5C’s Approach to Building a High Performance Team

As we are evolving into agile distributed world it has become increasingly critical to build high performance teams that can outperform expectations. Here is a 5C framework I have created to think about the key aspects.

The 5C framework includes

• Customer Centricity
• Continuous Improvement
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Celebration

Customer Centricity

The key here is correctly identify the customer — internal and external. Use customer journey maps to identify the key capabilities /functions, the value you are providing for the customers. Connecting the right data to the right decisions can help build a common understanding of customer needs into an organizational culture, fostering a virtuous cycle that reinforces customer-centricity.

Strategic Alignment with Effective Planning

This starts with defining the vision, strategy and roadmaps for the capability/functions and identifying how they align with the overall organization goals with the right set of KPI’s toto measure success , timelines and expectations. This also help set the right expectations with internal and external stakeholders, defines the roadmap and help is defining the building blocks of how value is being delivered for the customer in incremental steps.

Please refer to another article I published 5 Steps to Delivering Transformative Customer Experiences on how to approach this in more details

Ruthless Prioritization — You need less than you think you do.

Prioritization is not a one time activity but it needs to be done by everybody on a daily basis. This means identifying a framework for the team that they can use as guidelines for their decisions and has to be ingrained in everybody as they make those decisions on a day to day basis. The leadership team should also be basing their decisions on same core guidelines and principles that cab easily explained to the team while helping reinforcing them at every step. This can also mean making hard and quick decisions while your KPI’s should be your way to bring any course correction needed. With agile delivery models ideally these should be short feedback loops that prevent the team from going astray in it overall delivery timelines.

The Virtuous Wheel — A Well oiled COG driven Wheel

Execution with a Bias for Action and Accountability — This is where the rubber meats the road is the hardest part and where most team struggle. This requires Leadership with a right balance of management. I like to think of execution as a chain cog wheel with thousands of small and big cogs connected together to turn the wheel in the right direction. Even the small wheel can shut down the whole wheel or cause significant friction to slow it down. Each cog has to be well oiled machine and should know its place in the overall scheme of things . Lots of time you will see each of these cogs operating on their own and forget what direction they are supposed to turn in to help the wheel move forward and that’s where even though they might be executing well within their teams they are not providing value to their partners/customers. For the enterprise wheel to run like a well oiled mechanism each of the cogs has to run effectively and efficiently and has to think of any adjoining cog as its customers and question and understand how they helping them turn in the right direction with minimum friction. Ruthless prioritization is key here along with the KPI’s identified earlier. The vision and roadmaps and goals for the wheel and the partner cogs can help in providing the team with the bigger picture and the overall direction they are headed it and where they fit in the giant cog wheel. This helps ensure the team is focusing on the right set of activities, managing their time effectively and partnering with their customers .

Customer Journey Driven Organization Structure

Create product lines that align to key phases of the customer journey. Eliminate siloes that limit delivery teams’ understanding of customer voice by integrating IT and business resources and aligning them to key elements of the customer experience. Remove conflicting incentives and keep teams focused on customer experience by holding both business and IT teams within each product line accountable for a shared set of customer experience outcomes.

Continuous Improvement

‘Embrace Change, Take Risks, Disrupt Yourself’ with a Focus on Innovation, Simplification and Optimization.

Where

• We keep raising the bar / Challenging the status quo
• We have an Environment to experiment
• Where people are encouraged to ask questions

While

• Leveraging Results driven approach with KPI to measure success
• Providing Necessary training for team
• Identified career paths and ladders

In today environment there an increasing need for making bold bets and taking decisive actions that enable the business to pivot rapidly, sometimes at very large scale. Such moves require risk taking, aggressive goal setting and nimble resource reallocation. The teams need to adapt to ambiguous and unfamiliar terrain, show initiative in developing innovative solutions while developing their skills.

Shared Set of customer-centric delivery metrics /KPI’s .

You can’t change what you don’t measure and what isnt measured doesn’t get delivered. The KPI’s have to be focused on that value is being delivered to the customer. Use customer journey maps and operational process maps to drive and identify key indicators of customer experience.

Safe Experimenting

The team need to be have that to make quick decisions , experiment, learn and evolve while having a safe environment to fail.

Communication

Build a caring and transparent environment

where:

• we foster a diverse and inclusive culture
• every voice is heard and matters

While:

• setting the right expectations;
• developing as well as mentoring the team
• building strong and long lasting partnerships and relationships.

If you wanted to do start with 1 of the 5C’s then this would be the one to focus on.

This is the glue that holds everything together and is also highly critical in our current environment with global teams. Getting this right requires a lot of effort and practice but it can be well worth every bit of it.

This is also one of the most complex and most critical aspect in building your high performance team. communication can make or break teams.

Some of the things to consider while working on your communications strategy are:

Setting up the right mix of communication channels and feedback loops

Communications has multidimensional aspects with incoming and outcoming communications, internal and external communications including one on ones, team, peers, senior leadership, external entities, partners and vendors communication.

Having a consistent and coherent messaging yet tailoring them based on who you are addressing

This can take you long ways in building commitment, team engagement, retaining top talent, and helping rally the teams.

Listening , caring and connecting personally

Emotions are contagious, so it pays off to know what you and the team is feeling.

Being candid and setting the right expectations

Diversity and Inclusion

Everyone has a unique point of view to share, shaped by their life experiences, cultures, and passions so bringing in diversity and ensuring open communication is highly critical.

Being a role model

Think of yourself as the role model and in tough situations ask yourself how would I or somebody you really admire behave at their best in this situation.

Collaboration

This is all about building trust within the teams knowing

Where

• they can rely on each other
• They are helping each other be successful

while

• building teamwork, leadership and accountability.
• minimizing surprises
• aligning towards shared goals

Encourage an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Structure the teams to be independent and self sufficient while empowering them to make decisions and remove roadblocks, building team engagement .

Encourage an entrepreneurial mindset with teamwork, leadership, accountability with end-to-end outcome ownership with accountability towards the common goals.

Enable data-driven decisions and promote shared accountability for customer experience (both internal and external customers) outcomes leveraging metrics to drive delivery team priorities and activities.

Focus on people over process

Identify key functions within the team and setup a roles and responsibilities(RACI) matrix to help clarify ownership and accountability.

Ensure a horizonal focus with common practices and a setting up Centers of Excellence(COE) while ensuring the teams are vertically aligned toward delivering the products.

Setup a feedback loop to Build Trust

Lot of this has to do with listening and asking questions and being there for the team. Follow an open door policy , listen to people and understand their perspectives, foster open communications and candor.

Have a consistent approach to decision making while trying to minimize surprises , explaining to the team how the decisions are being made and what’s driving them.

Setup a communication framework to ensure as you and the teams make decisions, they are shared across the team.

Feedback loop from here should be fed into the other C’s specially continuous learning process and the customer centricity reviews to ensure that the team are continuously enabled to focus on the right areas and are delivering the right capabilities.

Celebrate every big and small win!!!

Last but not least appreciate the hard work and what the team and individuals have accomplished and enjoy spending time with your team!

Take every opportunity to thank and highlight the individuals contributions as well as the team efforts towards the overall goals. It helps to highlight the small successes towards the bigger or long term goals

Simple actions such as saying Thank you!! can help positive emotions to spread around the workplace. Celebrating can be as small as a simple Thank You!! note or a cake to celebrate the birthdays and any significant milestones during the month all the way to a lavish party on a major milestone or a successful delivery of a project.

Leverage your one on one’s help the team members understand how they are contributing towards the overall team and organization goals by highlighting their achievements / skills.