Building High Performance Teams

Key Goal

Managers, I hope you see this as a key goal for yourself and your group right now.

Usually, high-performance teams each build one great product at a time.

This is the way I think you maximize your R&D dollars. Your investment in your teams. This is the way to get the most out of your knowledge workers.

Why Not

First, I do not have any ideas that would improve your chances, compared to a high-performance team. The Agile High-Performance Team is an idea that has been tried. Often badly. Still, it is the best idea.

Why not try it?

If you have a bunch of really good people that do NOT want to be in a Team, you are stuck. I do NOT recommend putting people in a Team that do not want to be in a Team.

Related problem: Often you have people that do not know if they want to be in a highly productive team. Maybe some people have had some bad experiences with "teams." Maybe never in a Team. Often, you find out about these people later, which is a lot of trouble.

Related problem: Your culture does not know how to support teams. This really encompasses lots of related things. Ex: Your organization will not prioritize so a Team can focus mainly on one product goal. This and related problems can make building high-performance teams dicey.

There are other issues and what we might call prerequisites. Ex: A bunch of mediocre people doing a team process with mild agreement will probably not beat "top" people doing a workgroup (non-Team) process that they like.

My related quote: "People are remarkably good at doing what they want to do."

Why Useful

OK, why do you want to build high-performance teams?

Well, first, let's be honest and say having a high-performance team by itself is NOT what you want. You only want that IF it gives you more success.

Let's define success: higher customer satisfaction, and greater shareholder returns. And I think happier employees is key longer term. Higher quality is important. And higher innovation/creativity. Maybe we could also state this as "separation" - the sense that we have a product that, for our customers, sets us up for longer-term success versus the competition.

My way of expressing these. You might do it differently.

So, the main reason: We think High-Performance Teams, if done right, will give you more business success.

Why should High-Performance Teams work?

Here are some reasons quickly:

• Two heads (or seven heads) are better than one
• Seven people learn from each other, and learn faster and diffuse that throughout the Team
• Fairly autonomous (if you choose the right people)
• If the Team owns it, the work feels less daunting to a whole Team
• The Team estimates (or soon does) better than any one individual
• The Team can have fun; that improves the morale of all
• Having a good PO for one Team makes sense with Team = 7. A better PO makes a big difference in the value of what they produce.
• With a fairly autonomous Team, suddenly it is (or should be) much more transparent what the main problems are
• It is far easier for a manager to manage a Team, than to manage 7 individuals, to get to success

If you look at the economics (we will later), the Team's annual cost is near $1 million. And the value delivered (NPV over 3-5 years) of the product(s) produced is typically $3 million.

Getting a 20% improvement from this should be fairly easy.

Getting a 100% improvement should be common, if you do the right things (a bunch of things).

Conclusion

Focus on building High-Performance Teams.

The approach is a good path to success, given good people. And, somewhat, the right culture.

You should start with a decent / reasonable situation for the Team.

The will to put in reasonable effort must be there: 'whatever it takes'. And to change and improve.

Then it is well worth it.