Building a High Performance Team (Part 2)
This is the second of a 2-part piece on Building a High Performance Team. Part 1 was focused on how leaders can drive a culture of high performance by defining an organization’s purpose.
In Part 2 we look beyond goals, initiatives and key performance indicators to the values and social dynamics within your organization, set or adopted by you and your leadership team
6. Create psychological safety
Many people work in fear, afraid of making mistakes or showing vulnerability, because these things are associated with losing their job or losing influence.
When people do not feel psychological safety at work, they take fewer risks, critical questions are not surfaced, difficult conversations are avoided and innovation is stifled. Too many decisions require intervention from senior leaders. This forces senior leaders to expend a lot of their time on less critical issues that could easily be delegated, rather than focus on higher-impact challenges and opportunities.
Conversely, in organizations that create psychological safety people know that if they make a mistake or have shortcomings, they will be supported and not reprimanded. While writing this article, I faced a severe case of writer’s block. I struggled for a few weeks, and felt too embarrassed to ask for help — after-all I’m supposed to be a leader who knows this stuff. I eventually got over my insecurity and tweeted my challenge; within 24 hours three colleagues at work had spent hours with me on a weekend to help me assemble my thoughts into a first draft. I never felt that any of them would judge me, and that level of psychological safety allowed me to share something I’m struggling with.
7. Live your communicated values
Every community needs a set of core values that defines how its people should interact and what is rewarded or sanctioned.
These shared values create trust, by creating guidelines for what people should expect from each other and a clear lens through which actions can be viewed and evaluated. This allows each member of the community identify behaviors and interactions that align with the community’s values and empowers them to speak up when they see anything outside of the agreed boundaries.
Business leaders need to focus on defining a set of three to seven core values that fit the type of community we want to create. For example, military units often name loyalty, duty and courage as their core values, while an e-commerce company like Amazon begins with service-orientation.
Once these core values are defined, you have to follow them. Leaders whose actions are often inconsistent with the company’s stated values create a cycle of confusion and mistrust. When employees witness their leaders ignoring the stated values, two things happen:
- They view the hypocrisy of what you do versus what you say, and realize that the values don’t hold weight; so they stop holding others accountable
- They realize that they don’t need to adhere to the company values, and begin to re-align their behavior to reflect yours, further diminishing them
During a company offsite, one of the teams participating in a competition was ranked second. However, they noticed they had mistakenly been awarded an extra point. The team began discussing this, and eventually agreed to notify the judges. This reduced their points and subsequently their ranking, but the decision to report the error was a no-brainer for them. It is in these very moments that the company’s values get reinforced or diminished, and the actions of leaders greatly influence how others act.
I believe that by practicing integrity hundreds of times in these low-risk situations, people will be better equipped to intuitively act with integrity when the stakes are higher.
8. Your real culture is shaped by hire, fire, demote and promote decisions
Promotions are particularly powerful indicators of what your company rewards. When someone gets promoted, other colleagues look to understand how that person achieved the promotion, and draw valuable insights about your company’s reward system and values.
When an individual is performing highly and upholds company values, a promotion reinforces your high-performance culture. Conversely, when an individual is not performing well, or disregards the company’s values, a promotion signals to everyone else that your values and high-performance culture are phoney.
Similarly, when high-performing, values-aligned employees get passed over during promotions, without compelling reasons, it creates ambiguity about what people really need to do to get rewarded. The same principle applies to terminations.
Best-in-class organizations create very clear policies around how people get promoted, based on a combination of performance and values alignment (sometimes labeled “culture fit”). They create clarity around how the organization supports people who are underperforming or not living their core values. They also create clarity around how decisions to terminate people are made. Transparency around these, makes it possible for people to know what to expect, and also ensures you are applying consistent principles that reinforce your culture, through your values.
9. Infuse the voice of your employees in everything you do
Many leaders make every decision themselves or within their leadership team, believing they know exactly what employees need and want. It’s intriguing how often leaders focus on the wrong levers for building a high-performance culture, simply by not gaining an objective understanding of their employees.
