High performance teams #1: What is a 'high performance culture' and how do you know if you really have a high performance team?

High performance teams #1: What is a 'high performance culture' and how do you know if you really have a high performance team?

High performance teams are five times more productive and lead to a probability of 1.9 times higher financial outcomes. This series of three articles explores what makes up a high performance culture, how CEOs can nurture high performance teams and why they should want to. Parts of this article were informed by an interview with myself, alongside Marco Chiapusso, Chief Technology Officer for Ion and David Bleier, Head of Digital Transformation for Google. You can find the full transcript of that discussion here.

Were the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal Los Angeles Lakers a ‘high performance team’?

In the early 2000s, the Los Angeles Lakers were the team to beat in America’s National Basketball Association (NBA).

Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant were household names not just in the US, but throughout the world. The team hired legendary head coach Phil Jackson (of Netflix’s The Last Dance fame) and with O’Neal and Bryant as centrepieces went on to win the first three championships of the decade, in 2000, 2001, and 2002. They were, without a doubt, the best team of their era.

But alongside those championships there was growing concern about how the team functioned.

O’Neal and Bryant had a famously fractious relationship, Jackson’s tactics were lauded, but the players despised his practice routines and he once described Bryant as “uncoachable”. Throughout the 2000s a series of player trades and back office changes were attributed to unhappiness, power struggles and cultural disputes.

After that run of three back-to-back championships the team of the decade would reign superior just once more in that ten year span, failing to top the pile again until 2009.

If you assessed the team in business terms then you could characterise the 2000-2009 LA Lakers as successful performers.

But all of the evidence suggests that the culture around the team was actively pushing against the team’s success.?

The Lakers performed well and successfully in four of the ten years in the decade. But it is arguable whether they had a true high performance culture. The end goal of such a superstar-filled team was to win championships and the Lakers won just 40% of those available in the decade; a ‘D’ or ‘E’ grade on most exams.

How many more championships could they have won?

A company recently approached me to assess the performance of their teams.

This was a successful company, with good financial results, a sophisticated and successful approach to digital and a happy and motivated team.

Why then, did they need to assess how their teams were performing, how they were structured and what more they could do?

This turned out to be a classic case of a Johari Window, the four-quadrant model which maps a matrix of knowns and unknowns.?

The company thought they had a high performance culture, with high performing teams who were generating outstanding results.

But they did not know the true characteristics of a high performance culture and they had never had their structure assessed to see if they were truly creating an environment for high performance.?

High performance culture was, in Johari Window terms, an ‘unknown unknown’; the company didn’t truly know what it was and therefore didn’t know how to get there.

The trigger for taking steps to fix this was the company coming across an article about high performing teams. Remember: this is a company already performing really well, with motivated and generally happy staff. What was their reaction on reading about high performance culture?

“We’re missing at least 30% of what’s described in the article. How high could our performance go if we make the changes to run a genuine high performance team?”

The above two examples are incredibly common. Often businesses think that they have a high performance culture because they are successful or because their people are happy or because they hit KPIs or OKRs, or a combination of many of the above.

This is not a high performance culture. This is a business that is successful without a high performance culture and could therefore be even more successful with some changes.

David Bleier, Head of Digital Transformation at Google, explains this really well:

“Let's start with what high performance culture is not: it’s not an organisation of heroes. It’s not people with hero syndrome who work 12 hours a day or more, because that’s what they feel they need to do to get things done.”

If we say then that a high performance culture is not winning championships whilst everyone is generally unhappy and it’s not people working 12 hour days to be super productive and it’s not good financial performance without a specific focus on team, then what is it?

Defining high performance culture

Rather than an overt definition, it is helpful to look at common elements that are almost always a feature of high performance teams. If these are present in your working environment and, crucially, your team know, recognise and positively accept that they are present, then it is possible that you have a high performing team, operating in a high performance culture. If you are missing any of these, or your team cannot point to the below, then the evidence says that your business could perform even better than it already is.

