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š The secret to high-performing teams
Some may find this as a surprise, but how a team performs is way more important than how any one individual performs.
In some of their organizational research cited in the book Accelerate, Google found:
āWho is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.ā
It all comes down to team dynamics, yet many companies mostly ignore this and focus purely on the individuals within the company. When things go wrong, they are always looking for that single person to blame and when recognition is given, it is to a single person.
While this can be appropriate at times, and it is important to understand how individuals are contributing to their teams, Iād like to propose that most of the time companies and leaders should be focusing on developing healthy and high-performing teams.
Unfortunately, this can be a much harder task. We all know of āsuper teamsā assembled that are made up of the very best talent in each role and yet fail to achieve more than the sum of their parts. So, clearly, the secret to high-performing teams is not just hiring the absolute best people in each role and everything magically comes together (though I strongly believe having strong talent is an important first step).
How To Evaluate Teams
Assuming you have reasonably talented individuals in each of the roles for your team, how do you actually evaluate the team to know if it is healthy and performing well?
Unlike many traditional sports, teams within companies often donāt have a clear scorecard to know if they are winning. In traditional sports, if you are never winning any games, then it is very likely that your team isnāt healthy.
With that in mind, here are some things Iāve found useful to evaluate the health of a cross-functional team working on a tech product:
How much trust is being shown within the team?
Trust is so foundational to a healthy team. Without trust, the team will never be able to fully develop to their potential. The three pillars of trust are authenticity, rigor in logic, and empathy. As you are interacting with your teams, look for these attributes. Do you see people being authentic and candid in their interactions? When there are challenges on the team, is empathy shown? And, are people really making sure to provide rigor to their logic and bring forth well-thought-out ideas? If any of these are missing, you can work to shore them up and increase the trust within the team.
How does the team handle failure?
I love this because it is one of the best metrics I have seen to know whether a team actually thinks of itself as a team.
If they fail and immediately start looking for a person to blame or are shifting responsibility to certain people within the team, then they still mostly see themselves as a collection of individuals.
If instead, they fail and that leads to an inquiry on how the team could improve, that is incredibly healthy. This retrospective might, from time to time, lead to improvements that certain individuals need to make and that is completely fine. What is important is that the team starts addressing their failure together with empathy and the goal of improvement and not finger-pointing.
How effective are they at consistently delivering value to customers and the business?
At the end of the day, this really is the scorecard for product and tech teams. High-performing and healthy teams are consistently delivering value.
This is a lagging metric, though, that can be noisy.
You want to make sure you apply any necessary context to the team when doing this evaluation. For example, was the team just formed? If so, it might be unreasonable to believe they will deliver a huge amount of value in the next weeks.
You also want to avoid outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision based on its outcome rather than basing it on an assessment of the quality of the decision at the time it was made. In great economic conditions with stellar product market fit at your company, it is entirely possible that very unhealthy teams are still producing value for the customer. So, please donāt forget that how teams create value is just as important as creating value - especially in the long term. Unhealthy teams can find ways to create value, but it is rarely sustainable.
With all that in mind, though, if with sufficient time, effort, and appropriate conditions, a team isnāt able to consistently deliver value, something isnāt working correctly.
How strong is their code base?
This is critical for tech companies. You donāt want teams delivering value on top of a heap of code that is all barely held together.
That isnāt to say that some amount of technical debt isnāt appropriate. You want technical debt to the degree of your confidence in what you are building. Early in your product discovery phases, most of your code will likely be thrown away because you donāt yet know exactly what you need to build. But as you mature into the delivery phases that code should become more and more stable and scalable.
The book Accelerate puts forth 4 metrics that they found to be causal to teams delivering value:
Cycle time - Time to implement, test, and deliver code for a feature
Deployment frequency - Number of deployments in a given duration of time
Change failure rate - Percentage of deployments which caused a failure in production
Mean time to recovery - Mean time it takes to restore service after production failure
If you were to get started with just two, I would focus on cycle time and the mean time to recovery. If you have a healthy cycle time, it usually means you are deploying frequently and if it is very easy to recover quickly from failure, then the cost of failure is low.
Whatās the motivation level at?
Motivation is so critical to success. If you find that your team collectively is highly motivated to achieve their goals and work together to achieve more than they could individually, chances are that team is going to make some great things happen. And when things go wrong and they inevitably run into challenges, they will more naturally look for solutions independently to keep moving forward.
Iāve also found that while leaders can increase the motivation of individuals and teams for periods of time, at some point, you really need that motivation to come from within. You want people on your teams that intrinsically are super motivated to help the company achieve its mission and vision. Having that is like a superpower.
To help make that a reality, donāt forget to try and evaluate a candidateās interest in your mission and vision during the hiring process. With people already on the team, talk about motivation in 1 on 1ās and see how you can help them develop that intrinsic motivation. Not only is it better for the company, but it is such a joy to work towards something you really believe in and want to make a reality.
Team Work Makes the Dream Work
As much as it can be tempting, the success and the failures within your company are rarely on an individualās shoulders. This makes it so important to really invest in and develop healthy and high-performing teams. I hope this article gave you some ideas on how to evaluate teams and I am confident if you put some of these things into practice at your company, youāll find more value being created for both your customers and your business.
If youāve found other great ways to help develop and evaluate healthy teams, please share in the comments!