High performing teams take time and commitment to develop

Like flowers in a garden, teams will only thrive when the conditions are conducive to growth.

You can’t simply demand a team be autonomous and expect them to perform from day one, especially if they have not worked this way before.

High performing teams need:

A Sense of Purpose

All teams need a reason for being. Each member of the team need to be able to answer the question, what do you do and why is that valuable?

Give teams a clear mission and priorities. Focus on giving them the why and allow them to be self-organising around what and how.

Open Communication

For teams to self-organise, they need to be able to discuss their ideas and thoughts without fear.

Open communication requires excellent listening skills, mutual respect and trust.

Trust and Mutual Respect

All harmful, passive-aggressive and destructive behaviours are all a symptom of a lack of trust and mutual respect amongst team members.

Avoid treating the symptoms by considering why people are behaving the way they are.

Shared Leadership

Even within an autonomous team, there will be times when leadership is required.

Spreading leadership responsibilities across team balances the power dynamics keeping leaders humble and open to ideas and suggestions from others.

It also reduces decision bottlenecks and key person dependencies.

Strong Values & Complementary Skills

Autonomous teams need to be diverse yet cohesive. Often this requires individual members of a team to have conflicting opinions while upholding a shared set of team values.

Having shared values allows teams to challenge each other safely while having many alternative perspectives means you avoid groupthink.

Practice having strong opinions, loosely held.

Lean & Effective Processes

Avoid confusion and stop re-inventing the wheel, have a documented process and commit to improving it over time.

Don’t let your process go stale and keep it lean. A process that people don’t understand or follow is a process that may as well not exist.

Flexibility & Adaptability

Things change, and if they don’t, you should automate them.

Change can be challenging, and many people struggle with uncertainty. High performing teams need to become comfortable with the unexpected and have a healthy approach to dealing with it.

Continuous learning

Having a learning culture and a growth mindset is the leading indicator of team success. With it — teams can improve, without it — they can’t.

Hi, I’m Ben. By day, I’m the Founder & Head of Product Innovation at Beaker & Flint, where I help organisations design and deliver amazing customer experiences. By night you can find me running a trail or tinkering with code.

If this post sparked a question or idea you want to run by me, I’d love to chat it over with you. Reach out via the comments below or start a conversation via email here.