How to Build High Performing Teams

Pull. Push. Dream. Battle.

Pull with a Dream

First, the basics. To create a highly functional team, wisely manage long, medium and short term goals.

The long term goal is akin to the vision of an organization, adjusted for the scope of the team. It should seem a little out of reach but realistically attainable with the right resources available. Your client's ambitions can be a proxy start. This is the realm of dreams. A few people within and outside should cynically laugh about this goal, or it is not big enough.

Medium term goals are the milestones that guide you. They need to be big enough for you to have a genuine sense of achievement when met. Can you throw a proper party to celebrate? Can people put it on their CV? If the gap between two medium term goals are less than six months they are not big enough. If it is more than eighteen months, it will never happen in a form you ever envisioned.

Short term goals are the actual things you do. It is the accumulation (and if you do it well, the compounding of) short term goals that gets you to the medium term goals. A plan in its strict sense is about converting the short term goals in to hitting medium term goals.

Build your team so that the short term goals can be managed via exceptions. This is what delegation and empowerment really means. The team needs freedom and flexibility in achieving the short term goals, within acceptable and agreed parameters. Trying to manage short term goals too tightly is what micro management is. Remember, this is the pure management part. If you can, certainly play a part in completing tasks. But that should be by design, not to pick up slack.

Review the plan, which inherently should cover the goals as well as the means of achieving them,  periodically. Not just with the team, but also with senior management or the program sponsor. A world class car is an extremely poor substitute for a boat.

Have a representative risk register as a gauge of pain. You can’t eliminate pain and you can’t predict all of it. But a good risk register should minimise the surprises. Surprises are a useful tool to jump start relationships, but not to run businesses.

Consistently hitting goals within an anticipated level pain tells you the team is performing well.

That’s all the base. Here is the cherry.

Push with Fire

Cultivate an enemy. This can be external or internal.  A competitor you keep butting heads against or another team in the org that’s competing for resources. Naysayers of the team’s cause work very well. (Nothing motivates competent people like a dose of ‘nobody believes in us’.) If you are lucky, one will appear naturally. But in most instances you have to take a minor one and grow it or create one out of nothing (the Michael Jordan way).

This is a tricky balancing act. It cannot demoralise people or lead to unprofessional conflicts. But it needs to be strong enough to light a fire. You have to carefully manage the narrative.

Why does this work?

Bonding Failure

The strongest bonds are among organisms that can fail the same way.

Sports teams do not form the strongest bonds over their victories. (In fact, victories can spell disaster without proper leadership and management. Teams are more likely to break up after victories as they feel they have completed their group task, and individual interest start taking precedence.) The deepest bonds are made  either with the pain of going through gruelling practice sessions or with absolutely devastating losses.

What bonds military companies is not winning battles. It is the knowledge that they face death. Or that if they fail, an entire town, city or country will succumb. They face the highest possible personal and societal failure together.

Thankfully corporate life failures are like the ones in sports, and not the military. You can recover from them. Learn from them. Recoverable failure is the best cure for inhibition.

This doesn’t mean you engineer failures. (You don’t have to, they are inevitable.) It means you gear the team to handle them gracefully. Failure handled gracefully brings perspective and builds confidence of the team to take measured risks. And no meaningful dream was ever achieved without taking such risks.

All this requires you to be part of the team and not be an outsider who absolves yourself of blame.

A good enemy is invaluable in all of this. The enemy represents unrealised failures (danger) and can be the piñata when things actually fail.

Push. Pull.  The enemy is the fuel. The dream is the beacon.

Remember…

Every good team needs at least one dreamer. If it’s you, get a good second in command.