Three myths about high-performing teams
A primer on high performance
There’s a lot of talk in the industry about building high-performing teams. Everyone who has come across Accelerate [1] and DORA [2] knows that
“Elite teams are twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational performance goal”. — Accelerate
A successful engineering team achieves and exceeds organisational performance goals like profitability, productivity, market share, numbers of customers, operational efficiency etc. They also accomplish non-commercial performance goals like customer satisfaction, product quality, team satisfaction and mission achievement.
Hence, most leaders are keen to start measuring the four signals (deployment frequency, change lead time, change failure rate and time to restore service) in the hope that they’ll move faster into the elite, high-performing category.
Metrics are essential but not sufficient. It’s important to remember the 24 key capabilities that must be put in place before or alongside metrics. These capabilities are:
1. Continuous delivery
2. Architecture capabilities
3. Product and processes
4. Lean management and monitoring
5. Cultural capabilities
If you want to remember them, I’ve put them into a checklist, for a quick digest.
Aside from many books, articles and well-intended advice, I’ve also come across a few myths about how high-performance teams are built and grown. I’m sure other managers have encountered some of these as well, and perhaps others.
Below I’m listing the three most misguided ideas I’ve heard so far, with references to industry and behavioural research to back up my thoughts.
Let’s bust some myths!
Myth #1: Managers turn individuals and teams into high-performers.
Businesses hire managers to build high-performing organisations and deliver the expected business results.
In high-impact technology ventures, there are two key performance areas to address:
1. Human: individual, team and organisation performance
2. Software: system and delivery performance
Both areas are essential and each area has its own set of challenges. Each manager has their own experiences, personality and skills to solve them. One size doesn’t fit all. Companies that hire diverse managers increase profits by about 20%. [3]
To achieve organisational performance companies require strong leadership, to understand the trade-offs, make tough choices and communicate those choices upstream and downstream with both grace and confidence.
Managers manage people, so let’s examine the human component, at both the individual and team levels.
At an individual level, high performance is the result of work satisfaction combined with intrinsic motivation. To make it more memorable, I put it as a formula:
Individual performance = Work Satisfaction x Intrinsic Motivation
Work satisfaction comes from a workplace environment that ensures psychological safety and offers autonomy for people to make decisions and assume accountability, continuous feedback, recognition, competitive benefits and equal access to meaningful career growth opportunities.
Intrinsic motivation naturally belongs to the individual. The manager can coach folks on how to increase their own motivation, for example, ensuring that they understand the meaning of their work and the contribution to the whole. However, intrinsic motivation it’s not a switch a manager can just turn on after a few 1:1s.
This is where the values fit interviews help. Managers can screen for folks who have demonstrable intrinsic motivation, are open-minded, curious and accept learning as a natural, constant way of life.
To sum up, managers can ensure individuals have good work satisfaction and coach them towards self-motivation, but the latter is a psychological component outside of the manager’s control.
Myth #2: Any team can be a high-performant team.
Great managers heavily influence the direction, tempo and baseline performance of a team. They recognise and coach individual talents, find differences between people’s particular abilities and interests and use those to orchestrate a high-performing team.
However, a team needs to be built in a certain way from the start to ensure it has the potential to become high performant.
High performant teams give off three key signals: energy, engagement and exploration. [4]
Energy can be measured by the number of interactions between each member. Having equally distributed energy is better than clusters of high-energy and team members who don’t participate.
In a remote context, the manager has to be more intentional about creating engagement opportunities. They can assist to maintain that energy by reducing context-switching and limiting the amount of work in progress.
Whether the manager joins an existing team or builds one from scratch, there has to be an acceptable level of energy that can be maintained and increased. Otherwise, the team has fewer chances of gaining the energy necessary for high performance.
Engagement can be measured by the number and quality of interactions and also by the diffusion of energy among team members.
In a remote context, the manager should create more engagement opportunities, for example, setting up a mix of sync and async activities (e.g. 1:1s, 3Amigos, engineering guilds, brown bag sessions etc.) and strengthen human bonds through regular team-building activities.
High engagement requires excellent team chemistry. Chemistry comes from both individual personalities and communication patterns. And while the manager can help establish good communication rules, personality is a set of individual characteristics outside of the manager’s control. Hence, managers must account for it when creating a team, through a good interview and onboarding process. #NoBrilliantAssholes.
A high performant team also requires what I call seeds. These are individuals who have high energy and high engagement. This doesn’t mean they’re extroverts, but they have a genuine interest in helping others improve. More often, they are the reliable and quiet ones (the rocks of a team) who offer their time to anyone without feeling burdened or judgemental. The fewer seeds a team has, the less likely that team will ever become a high performant one.
I would also add another component of engagement which is resilience.
Resilience is the treasure trove of good behaviours, such as the ability to learn from feedback and adapt to change quickly and effortlessly.
Resilience can be measured by the number of challenging situations a team has gone through without damage. To increase resilience, the manager must be a great facilitator and mediator and put in place good feedback loops between team members. Now imagine a team that has “feedback loops that can learn, create, design and evolve even more complex restorative structures.” This is called self-organisation and it’s the highest order of resilience. [5]
Exploration can be measured by how much teams scouts for knowledge outside and bring back that knowledge to their team. It’s about having the motivation, curiosity and energy to seek further information in various places, like other teams, professional guilds and working groups, other departments, customers, industry knowledge and also disseminate it back to the team, so they can all benefit from it. The more exploration a team engages in, the more they’ll increase their own creativity and innovation — key contributing factors to high performance.
The manager can facilitate exploration by creating cross-team working groups, dry runs with other teams, brown bag sessions, all hands, as well as mentorship opportunities between members of different teams. However, exploration does depend on psychological and behavioural factors like motivation and energy, so it can be encouraged and facilitated, but can’t be conjured up from thin air.
Myth #3: A high performant team has high performance all the time.
This is probably the hardest myth to bust, especially in highly-paced tech startups. There might be a misguided expectation for people to have high output at all times to be considered high performers. A high output doesn't mean high value but it’s the surest way to burn out.
As I mentioned, team energy is very precious and must be conserved. Even if we’re lucky enough to work in a team where there’s enough energy, there are all sorts of ways to destroy it.
A team’s high performance is not a hockey-stick curve growing to infinity. It looks more like a series of peaks and plateaus. Having periods of consolidation is essential to recharge, reflect on learnings and increase resilience. [6] Constant pressure not only doesn’t increase performance but can easily flatten it out by dissolving creativity and innovation. [7]
To sum it all up, as managers, we all strive to build high performing organisations that work on impactful undertakings delivering and exceeding the expected business value.
When the key capabilities are put in place, metrics are helpful to understand and correct the direction in which organisational performance goes over time.
Great managers can and should influence work satisfaction and coach individual and teams towards high performance. However, teams need to be built from the ground up with certain characteristics to ensure they have a high chance of hitting desirable performance. Managers are not magicians: we can’t control others’ intrinsic psychological traits like motivation, energy, engagement and resilience.
References
[1] Accelerate —The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
[2] DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)
[3] https://www.bcg.com/publications/2018/how-diverse-leadership-teams-boost-innovation
[4] The New Science of Building Great Teams
[5] Thinking in Systems: A Primer
[6] Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure
[7] Creativity Under the Gun
