‘High performance team' has to be right up there with ‘learning organisation' and ‘empowerment' in the league of over- and mis-used phrases. That it is not to say they are meaningless, just that they used in a hypothetical way and are not referenced to actual behaviours or accountable actions which are articulated, supported and recognised. Similarly, ‘developing high performance teams' appears again and again in mission statements, business objectives and the like, but without agreement on, or articulating, what a high performance team actually is, or what specific actions we are going to take to develop them.
At Mission Excellence, we have noticed 3 key factors in our clients, which will make the difference between talking about high performance teams and developing high performance teams:
1. Do you need high performance teams?
This might seem a rather dumb question; ‘of course we do; what's the alternative – low performance teams?' That is to focus on the wrong element of the question though: not high vs low performance teams, but teams vs not.
When does great teamwork happen? It happens when it's required. Incredible examples of teamwork sometimes emerge with little or no conscious decision or training, simply because great teamwork is the only way to resolve a situation eg survival situation following an aircraft crash. In a hospital operating room, there is no financial incentive to adopt a team working model and staff may have received little or no formal training in team working, however team members routinely deliver outstanding team performance, because that is the only way to save the patient's life.
In less extreme examples, the benefits of team working may not be so obvious to individuals and buy-in is much more difficult to achieve. In fact it may be that there is simply no benefit to team working. Team working is not a panacea which will always make life (and performance) better. There are a number of challenges in a team-based approach:
- Most organisations intrinsically prefer individual over team accountability
- Ingrained individualism discourages us from putting our fates in the hands of others
- Teamwork requires an investment of time and effort
- There are risks involved, not least conflict and failure
- It requires commitment and trust – both 2-way processes
If we are talking about a sales team who work individually within geographical areas, and have centralised marketing and support functions, there is little or no incremental benefit in employing a team-based model. The total output will simply be the sum of the inputs anyway so why bother taking people off the road for team meetings and attempting to solve the challenges above?
On the other hand, if your sales model requires coordinated interdependent activity from a number of people, then almost by definition you need to invest effort in developing that group as a team in order to exploit the potential synergy and increased performance available. Another interesting example is a board of directors – team or not? On the one hand, they may be heads of functional business units – leaders in their own right with limited dependence on each other. On the other hand, they are collectively responsible for the running of the business. The 2 roles require a different mindset and behaviour, yet how many boards invest time in addressing the team aspect of their performance?
You cannot simply make people into great teams because you legislate it so, however in the their book ‘The Wisdom of Teams' (1993), Katzenbach and Smith identify 4 factors which they found common to many true high performance teams – putting these factors in place should definitely maximise the chance to develop such teams:
- Clarity in common purpose
- Performance goals
Measurable and accountable targets, which if achieved, will deliver the common purpose
- Common approach
An agreed method of working and direction towards the performance goals, which all team members are employing (you can't just do your own thing!)
- Mutual accountability
Collective measurement of performance – you all live and die together
One of the reasons we like Katzenbach and Smith's model, apart from the refreshing absence of psychobabble, is that it describes very accurately our experiences as fighter pilots and on the Red Arrows. In particular, the last item above is one we don't even think about. Doing an individual great job is irrelevant if we don't achieve the mission. Flying your jet perfectly is irrelevant if the show is not perfect. It's the same in sports teams – individual brilliance is irrelevant if the team loses. In the commercial world, it is of course, possible to set this up artificially simply by measuring people on collective performance.
2. You get the behaviour (performance) you reward.
We have one large multinational client who employs a regional team-based working model where team members have a relatively high degree of interdependence on each other. Until very recently, team managers were assessed on collective team performance, however team members were paid significant bonus elements to their pay based on individual performance – if you're the top sales person, why bother investing effort in team activities and sharing best practice which has taken you years to learn? You could be out earning.
This misalignment of rewards and behaviour is extremely common. It is most glaring during change management and/or M&A – publicising behaviours through a massive communication effort, and then wondering why it's taking so long to change. Why would anybody change? In order for anything to happen, the ‘right' behaviours must be routinely and consistently demonstrated by senior management, role models must be deployed, and there has to be public reward and recognition of those behaviours. We worked with another client who operates in charter and sales of luxury transport. The MD recently described to us the difficulty in getting people to buy into the ‘one team' concept. ‘Charter' were very keen to keep charter clients; even where clear buying signals were being given off, they were reluctant to hand them off to ‘Sales' – they might get another year of charter out of them. When asked about how ‘Charter' are rewarded for generating sales opportunities, the answer was along the lines of ‘well they know I have always done something – a bonus or a present or something'. Would you give away your client for an undefined ‘bonus or present or something'? Would you give away a client you might otherwise lose, in order to retain that client in the company, knowing that you would get an agreed ongoing cut of their future spend, which might ultimately improve overall performance and mean a higher bonus for you?
3. You get the behaviour (performance) you train for.
‘Culture will eat strategy for breakfast every day'
Prof Aidan Halligan, formerly Deputy Chief Medical Officer
You wouldn't expect somebody to sell a technically complex product without sales and product training, so why would you expect them to intrinsically have the behavioural skills and emotional intelligence to be a great team player without training? A recent Mission Excellence survey showed that whilst most large companies run induction programmes, emphasis on functional competence dominates, with little evidence of behavioural training or personal development. This emphasis on functional competence continues further up the management ladder; 50% of survey respondents commented that people are promoted to leadership roles on technical competence over leadership ability. In fact, only last week, a senior manager at one of the world's most successful professional services companies was bemoaning to us how they trained managers but expected leaders.
Prior to any technical training, trainee fighter pilots in the Royal Air Force (along with officers form every other discipline) complete an intensive immersion into the organisational culture of up to six months. As well as the organisation's history and values (brand), this crux of this programme is about understanding leadership and ‘followership' behaviours. We deeply embed the right behaviours before we even start to worry about skill or process. This theme is the start of something which continues throughout a fighter pilot's career.
Contrary to popular opinions about the military, the ‘command and control model' is as outdated there as anywhere else. Today's military is about empowerment, network models and agility. Missions are resourced to task or opportunity, independent of line management or seniority. One result of this is that senior ‘line managers' can routinely find themselves in subordinate roles on operational missions. There is a requirement to be able to choose a behaviour appropriate to role – one day leading, the next day wingman on a completely different type of mission with a new mix of assets and people.
Leadership development is continuous for pilots; every single mission includes a debrief, where the team performance is analysed from a totally objective standpoint in order to identify individual and team learning outcomes with accountability to action. This routine ‘everyday development' will, by its very nature, include comment on the leader's performance from the team. Who is better placed to offer feedback to the leader than those being led? And this is not done through an anonymous programme but through open discussion. This offers a fabulous multiplier of benefit – everybody in the room gets the value of the feedback for when they are facing the same challenges as leader themselves.
The focus of this article has been around intra-team working. The real world is of course a more complex and subtle mix of intra- and inter-team working. Whilst many of the fundamental principles remain unchanged, once you start to move to a multi-site, multi-function virtual or matrix team, clarity, communication and discipline in process assumes an ever greater importance. The basic building block though is still your single team, and assuming everybody is above the minimum competency level, we believe that the team dynamics and performance of that team will ultimately revolve around behaviour; you get the behaviour you train for; you get the behaviour you reward.
