In Search of the High Performance Team
A special note: today is Veterans Day
While we may struggle in business to consistently produce high-performance teams, our soldiers in service of our country live this on a regular basis. Thanks to those who have served, those who are serving and to all who have sacrificed. Our gratitude has no end.
In Search of the High Performance Team
I regularly poll my seminar participants and MBA students on their team-focused experiences in the workplace and I am consistently surprised when very few report ever being part of something that they would classify as a “high performance” team.
The results of my unscientific polling are all the more surprising given that we live during a time when involvement in short-term projects with individuals across functions is a part of the regular work experience of most professionals.
The business literature is filled with articles and interviews from leaders and pundits on topics tied to innovation, business execution and team heroics. Of course, the same companies tend to be the focal point of these articles. It seems like we cannot get enough of the stories of heroics pulled off in companies like Apple, Ideo Google and the few others that seem to make the short-list for the popular business press. It’s curious that those companies got the memo on creating high-performance teams and the rest of us are relegated to reading about their successes.
When I ask about involvement on high-performance teams, there is invariably someone in the audience sharp enough to ask me what I mean. Admittedly, my definition is one of those kind of squishy, you’ll know it when you experience it answers. It’s also a multi-part answer that goes something like this:
- A high-performance team is a group of people that have figured out how to work together to knock down and succeed in pursuit of audacious goals. They’ve learned to leverage their respective strengths, compensate for weaknesses and tap into the power that a group of people uniquely focused on a goal are able to generate.
- High-performance teams thrive on challenges, revel only momentarily in successes and mostly seek the next big challenge. They tend to be paranoid about becoming overconfident and in general, they don’t seek significant public recognition.
- The working environment on this team is comfortable for collaboration, encouraging of disparate opinions and singularly focused on turning ideas into actions. High-performance teams are
self-policing. Values and accountabilities are clear and there is an explicit expectation that membership requires honoring the values. Membership on this team is a true privilege.
- The leader on a high-performance team recognizes that his or her role is teach, to knock down obstacles and to constantly focus on creating the environment that allows others to succeed at high-levels. This leader may be tough, but this leader tends to be quiet, letting actions talk. You generally won’t find this leader to be loud and boisterous, although they may be a great cheerleader as well as a stern disciplinarian behind team walls.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Effective leadership is a pre-requisite for the creation of a high-performance team. Perhaps if more leaders focused on their responsibility to empower others, I would see some more hands raised when I ask about whether your employees have been part of a high-performance team. It’s not too late to start working on this.
“If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Filed under: Customer Service, Making Decisions, Marketing, Product Management, Strategy
Students of business history might recognize the quote above as coming from Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company and one of the early management innovators. Mr. Ford’s quote raises a profound issue of when and how to listen to customers, or perhaps the more challenging flip side: when not to listen to customers.
The notion of not asking customers what they want and responding directly to their needs may seem like heresy to those individuals and organizations consumed with improving customer satisfaction and creating customer loyalty. In fact, you should always listen and importantly, observe. The real art in this process is understanding what customers really need, what problems they really would like to solve and what approaches and experiences that you can create that can surprise and delight them.
Harvard Professor, Clayton Christensen, seized upon this issue in his Innovator’s Dilemma/Innovator’s Solution books, where he suggests that a well-intentioned business may do everything right by listening and responding to customer requests, and ultimately fail as disruptive offerings upset the status quo.
In my own work in the technology space over the past two decades, it is easy to look back at product development cycles driven by a never-ending desire to cram in customer-driven features, without a good understanding of why those features were needed and whether they were solving key problems or attacking symptoms. It always felt like we were doing the right thing, but in hindsight, it was blind marketing. As Product Management systems improved and requirements development received more scrutiny, this situation improved. Nonetheless, it is hard to see how the forest is changing when you are staring so intently at the trees.
Christensen’s classic scenario is the company that dutifully enhances its offerings based on client input, ultimately creating bloated offerings with capabilities far exceeding what might be required of many or any buyers. In the interim, a disruptive offering…something perhaps with fewer features and priced much lower (not always the case) can easily swoop in and…well, disrupt the market. In essence, the well-managed, well-intentioned company created a vacuum that was filled by someone who understood the essence of the client’s problems…not just the features they were asking for. (Think “Faster Horses” versus a new mode of transportation.)
The authors of the recent book, Tuned In, tackle this important topic by suggesting that a firm focus on developing Resonators, products or services that practically sell themselves. Their six step process for creating a resonator and for Tuning In is in my opinion, a framework for avoiding the Innovator’s Dilemma that Christensen warns us about.
The design firm Ideo in their famous Deep Dive segment on ABC News showcase a process for design innovation that is what you might imagine a sociological dig would look like, as they follow and observe the various “buyers” of shopping carts in pursuit of understanding how this classic device could be grossly improved to better solve real problems. While there is a fair amount of criticism of the “made for TV” nature of this episode, it offers some classic lessons in looking and observing to identify significant and perhaps even disruptive improvements. Just asking a store manager or a customer about what they would like to see improved in their shopping cart may be insufficient for identifying what a shopping cart might actually be able to do. Think cell phones and the iphone.
The Bottom Line for Now:
My message here is intended as a cautionary tale. It is good and right and noble to pursue increasing levels of customer satisfaction in your framework for operational excellence. However, it is also easy to be misled by false signals, and sometimes those signals come from your customers. Remember, they know you in a narrow context, so when they engage with you to talk about improving the Widgets that you make, they are thinking about you only as the Widget Company and as users of your widgets. Their context is to give you ideas to improve your widgets. Just remember that it is quite possible that they don’t need a better widget or a faster horse.
You need to build the institutional intelligence, the systems and of course the talent that truly focuses on understanding the unstated needs of buyers. Of course, once you understand this, the real work of meeting and exceeding those needs as an organization begins.
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