Leading high-performance teams in overdrive

This is not a motivational article, and despite most of the readings on leadership, we won’t focus on the leader. For high-performance teams, leaders are the gears that compose the engine, where none are better than the others, but rather simply have a different charge. When we talk about high-performance teams we’re not referring to a specific gear, but the engine, so let’s start understanding this mechanism.

Everything is changing very fast, new technologies and trends are launched every day, people have a huge ocean of buying possibilities. Your company is in this ocean swimming alongside others, and what determines the ones that swim and the ones that get drowned is the ability to quickly adapt to the different circumstances the market brings.

The market is an invisible monster, it has its own wills, and it moves hastily in hard to predict directions. You need to move quickly if you don’t want to be left behind… but arms aren’t enough in this swimming race. To move fast you need an awesome engine filled with the most powerful fuel on Earth: human creativity.

All you need are people willing to download their brains, different experiences to mix, talents to donate all their effort and commitment to your company. You have money, you can pay them what they desire, so why are they running away from you? My guess is that you are using the wrong incentives, these people aren’t full and therefore automatically not stimulated by ordinary stuff. We’re talking about “Smart Creatives”, a concept introduced in the book “How Google Works” to define the employee profile they have there. The good news is that there are lots of them. The bad news…They’re extremely hard to lead.

In a nutshell, a Smart Creative is someone that dominates all the job’s processes and required tools, uses this knowledge to generate new hypothesis and controlled tests, knows how to sell their product since they’re super convinced of its benefits, and as consumers, have a deep understanding of the client’s mindset. The book lists lots of traits that build a Smart Creative, but probably the strongest one is that the Smart Creatives are constantly challenging the status quo. They need a reason, a “why”, a cause for working, and it is your job as a leader to give it to them, but just as the status quo, you yourself will also be challenged.

I’ve been working with Smart Creatives for a long time, and along this period I developed three suppositions that have helped me in my day-to-day with them:

1. People are trustable and committed
2. People are with you because they want to be
3. People will have better ideas than yours

People are trustable and committed

If you’re leading Smart Creatives you’re probably working on a high impact project (otherwise, they probably wouldn’t have joined you) and high impact projects always demand solving complex problems. If you find yourself in this situation, you should be placing 100% of your efforts on the organization’s Maslow’s pyramid problems, meaning the most complex ones, and for that, you need to trust your team is working with ethics and properly following all the company’s processes without needing your constant review. There’s a word for that: complicity, which is for me the most basic factor for successful projects, but for a significant part of leaders, they call this a competitive advantage. They invest lots of money, time and effort to keep this trusting environment alive, draining their energy from other things that really need their attention.

I’m not saying that you need to ignore actions to enhance the team’s engagement, trustiness, and a healthy working environment. I’m just saying that for high-performance teams, this is very basic. Remember that you need to swim fast if you don’t want to get blown away, and wasting time on basic stuff equates to swimming slower.

When you hire a Smart Creative, the trust and complicity come in the same package and, once you have reached it , you’ll never need to be concerned with the team’s commitment again. It might sound risky saying that you need to trust your team blindly, but in fact it is since after all your team is all you have However it’s good to remember you can significantly reduce this risk by hiring the right people, and this is definitely not easy to do.

Let’s look at Pipefy’s example. Pipefy’s Sales Department has a trainee program called Pipefy Young Guns, tailored made for 21–25 year old talents that will spend a year working as SDRs before moving on to other challenges within the company. In the last recruiting process we spent 2 months advertising the program and nearly 30 people in the company were involved in at least one of the 14 group dynamics that we had over a two week period. We had more than 1.500 candidates, and in addition to the group dynamics, we also had an interview with each of the 52 best from the dynamics. After two days of looking at the pictures of the 52 interviewees we finally made a decision. In the 7 months since then, we haven’t had any commitment or trustiness issues with any of the 14 selected.

All the time that we might have been spent over the last 7 months monitoring the team to ensure their engagement was transferred to those 2 months in a super-focused recruiting process. I’d say that’s a very good long-term investment.

People are with you because they want to be

It’s a supply and demand mindset. Smart Creatives know that they are different, they have all kinds of companies after them. The hunt for talented people is where Coca-Cola competes against Ford, Nasa against M&M’s, and Pipefy versus McDonald’s. These people aren’t with you because you’re paying more. Actually, there are lots of companies that could be paying more, so you need to consider that if a talented employee is with you, it’s because they really want to.

Now imagine that you hired a new talented employee. There’s always the “honeymoon phase”, where everything is well until they start noticing things aren’t perfect. That dreamy phase of the first days starts becoming a routine, and to keep the fire lit, your new Smart Creative will need to sustain their motivation not just on the immeasurable stuff that we described in the previous idea, but also throughout all the positive exchanges they make with other people in the company. Everyone likes being part of a tribe, and every tribe has its own culture. Awesome people need awesome culture, which is the second huge factor for the a Smart Creative’s satisfaction: The Company Culture.

Strong company cultures aren’t made simply with a cool social media strategy, yoga sessions, pets in the office, and motivational messages written on the walls. Talented people like these things, but it’s crucial for them to have a feeling of looking around and thinking “oh my god, there’s a lot of good people working here”; or “I have a lot to learn with all these people”.

Hiring and maintaining talented people working in your company is the best weapon in the search for more talented people. Everyone knows someone very special. Think, for a second, of the most special person you know…Where does this person work? This company must have something unique for having being chosen by this person, right? I bet more people think like this, and would at least be interested in getting to know more about this place.

