give responsibility instead of tasks. They ask their teams to take ownership to solve a problem without pointing them to specific solutions. Thirdly, leaders incentivize behaviours that help sustain high performance by championing and sharing examples that they believe inspires people to act. Often these behaviours are part of shared values and principles that the team uses to resolve conflicts and make decisions. Lastly, leaders swiftly act to address consistent low performance by approaching with candidness and care.
What else do you think leaders can do to build and sustain high performing teams ?
This is a shorter version of my talk “Building and Sustaining High performing teams” at Tech Leadership Summit in Zurich in November 2024.
A NotebookLM generated Audio podcast is available here :