What are the Characteristics of High Performance Teams? Part 7

7. Space honoured for rehearsal and celebration

Sports teams spend 95% of their working time training. Orchestras spend 95% of their time rehearsing. Business teams on the other hand, spend 100% of their time performing (even when we are practising we are concerned with how we look!). In other words when performance is the most critical thing, teams spend huge amounts of time and energy on training, practice, rehearsal and experimentation in order that they can perform to their very best. They create environments and activities where they have full licence and permission to experiment, to improvise, try new ways, to duff shots, hit bum notes and generally to look foolish in the process. And this is the true creative process. This is where excellence is honed, iterated and refined. We learn and grow not by an intellectual process of acquiring knowledge or theory, but through a process of repetition, iteration and constant refinement. We hone our performance until the basic and fundamental techniques are in our muscle memory, so that we can do it without engaging our conscious mind, so our body does it for us, and then we are free to use our conscious mind in reaction to the dance that it going in around us in the moment. We are free to use our flair, our instinct, our essence, our soul. Wow. What a performance!

So how does your team do this? What are the critical performances that you give? A team meeting is not a performance, it’s training and preparation. A presentation to a major client is a performance – that’s where we have to be at our very best. An all hands or town hall meeting with the employees – that’s a performance and a place where we need to have fully prepared ourselves in advance.

And by performance I don’t mean putting on an act. I don’t mean pretending to be someone or something we are not. I mean striving to be the best we can at that moment in whatever we are doing and whatever role we are playing. If I consciously think about myself as a father, think about what I do wrong and what I could do to be a better father, and if I then seek to consciously do those things, I’m not acting, I’m just trying to be the best Dad I can be for my children. I am seeking to perform my role as a father the best way I possibly can. This for me is the difference between acting and performing. So although I understand Antony Robbins’ exhortation to ‘fake it before you make it’ and I might even seem to advocate this at times (when asked how do I become a Director my advice is always ‘behave like one first’), for me there is a critical difference between acting and performing.

I sometimes hear the argument that says ‘if I rehearse then I won’t be spontaneous’ but this is a cop out uttered by someone who can’t be bothered to put the work in. Would you make your wedding vows up on the spot or would you at the very least have thought through the essence of what you wanted to communicate to your new spouse and all your friends and family congregated? Would you go for the most important interview of your life without doing any preparation? Then you won’t get the job.

So if we would naturally prepare for critical performances, why would we not prepare for ‘smaller’ performances? As a leader we do not have the luxury of playing to small theatres where it really doesn’t matter. We are always on stage and every action and inaction is judged. This is tyrannical and exhausting – there is no hiding place – but it is the responsibility that goes with the privilege.

I’m amazed at how managers don’t observe their direct reports performing as a matter of standard management practice. How as a Sales Manager can you give accurate and effective, nay inspiring feedback and guidance to one of your sales guys, if you do not observe them in the spotlight and under the pressure of the sales calls they make to customers? And yet I often hear that managers don’t want to put their people off, and don’t want to be accused of not trusting their people.

AAA (Access All Areas) guys…….the trick is to make the prospect of your observation exciting, so it is eagerly anticipated. When the store colleagues see your car pull up in the customer car park, do they feel a thrill of positive anticipation, or they filled with dread?

Have you noticed how sales people hate failure – fear it? And have you noticed how engineers love it – invite it? Why is this? Well for salespeople their experience is that failure (to win the deal, get the order, achieve the price increase, hit the target etc) is punished, either overtly with the missing out on financial rewards or promotions, or in that dreadful passive aggressive sort of way emotionally where they suffer the disappointment of their boss and maybe their colleagues. For a salesperson, failure is horrible and potentially final. It is to be avoided at all costs, and if suffered, it is to be deflected as much as possible. This is why we have to be so careful in our use of targets and in how we set objectives.

But for engineers, failure is inevitable and necessary, and provides incredibly valuable data – it is simply one amazingly useful step along the way to perfection. An engineer is dissatisfied and suspicious if something works first time, since that had to be luck. Engineers will test things to destruction – this is what they trust and then they know how to replicate the product or situation reliably and predictably, which means we can scale it and allow others to get involved But salespeople will often take the first order, the easy sale and get out quick. Weak salespeople miss so many opportunities.?

Do you play video games? How do you learn the game? Do you studiously read the instructions, or do you simply experiment and learn as you go along. I’m no expert but even I’ve noticed that video games no longer come with instructions. There may be some tutorial modules to equip us with the basic consol techniques, but after that we’ll learn as we go. And in the combat games, we learn by dying. We may die hundreds of times before we successfully progress to the next level – and every time we die we learn something, and have new data to inform small changes in our strategies and techniques. So if we can do this when we play…….

We have to let people play at work for this is where we will create the finest arena for creativity and learning and improvement and growth.

Our team meetings are the classic medium for rehearsal and practice so we must create the culture that gives licence and permission for people to play, and then have structures and devices we can implement when we are all being too serious. One of my clients created what he called a “Jumpers for Goalposts” rule in meetings. He recalled that as a boy walking home from school (he lived in the Dickensian era) he and his mates would often stop on a small piece of waste ground and put their jumpers or school bags down as goalposts and have an impromptu football match. They all knew it wasn’t real and it certainly wasn’t perfect, but it worked. Ten minutes later the posts had been collected up and they continued home. So the rule in his meetings was that anyone, at any time, could literally call out ‘Jumpers for Goalposts’, and the team would metaphorically kick a ball about for 10 minutes. During that 10 minutes, the rules of the game changed from having to be right, or serious or even respectful, and the team members were allowed to be childish, wrong, crazy, politically incorrect, human………just for 10 minutes. It was an amazingly powerful device and would often have a dramatic impact on the team performance and output.

Article excerpted from “And The Leader Is… Transforming Cultures with CEQ” - by Gareth Chick for the CEQ Newsletter: Coaching, Leadership, Change

Exclusive to our Newsletter subscribers, we are offering free 30 minute Coaching Sessions with one of our coaches. Simply fill out the short form below and we will do the rest:

https://www.ceq.com/1-2-1-coaching-booking-form

Our Page | Our Website | Our Team | Our Services