Mission

High performance teams not only know what the company’s mission is, that mission is present in every aspect of how the company operates. Rather than just talking about the mission and referencing it in marketing material, the mission governs things like how the company approaches hiring, how customer centricity informs the work it does and how performance reviews and HR tasks are completed, to name just a few aspects of business. The mission is not just present; it is the business.

Purpose

This means that your team acts with purpose. They do jobs and tasks that are meaningful. The work they do has a direct link to the company mission. The team knows that what they are doing is helping the company to advance. In short: how they spend their day matters to both themselves and the company.?

Marco Chiapusso Chief Technology Officer at Ion puts this really well: “high performance culture teams need to have a purpose. When you have a purpose you can have a mission and then you know why you’re coming to work every day… It’s very important to feel part of something, because that means that there is trust between all of the members of the team.”

Raspberry Pi makes affordable computers. Taken alone that’s an interesting enough go-to-market approach. But Raspberry Pi are led by a mission and that mission has a purpose;

“Our mission

To put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.

Our reason

So that more people are able to harness the power of computing and digital technologies for work, to solve problems that matter to them, and to express themselves creatively.”

Now, if we work for Raspberry Pi, we’re not just making and shipping computers. We’re giving everyone, globally, no matter their resources, the power of digital to solve the issues they encounter daily.?

Are you likely to perform better working with that purpose, or working with the aim to sell as many cheap computers as possible?

Trust

As Marco says, complete trust eliminates wasted time on internal politics, micro management and disputes. If your team feels they are trusted, they are more likely to be engaged in meaningful work. They are also more likely to take risks, another characteristic covered below and to engage with work which may be outside of their job role or comfort zone.

Autonomy

High performance teams are often multi-disciplined, with the freedom to operate as they need to to get the work done. In this environment it is the work that is important to the team, not necessarily the person who gets assigned to that work. Because there is trust, there is no risk to anyone of anyone else completing a key task that the team needs to get done in order to fulfil its purpose.

Safety

Trust and freedom breed safety. In our discussion on high performance teams, Marco and David both mentioned Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs. The bottom two needs in Maslow are our psychological and safety needs. Executives can address these needs, even if they are not being directly put at risk by the business. By increasing the team’s collective and individual safety you can remove various fears and encourage growth and time spent on more meaningful tasks.

Taking measured risks

Safety also links to risk. When teams feel safe, they also feel safe to take measured risks. They will try innovative ideas, processes and product developments with the knowledge that if they fail there is no consequence, because trying, risking and failing is part of the job description. As David says: “people who feel comfortable enough to take risks, fail fast and learn. That’s all about high performance.” Without risk, innovative things do not get made.

Learning

This is an outcome of taking risks. By taking risks innovation happens and teams learn. Even when things fail there is learning to be taken from those failures, which is accepted and incorporated into the team’s activity. This positive output of a failed risk is part of the high performance team’s process. It helps to ensure that morale never dips, that the team is academically engaged and that there is focus on outputs at all times.

Outputs

High performance teams produce outputs often and quickly. There is no waiting for 12 months to produce something only to find that that something is not quite right. Teams produce an output, collect target market and internal reaction, incorporate that reaction and produce another output. This is iterating quickly. High performance teams are focused on an end output and extremely good at getting these outputs in front of people as often as possible. If you are not producing an output at least every four weeks then you likely are not being iterative enough.

Blockage removal

Blockers of any sort - process, people, supply or others - stop teams from producing outputs quickly, which is one of our high performance team hallmarks. This means that high performance teams have generally established methods to remove blockages quickly. Often this is input from a senior executive. Where this is not the case, these blockers are often ‘unknown, unknowns’. The leadership team is unaware of what is blocking the team from moving quickly, so no-one with the power to remove the blockage acts at the appropriate time. High performing teams have feedback mechanisms to ensure blockages are reported and acted on quickly.

Inspired encouragement

Leadership in high performance teams often functions as inspired encouragement, rather than micro management. The leaders are available to remind the team of their safety, to encourage them to take risks, to motivate the team to draw positives from failed risks and to remove process blockers. Leadership knows and recognises the benefits of high performance culture, so they act to protect and encourage it further.

Part two, covering the benefits of adopting a high performance culture and how CEOs can start to make this change in their company, will be published next week.