There is no silver bullet to drive team performance
Organizations want to see their functional teams succeed, whether it is a strategy management team, project team, executive committee, digital transformation team, product innovation team, etc. But it is hard to attribute a team’s success to just one or two factors. A popular opinion is that it depends on the team makeup. But most of us can come up with examples of superstar-studded teams that failed and teams made up of seemingly mediocre members win. Functional team success factors come down to 4 major questions:
- Who – Abilities and soft skills of team members
- Why – Make it the only priority
- How – Iterative approach
- What – Team empowerment
Who – Abilities and soft skills of team members
With the rise of AI, most hard skills are becoming a commodity. Experts on a team are certainly helpful, but they only provide a quicker answer to questions in specific areas of technology, methodology, law, etc. Soft skills truly drive success. With generally accessible tools we see people with problem solving skills get answers quicker than experts. And those answers are often more accurate. Altogether soft skills contribute to team’s success much more than hard skills. In fact, teamwork itself is a soft skill. Other critical soft skills include collaboration, work ethic, communication, self-awareness, negotiation, etc.
For a couple of years now I have been an advisory board member to one of state college programs. On a surface, I don’t qualify for the post altogether – I don’t even have a college degree. But when we get together I am often the one asking critical questions, facilitating discussions, and throwing in unorthodox ideas.
While soft and hard skills can be trained or acquired, most people have natural abilities, which help them perform. Curiosity, ability to learn, positive demeanor, drive, guts are some of the examples. People use other terms related to abilities worth mentioning – disposition, character, potential, and genetics.
Soft skills are a definite must for team success. The more, the merrier. There is no harm in having every team member being a great communicator or a self-aware person. But abilities should be balanced based on the subject matter and goals. For example, if you want the team to take risks, you want more people with guts. But probably not everyone. Likewise, you can’t have everyone on the team to be a “character”.
Why – Make it the only priority
At a conference last year there was a whole panel discussing “transformational fatigue”. Organizations these days take on too many transformations simultaneously. As a result, they overload their employees with transformational roles and objectives. If you add a constant shift of priorities on top of that, you get quick employee burnout.
Teams, and frankly humans altogether perform better when they can focus on making progress in one area for extended periods of time. If sponsors and stakeholders allow a team to concentrate their energy on one transformation without significant distractions, the team will perform way better.
How – Iterative approach
Early in my career I was a software developer. I was so proud of my ability to write code fast. Sometimes I would tell my boss how proud I was from writing so many hundreds or thousands of lines of code. And my boss would always ask “do they work”. Admittedly, after writing so much code, I had a tough time repairing the code, because there was so much of it to analyze, when something didn’t work as designed. This is where I switched my style to writing code in “testable” chunks. This gave me a chance to frequently report to my boss “This is how many lines I wrote. And it all works”.
Similarly, teams that take on huge changes in their entirety without an opportunity to periodically validate their work run a risk of missing the mark and having to remediate a lot of work they had done. Making a change in “testable” segments provides the luxury of coordination, validation, celebration, failing fast, pivoting, etc.
What – Team empowerment
Empowerment and autonomy are vastly different concepts. Autonomy says that employees can work wherever they want, whenever they want, on whatever they want to work on, and approach that however they want. Full autonomy is hardly fit for the workplace. In comparison, empowerment means that goals and the environment are non-negotiable. But the daily tasks, approach, communication schedule, and other parameters of team’s activity are defined by the team.
It is another way of saying “no micromanagement”. And it is easier said than done, especially when stakeholders’ or sponsors’ reputation is on the line. To help solve this I would like to give you a binary choice. If you created a good team, leave them alone. If you have to get involved and course correct often, you have a bad team that needs to be replaced. In neither case is micromanagement applicable or effective.
Not all teams have the same chances to succeed
If we want a functional team to succeed we want to answer four major questions – who, why, how, and what. Who is going to make up the team – members with balanced abilities and exceptional soft skills. Why will they forge forward – because this is their top priority and they have no distractions. How will they build their success – in an iterative fashion with adjustments along the way. What will they work on at a given time is up to the team.
These four questions are even more critical for teams that manage other teams, such as boards, governance committees or PMO. If you find yourself on one of these teams, your soft skills are more critical than your hard skills or experience. You want your team to focus on a short list of priorities, work in iterative fashion, and choose its own next move. By the same token you would want to extend the same approach to the teams you manage.
