Is Your Team Environment Actually Conducive To High-Performance?

Good morning.

What we know from Google’s project Aristotle, is that how a team performs is not determined only by?who?is on the team but by?how?the team interacts with each other.

Mediocre teams leave this interaction, and the resulting team environment, up to chance. High-performance teams design it in a way that brings the best out of the team.

Expecting exceptional team performance from a mediocre team environment is like tossing a seed onto barren soil and hoping that it will sprout into a tree.

The team environment is ever present. It’s the language that we use to describe how it feels being a part of a team. It’s our sense of belonging, our expectations, our social contract.

It’s the foundation from which a team does its work.

And it’s quite clear that this is something we want to be intentional about crafting.

But how do we go about it?

Here are three starting points that we have been using with our clients at Modern Breed.

1. Cultivating Psychological Safety

2. Creating Alignment: A Performance Execution Framework

3. Tabling The Team Operating System

Cultivating Psychological Safety

When we work on fixing our teams we usually want to start with the behaviour. We directly want to address things like accountability, feedback, or time-management.

This is the wrong place to start.

According to Google's study of 180 teams, the following factors contribute to team effectiveness:

Impact. Meaning. Structure. Dependability.

But most of all,?psychological safety.

When we step back, we realize that this makes complete sense.

Psychological safety exists when we have created an environment where people feel they can speak up without being ostracized from the group. Specifically, this means that they can raise concerns, ask questions, and challenge assumptions.

Apart from the obvious benefit that people feel a greater sense of belonging when psychological safety is high. There is something else that emerges as a result – we are more likely to disagree and to have frank discussions about what is working and not working.

Without it, we are likely to avoid difficult conversations about the things that matter – like accountability, feedback, and time-management.

The point I'm trying to make is that even if you try to address certain structural issues, your intervention will ultimately fail if the environment doesn't support the new behavior.

It doesn't matter what feedback framework you have if your team doesn't feel comfortable having honest conversations.

Psychological safety is equal parts truth serum and confidence in the team.

When we have it, we create the space where a team can grow, fail, be challenged, and ultimately reach its full potential.

Creating Alignment: A Performance Execution Framework

Teamwork is complex. We have individuals from diverse backgrounds, with different perspectives and beliefs coming together to accomplish a joint mission.

Our varying strengths and points of view are great but must be aligned if we are to succeed.

A Performance Execution Framework does just that. It aligns the team around the key levers of behaviour that will move the team forward.

There are an infinite number of things that we can focus on that will create progress. But trying to focus on them all means we focus on nothing. And so, what we want is to harness people’s attention around the things that matter.

The simplest example of a Performance Execution Framework demonstrates this perfectly.

In the high-stakes world of competitive rowing, where the battle is not just against fellow competitors but also against the relentless challenges of nature, the British rowing team has distinguished itself with a philosophy (Performance Execution Framework) as profound as it is simple: "Will it make the boat go faster?"

It underlines the mindset that every single action, decision, and thought should contribute directly to the ultimate goal: making the boat go faster.

This is not just about physical strength or technical finesse, it extends to nutrition, sleep, mental health, team dynamics and beyond.

The idea was popularised by Olympic Gold Medalist Ben Hunt-Davis and his team during their preparation for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. Faced with the formidable task of turning their past disappointments into a competitive advantage, they chose this mantra as a guiding principle for their collective and individual actions.

The results were spectacular. The British rowing team won the gold medal in the men's eight event, an achievement that epitomised the power of their philosophy.

What this story demonstrates is the power of using a framework, as simple as a singular question, to harness the attention and focus of a team.

I have many more examples of stories like this that demonstrate how a framework for performance can turn around teams, businesses, and even countries.

Tabling The Team Operating System

The final component of creating a team environment is about being explicit.

Explicit in how we operate as a team:

- The roles and responsibilities of team members

- How we deal with accountability

- How we give and receive feedback

- How we measure performance

For example, Netflix has the 4 A’s of dealing with feedback. It’s an explicit, scripted, process.

When giving feedback,?aim to assist and make the advice?actionable. When receiving feedback,?appreciate that someone took the time to give it to you but ultimately choose to?accept or disregard what has been said.

A clear set of guidelines for everyone in the company to follow as it relates to the topic of feedback. Explicit.

When working on team structure, the Team Operating System, we are doing something that’s incredibly important for the team environment.

We are creating clarity and removing uncertainty.

As Brene Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.”

There is enough uncertainty for us to have to deal with in the world around us. We don’t need it in our teams too.

Most teams never explicitly discuss these important aspects of collaboration. We just allow them to evolve organically over time.

Unfortunately, this leaves people guessing as to the best way to conduct themselves in the team setup.

Wrapping Up

When I started out working with teams, I thought we could work on structural issues independent of what’s happening in the team environment.

Want a workshop on improving feedback in the team? Sure.

Or a workshop on better collaboration? Not a problem.

Except, it is a problem.

You will never move a team forward if you do not start with the team environment. Working on team issues in isolation is like being worried about fixing a flat tire on a car with a faulty engine.

Sure, it will look more complete from the outside.

But we all know, it’s going nowhere.

Fix the engine.

Here's to building better teams.

Erik//

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Whenever you are ready, here are 3 ways in which we can help you:

1.???Book me to?speak?at your event or next team meeting. These hour-long sessions are perfect for aligning the team and sparking new ways of thinking.

2.???Book us to?design and deliver a workshop?for your team. Our flagship workshop helps your team to discover the practices that increase psychological safety and to create a code for performance.

3.???If you are ready to deeply invest in your people, then reach out for us to design a?3 - 6 session long engagement?geared towards creating shared mental models and facilitating change.

Click here to enquire about any of the above.