High Performing Teams
What’s not to love?
“a team is more than a group of people who work together. A high performing team is a group of people who share a common vision, goals, metrics and who collaborate, challenge and hold each other accountable to achieve outstanding results” — the Center for Organizational Design
From a commercial stand-point, high performing teams are a must to deliver the kind of demands customers require, or that organisation will not survive. Small to medium-sized organisations are perhaps more acutely aware of this and will introspect on what they need to be successful. The “be successful or die” is an excellent drive for this and invokes a focus on the need to improve continually, reap results for the customer and have data not only to prove this continued evolution but also to use as a marketing tool.
As we consider enterprise organisations, the urgency to continuously improve one’s worth and value to the customer in some respects can be diminished and the struggle of teams being extrapolated too far away from the actual customer can dull the senses of that once felt urgency for survival. This can result in a reduction of the commercial mindset and a lack of motivation for team performance. In the extreme, it can manifest itself in a real aversion to team ownership of continuous improvement and any measures of high performance, much less publicising these.
It’s interesting to observe teams that introspect on the following three things, kick-start a drive for continuous improvement and high performance.
- Removing barriers to get closer to the actual customer and their needs and increasing the the perception of relatedness to the challenges at hand
- Becoming experts in their field of technical mastery and therefore improving both their overall competence and confidence levels
- Gaining a sense of autonomy to make decisions about how they deliver impactful solutions to the customer
According to Deci and Ryan (1985 & 2017) relatedness, competence, and autonomy, are key factors in increasing an individual’s or a group, intrinsic, motivation. Important to a sense of well-being, and assuring a continued drive to optimal performance.
“software delivery is an exercise in continuous improvement, and our research shows that year over year the best keep getting better, and those who fail to improve fall further and further behind.” — Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, building and scaling High performing Technology organisations
For teams that are in the business of creating digital solutions to solve real business problems, check out the body of work that’s been done around 4 key metrics for teams to get a real focus on their performance. Thoughtworks technology radar suggests the ‘Adoption’ of the 4 key metrics outlined in the Accelerate book and describes it as follows.
The thorough State of DevOps reports have focused on data-driven and statistical analysis of high-performing organisations. The result of this multiyear research, published in Accelerate, demonstrates a direct link between organisational performance and software delivery performance. The researchers have determined that only four key metrics differentiate between low, medium and high performers: lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to restore (MTTR) and change fail percentage. Indeed, we’ve found that these four key metrics are a simple and yet powerful tool to help leaders and teams focus on measuring and improving what matters. A good place to start is to instrument the build pipelines so you can capture the four key metrics and make the software delivery value stream visible.
If you want a place to start on your journey to high performance, check out these 4 metrics to drive your team continuous improvement journey. Use these only as a place to start and add in others that give a rounded coverage of what really makes you ‘elite’ in your field.