Within the context of running an organization, employees are your internal customers. If we fundamentally believe that infusing customer insights into products and services makes them better, we should be applying this same principle to our internal customers.
Early in 2016, as Director of Operations at Andela, I was responsible for hundreds of micro-decisions and began to suffer from decision fatigue. While thinking about ways to improve my productivity, I decided to delegate a lot of decisions, by creating a senate, composed of engineers who then elected a council of 5 members. I handed a budget to them, and made them responsible for reviewing and approving requests for money for a range of social activities. Whatever they approved within that budget, I automatically approved.
Once we began to apply this principle across the organization (e.g. through employee surveys), we saw a massive increase in employee engagement. People became interested in helping to shaped every aspect of the company. Every time we ask for volunteers to help review a policy or decision, several hands go up. Our employees know exactly what they want and need. When making decisions that affect them directly, they know the pain points far better than we do. Why shouldn’t they be contributing?
Once leaders realize that the voice of our employees can be a critical input in decision-making, we are freed from decision fatigue, and can create a culture where employees feel energized to directly impact the trajectory of their organization.
10. Adopt a customer service approach within each department
High-performance organizations are a matrixed world of internal service providers who ensure everyone has all the support they need to do their best work. To achieve this, every department must see itself as a customer service unit solving problems and creating value for employees. At the risk of oversimplifying, Finance ensures the company has sound financial management and everyone gets paid on time; Internal operations ensures that employees have all the tools and resources needed to get their work done; Human Resources creates the boundaries on how employees engage with each other and the organization, and also helps create an excellent employee experience that drives retention and morale.
To build a high-performance culture that retains values-aligned employees, each team must pride themselves on excellent customer service and execution. Leaders must assess the cost of underperformance and realize that the seemingly insignificant areas of underperformance play a critical role in employee retention and morale.
I make it a point to ask my colleagues and teams for feedback.Their feedback helps me hold myself accountable, and also encourages them to hold me accountable. In the process, I learn about areas I need to improve on. The best customer service organizations do this often and embed it within their processes. When an entire organization adopts a strong feedback culture, and a customer service mindset, they are better able to serve employees and better support a highly productive and engaged workforce.
11. Reward people
People want to be rewarded. Whether it’s with money, recognition, relevance, responsibility, or other things they value. When people give you the best of themselves in a high-performance, values-aligned culture, they want to feel appreciated.
When your organization receives an award, don’t just send your most senior executives to receive it; invite some more junior team members to join.
Cultures that don’t reward people can become toxic. In some organizations, leaders often take credit for others’ work without attributing the work to them, and without giving them any credit. At a prior organization, while chatting with a colleague one afternoon, he told me he hopes the project I was leading fails. He assured me that I was an amazing person, but felt the leaders of the organization did not value all the hard work people were putting in and felt they should be punished. This is an extreme case, but isn’t so far away from the apathy people feel when they don’t think their hard work is valued by their leaders.
12. Make working with colleagues enjoyable and meaningful
When something is fun or meaningful, people will invest their precious hours and resources on it. It won’t feel like work. This is common knowledge. You cannot predict all the supplementary value that will come from people believing that work is fun.
Some of the best performing sports teams are the ones that, not only have good players and coaches, but also enjoy spending time together outside of work. They learn new things together, and might even choose to hang out with their teammates before other friends outside the organization. These fun gatherings naturally stimulate intelligent conversations and insights about their work.
Fun can also be about “being in the trenches together”, sometimes literally. In war, people feel camaraderie because they are going through the same shared experience, they feel a part of something greater and they are experiencing it with people who have their back. That feeling of togetherness is so strong that even when work involves dodging bullets, people are committed to each other and the “mission.”
If all the other levers are in place, employees will naturally gravitate towards one another. As people begin socializing outside of work, they’ll not only solve work-related problems while they’re out having fun, they’ll begin to reinforce the company’s values even outside the workplace.
Back to the point
Leaders need to excel at inspiring a culture of excellence which defines how people’s work contributes to the organization’s output, and also inspire a culture of values alignment which is more focused on the team dynamics and the ways in which employees engage with one another. Getting both right is ultimately the key to unlocking a high performing team.