On Tour-de-France
Strategies on keeping people in the same caliber, because it doesn’t matter how good you are if the rest of the team is shit. We fail and succeed together.
Note on the delay of publishing this one: I created the skeleton for the series of 7 posts back in October, and when I got round to this 4th installment, things happened at work that hit very close to the topic of this post. Suddenly, I found myself alone without peers as they took personal time out from work due to stress and burn out. After unpacking my initial emotional reaction and dealing with the vacuum their absence left, I’m doing pretty well and learning from others’ mistakes as well as my own. Here it is, the post with reflections, vulnerabilities and everything else.
I often take sports metaphor into my own team-building strategies and rituals. For this post, I specifically drew parallels between the ranking system for multi-stage bike races, like the Tour de France, that awards the effort of a whole team, rather than the performance of the individual riders, and the successful leading of cross-functional teams in tech or product organisations.
As a leader, I’m in the business of transforming teams and workforce. In my current context, I’m on a mission to build the X team with skilled and talented team members and grow the UX/design maturity in the organisation.
My playground is the gap between the organisation’s UX maturity and my own UX maturity.
Understanding the performance of the team I lead is one thing. Knowing what makes each team member effective, and how intense interactions with others can amplify their strengths and narrow their gaps. Together we create rituals to sharpen craft and identify opportunities where beautiful interactions can happen.
It’s a whole other thing to transform equally across the disciplines. I look beyond the immediate team that I lead and observe how other (functional) teams perform. Are they worthy “opponents”? Are they in the same caliber as the team I’m growing?
How well-versed are our product designers in the UI language used by designers and front-end devs? To what extent are designers fluent in understanding business goals and corporate strategy? Are product managers as skilled in their craft as the designers and researchers are in theirs? If not, how do we support and grow individuals so that we are able to volley the ball back and forth in a fluid game? So many companies fail at supporting people.
Here are four practices to help you manage down, sideways and upwards when it comes to growing talented individuals that perform effectively in cross-functional teams.
Practice #1. Mind the gap. Going back to the premise of a system that awards the effort of a whole team, rather than the performance of the individual riders, mind the gap between teams because this is going to kick your butt later.
Maintain the “comfortable” gap. For my current context, I’ve discovered that our sweet spot is the X-team being three steps ahead of everyone else. Less than this, the project leads start to lose sight of the big picture as they get swallowed up in the day-to-day. More than three steps, we start to lose the colleagues we’re guiding in the first place.
It can be hard work, but as a leader, you need to learn how to pull on the brakes and when to step on the gas.
Manage up and fill the gap with support from senior leadership. A performance gap is easier to deal with, rather than a missing team or capability altogether. Missing content design? Craft the purpose and outcome statements, recruit for the position(s), and hold space for the team to do their work for getting that outcome.
Manage sideways across disciplines. Unbalanced skillset between disciplines resulting in team members having to do other people’s homework? Have those conversations with your peers. Are they first-time or inexperienced managers? Help them grow their teams, give them cheat sheets on how you run your teams. If you’re both equally lost, ask for outside help.
One way I solved this was throwing a cross-functional group of people into the same Behavioural Science training. Having only designers and researchers in the training would severely limit adoption of the practice. By having product managers, marketers, designers and researchers together in the same training, they learn the same skillset and have the vocabulary that they can practice together. This ties into Practice 2 below.
Practice #2. Maximise exposure time. When people work together in cross-functional project teams, these hours of exposure weaves the connection fabric out of moments of understanding and empathy, moments of rapport and problem-solving, moments of emotional reactions and moving forward, or backwards, as a group.
Spread the good stuff. Is it about dismantling an effective team to seed those influencers across other teams? Is it putting people whose paths wouldn’t ordinarily cross into a short-but-intense collaborations? Sometimes it’s both. You’ll learn what works for your context.
Make and hold space for these short-but-intense collaborations. I’m a fan of workshops where teams are encouraged to go through sensemaking, relating, visioning and inventing processes together. By doing these regularly, we start to speak the same language, with different research/design/product dialects.
Practice #3. Be ruthless in giving feedback: you can’t afford not to. The cost can be high when people aren’t performing. My past blindspot to a colleague’s adequate performance may have contributed to their burnout. Not giving people concrete and tangible feedback gives them a false sense of where they are and how they’re doing.
Normalise feedback-giving. Start with always having a 5-minute debrief or feedback session after workshops, presentations, design critiques. Make it a habit.
Come from a place of curiosity: “How did you learn to do that thing? It was great, I’m going to steal it…” and “I sensed there was nervousness. Was that so? Can we help reduce nervousness for next time?”
Using the principles of non-violent communication here has proven effective to me.
Don’t give untimely, unsolicited feedback. When the negative feedback is unexpected, due to it being unsolicited or it surfaces a complete blindspot to the person involved, people can be propelled into an emotional state where any further dialogue is blocked, and they are unable to hear the message due to the method of delivery.
Don’t give people a shit sandwich. Just don’t. Don’t tell them what they’re good at, followed by what they’re terrible at.
Practice #4. Find worthy sparring partners. It can be a steep curve, so find as many sparring partners as you want or need to. It’s okay to outgrow or be outgrown by people. People grow at different rates and it’s normal to outgrow others or be outgrown by others. Someone you enjoy a casual evening run with, might not the training partner you’d want if you are prepping for your first marathon race.
What is the fun of sparring with someone who you know you will beat every single sparring session? You want someone you can have a productive back-and-forth with. Someone who is good at things you aren’t so you can learn. Someone inventive and resilient who’s always got something up their sleeve to keep you on your toes.
I keep returning to these hard lessons.
- It doesn’t matter how good you are if the rest of the team is shit.
- We fail and succeed as a team, and as an organisation.