This is the type of job announcement that attracts a Smart Creative:

The story behind this image comes from Ernest Shackleton, British polar explorer that in the beginning of the 20’ century supposedly published this announcement in newspapers searching for men for one of his expeditions to the Antarctic, and after a few days had more than 5.000 respondents. Well, no one knows if the story is true, but the challenge and the unsafe scenario proposed in the announcement is exactly what catches the eye of the people that think outside of the box. Smart Creatives are dreamers and need to stay among other dreamers to feel comfortable.

The book “How Google Works” tells a short story that explains very well the power of their company culture:

One day at the Google’s headquarter, the former CEO Larry Page was making some random searches on Google, just to test the accuracy of the Google Ads, a new resource that the company had just launched. The problem is that when Page searched for words like “Harley Davidson”, Google returned lawyer ads, that made him flip out. Furious, he printed them as well as other situations he had found and put the papers at the office’s kitchen, where the Google’s engineers used to play pool, with the message “THESE ADS SUCK”. It was Friday, Page gathered his stuff and went home, but one of the company’s engineers (who wasn’t working on the Ads team) saw those prints and called four other engineers to do something about it.

Over the weekend a team formed of engineers from different teams worked together to fix the Ad issue. They didn’t warn Page, who just found out it was fixed on Monday when he arrived at the office. Surprised with the team’s attitude, Page said:

“It wasn’t Google’s culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place.”

People will have better ideas than yours

I’ve heard many times that depression is this century’s disease, but I would also consider another: The Ego. Ego can be good, people with high self-esteem find lots of open doors by knowing how to positively advertise themselves to the world, easily convincing others of their craziest ideas, taking on huge challenges, not being afraid of speaking in public, and because of this exposure they tend to believe they’re special, which further inflates their self-confidence.

Self-confidence is very important, but you know the difference between medicine and poison is in the dose, and in this case, the poison may cause blindness. Do you remember “The King is Naked” story? It’s about a king who was convinced by a thief to exchange his royal clothes for magic ones that only intelligent people could see. Actually, he was wearing nothing, but because of his position, no one in his village had the courage to say anything, and instead, were commending him on his new style. The only person that had the courage to say that the king was naked was a kid, who had no idea of the king’s rank. This kid was probably a Smart Creative.

To have success, leaders need people that tell them the most honest and pure truth, even if it hurts. Sometimes the leaders give bad or incomplete ideas in a team meeting and people become afraid of disagreeing, which is terrible for the company. Smart Creatives like to participate in the decisions, they feel uncomfortable doing stuff they don’t understand the reasons for (they may not agree, but they must at least comprehend the reasons for the decisions). Remember, you hired people to literally download their brains, you really need their ideas, and it’s your job to create an environment where everyone feels free to contribute…even if their contribution is telling you that you’re wrong (or naked).

Instead of being alone under the spotlight, choose sharing the stardom. Make the stage a place where people can make decisions via consensus. The director of business operations at Pipefy once told me a cool story about consensus from his MBA program. In a certain class, the professor asked the students to bet how many M&M’s were in a package. People started to bet on hugely different numbers, and in the end, the real number of M&M’s was very close to the average of the numbers that people bet. The moral of the story is very simple: making group decisions is better than make individual decisions. The theory is simple, but you know how hard it is to put this into practice.

The communication between leaders and employees is something very serious, and it was the theme of Geert Hofstede’s research, a Dutch psychologist who visited several IBM offices around the world to develop the PDI — Power Distance Index — concept. His research was published in his book “Cultures and Organizations”, where he describes 6 strong factors that define a society’s profile.

What Hofstede observed was that in a population (country, company, team) with a low PDI, the distance between leaders and the rest of the team is short. The consequence is an environment where everyone (leaders or not) feels comfortable to express sincere and authentic opinions. The hierarchy is horizontal, leaders don’t need to hide behind their roles to be respected, the communication is quick and the team’s rituals aren’t bureaucratic.

A high PDI is like the cold war: People don’t communicate precisely what they’re thinking, the team members’ position/ role carries a lot of weight, and leaders need to constantly demonstrate superiority in things that have no relation to their competence, like using top brand clothes (remember the king!).

Are you working on a high or low PDI team?

The first step

Good leaders aren’t good leaders because of a single aspect, but all the good leaders I’ve met have one aspect in common: humbleness. Humbleness is an ability, and as is the case with every ability you need to practice to get better and better. Start practicing by making observations.

My theory is that we learn a lot by making observations. If you’re leading a high-performance team, your first step is to talk with other leaders and investigate what are the good practices that they have that you can also implement for your team. Talk to your team, ask them to participate in the company’s decisions, don’t take action based on your emotions and reinforce every chance you get that everybody relies on each other to reach your project’s success. If you’re not leading, but working in a high performance team, start looking at your leader not just as a “boss”, but as a human that is susceptible to making mistakes, give them your most honest feedback with the best intention, and even sometimes allow yourself to be angry with them, while always thinking first about the company’s health.

This is the first step. Humbleness, regardless of your position. The next steps for successful teamwork depend on a sequence of things going the right way, and it’s a subject for another article. But if you want a tip: keep up the good mood.

By the way, we are hiring…

Thanks for reading, if you want to be part of a company growing in full speed, join our team. We want to meet you.