The Buzz about Exceptional Teams: How Honeybees Set the Standard for High Performance

Take a look at the picture above. Does this look like your organization - everyone "busy as a bee?"

Last week, Mike and I had an opportunity to visit an apiary. After a costume change that had us looking like Rihanna’s Super Bowl Halftime Show back-up dancers, we were surprised to learn so much about honeybees that translates to Exemplary Performance’s work with high-performing individuals and teams.?

Here are three insights from the hive that show us how to bee ??a better performing team (sorry, couldn't help myself!):

1. Role clarity, task clarity, and the theory of specialization. As social insects, bees live in colonies where each individual has a specific task to perform for the common good of the hive. A single colony can contain a Queen, 20,000-60,000 female Worker Bees, and <1% of stingless Male Drones. During their ~6-7-week lifespan, their roles can morph from housekeeping to undertaking, nursing younger bees, attending to the queen, collecting nectar, fanning the beehive, producing beeswax, guarding the hive, and finally, from days 22-42, foraging for pollen. Phew!

How you can thrive like the hive: Is your organization aligned on what each role must produce to drive business results, or are projects and tasks overlapping and sometimes redundant? Do you have career pathing within job families so criteria for promotion are clear and objective? Can you articulate what your best performers do differently that makes them the best? Consider an organizational alignment and profile of excellence exercise that maps how each role contributes to the business. Then, recruit, interview, hire, onboard, train, and promote to the new standard.

2. Such role and task clarity would not be possible without lifelong learning and communication. Like your best customer success representatives, commercial loan officers, training managers, and sales reps, bees are not born knowing how to make honey, but must be taught from older bees within the hive. Bees are quick to learn from their experience. Through pheromones and "waggle dances," they communicate incessantly about the location of the best flowers, any danger zones, and tasks that still need to be accomplished.

How you can thrive like the hive: Do you have a repository of best, "repeatable," practices that is current and easy to mine? Do you have a central view of all projects hitting your teams so you can resource them appropriately and help hold folks accountable? Does your organization incent and reward "performance contagion" - high-performing employees who positively influence their peers' performance and productivity, passing down critical tribal knowledge (or do your top performers view it as a competitive advantage and quietly refuse to share)? Tap into the mystery of mastery of your top performers and codify what they do differently to win. Communicate this throughout the organization and reward and recognize collaboration, mentoring, continuous process improvement, and best/next-practice sharing.

3. Self-awareness, shifting the performance curve, and colony collapse disorder. As they near the end of their lifecycle, or if they become sickly, poor performing bees self-select and leave the hive to selflessly die outside, sparing their colony from the work of having to remove them. This, in turn, makes the colony stronger and shifts the performance curve to the right, eliminating the left, lagging tail of weaker bees. On the opposite spectrum, when too many high-performing worker bees desert the colony, colony collapse disorder (CCD) can occur. Whether due to low workforce, burnout, too many young (inexperienced) worker bees, or climate change, CCD will ultimately destroy the hive.

How you can thrive like the hive: Think about your team's bell-shaped curve. Are you spending a disproportionate amount of your coaching time on your poorest performers? How self-aware and coachable are they? As we are nearly halfway through the year, is it time for a conversation around job-fit?

Now, think about your best performers. Have you conducted a "stay interview" to learn what tweaks to tools, processes, and policies would serve them even better? Are you aware of their signs and signals of burnout? And if your best person left the company tomorrow, would you have the resources necessary to elevate high potential, but less experienced bench strength? As painful as it may be, have the performance discussion. Exit underperforming teammates that are unintentionally limiting your success. And avoid CCD by plugging into your top performers, understanding what makes them thrive, and equipping them with the proper resources to amplify their performance. ????????

Fun facts:

• In ancient Egypt, people would pay their taxes in honey. My accountant advised against this. Ironically, her name is Melissa, which is Greek for “honeybee.”
• The word honeymoon is derived from the ancient practice of gifting a newly married couple a month’s supply of honey to ensure happiness and fertility.?
• No such thing as "the bee's knees" - although they have jointed legs, they lack a kneecap. So, this fanciful phrase accurately refers to something that doesn't exist.
• Bees may clean their cells up to 1,000 times a day. So, I'm not really crazy...maybe I'm just a bee?

Bee-sides (??) honey, here's what else we're consuming:

• Re:Thinking with Adam Grant : Steve Martin on finding your authentic voice. (5/4/2023).
• HBR IdeaCast podcast: How Generative AI Changes Productivity. (5/4/2023).
• Influence. Cialdini, Robert. 2021.

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