Building High Performance Teams

EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE AUG.2009

Building High Performance Teams

Building High Performance Teams Decentralize

-- Tamara J Erickson

Leading a high performance team requires creating a context that will encourage all team members to contribute to their fullest – by sharing information and ideas to meet intriguing challenges in an atmosphere of trust.

Almost everyone who takes on the responsibility of managing within an enterprise feels the weight of obligation deep in their bones—obligations to the owners of the enterprise, of course; and to customers; but for most, perhaps even more viscerally, obligations to the employees and families that depend on the company for their livelihood; and to the heritage of the organization that they've been given the privilege to steward.

As a result, there's no big surprise that many leaders too feel that they have to call the shots, to make the key decisions personally. It's probably human nature – or at least human nature for those who take on these roles – particularly in a challenging business economy, to have the desire to centralize control, but not the best way to get high performance from your team.

In many companies today, authority is being centralized, extra levels of sign-off added; small teams of executives are closeting away in secret retreats to review options while meetings that would bring the troops together are being canceled. Executive instinct drives tighter control – reviews your costs, tightens your approval criteria, pulls key decisions and sign offs up to higher levels, makes sure everyone in the organization is as fully busy as possible, and narrows the business scope. These actions are understandable, but dangerously wrong, particularly if the high performance of your team depends on its ability to share information and innovate.

Innovation occurred when two areas of knowledge or insight came together. The most straightforward definition of innovation is, in some way, the combination of two previously unrelated ideas. These might be an insight about a business need and a new way to solve it; two technologies that have never before been combined; the skills of one colleague sparking the creativity of another; or any other merger of two approaches or perspectives.

Occasionally, disparate ideas come together within one individual's mind, perhaps as the result of a highly unusual combination of personal knowledge, experience, and exposure. But more often, creative leaps are sparked by two or more people working together, each with their own unique competency, perspectives, and experiences. The paradox is this: although such diversity is the foundation of disparate ideas, it is also the very thing that is most likely to discourage knowledge sharing. Most of us find it much more difficult to form trust-based relationships with people we perceive as being `different'. Not that these relationships don't happen, but they typically take longer to form and require greater focus and intent. Diversity decreases the likelihood of knowledge transfer unless you purposely invest in forming relationships.

Significant research has shown that groups make better decisions than individuals, that there is wisdom in crowds. Rather than personally grabbing control during a challenge, leaders need to tap into the wisdom and – perhaps even more importantly, energy – of the entire team.

To create a high performance team, a leader's role is to do three things:

1. Build the team's collaborative capacity by investing in relationships and creating trust among team members. Don't cut out meetings, intensify the competition among team members, or reduce investments in learning. Increase your team's collaborative capacity by building relationships and encouraging knowledge exchange.

2. Ask great questions. Challenge the team to meet goals that are intriguing, complex and important. Don't narrow the focus to the mundane or over-specify the way teams should approach their challenges. Articulate a compelling intent – something that, in the language of complexity theory, will serve as a `strange attractor' to rally.

3. Challenge the status quo. Insure that your team has regular on-going exposure to disruptive insights through diversity and external forays. Don't cut travel or fall back on the old `tried and true' team. Bring in new people and new ideas – and take them seriously. Get outside your business sphere. Encourage brainstorming and the use of scenario analysis. Don't cut training – invest in your people.

Rather than trying to tighten control and hunker down, to lead a high performance team, find ways to help the team become more spontaneous, innovative and reflexive.

Increase Collaborative Capacity

Strong, trust-based relationships are the foundation for the behaviors you need both as an individual and within the organization you lead. These relationships are essential for collaboration, which in turn is needed to bring ideas together to innovate and to address complex challenges.

Creating the capacity to bring ideas together on a reliable, consistent basis depends on ensuring that multiple individuals will freely exchange knowledge. This requires strong, safe relationships between people. As a contemporary leader, one of your primary responsibilities is to build your organization's capacity for collaboration by systematically investing in activities that develop trust-based relationships.

Leaders in organizations with significant capacity to collaborate and innovate actively set the stage.

• Invest in networks around innovation priorities. Collaboration, as I'm using it here, requires an investment of time and effort from the people involved. It is the act of working together, especially in a joint intellectual effort. It has nothing to do with being `nice', per se. And not all tasks require it.

Determine which parts of the organization need to exchange insights and whether the collaborative capacity among members of those groups is strong. Do the right people know and trust each other? You can map the frequency of information exchange among individuals using tools such as the one developed by Robert Cross at the University of Virginia, creating rich visual representations of the relationships of collaboration within an organization and, conversely, identifying those parts of the organization where little exchange occurs.

Tamara J Erickson is a McKinsey Award-winning author and widely respected expert on organizations and innovation – on building talent and enhancing productivity – and on the nature of work in the intelligent economy. Her work is based on extensive research on the changing workforce and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations innovate through collaboration. As President of the nGenera Innovation Network, Tammy is currently directing a major research program on the practical realities of creating a next generation enterprise. Tammy has authored or co-authored numerous Harvard Business Review articles, including "It's Time to Retire Retirement," winner of the McKinsey Award; an MIT Sloan Management Review article; and the book Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. She recently completed a trilogy of books on how individuals in specific generations can excel in today's workplace – Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Plugged In: The Generation Y Guide to Thriving at Work were published in 2008. The third book, What's Next, Gen X? Keeping Up, Moving Ahead and Getting the Career You Want, will be available later this year.

• Select people who like to collaborate. If collaboration is important to a program's success, gauge an individual's preference for doing so as part of the selection and promotion processes.

• Create a `gift' culture. Establish an organizational culture in which people freely give their time to help others. Model this behavior personally; share the best of yourself by becoming a teacher, a mentor, and a mentee. Focus on developing others. Be open to what you can learn even from younger members. Visible examples of senior leaders generously helping and learning from others are a powerful way to spread this behavior.

• Design ways to format trust-based relationships. Make significant and thoughtful investments in programs and processes that will facilitate the development of relationships. Approaches can vary widely, including:

• Events to give people opportunities to meet

• Technology to allow work groups to communicate easily

• Education to strengthen people's ability to resolve conflict and hold meaningful conversations

• Physical architecture to provide informal space for colleagues to congregate

• Organizational design to create units of a size that permit people to know each other and understand the whole and negate the need for excessive control

• Process or workflow design to consider relationship formation by bringing people together regularly during the process.

• Leverage strong relationships within the organization. Nokia, for example, often transfers small groups of employees from one area to another so that they begin each new job with already formed relationships. And, when budgets are tight, don't eliminate the meetings that are the key to forming relationships and intensifying competition among internal teams, or reduce investments in learning, not if you plan to innovate.

• Operate as a community of adults. Trust the people you lead. Establish practices, particularly for access to and handling of sensitive information, that signal the organization's trust of employees. In a possibly extreme example, the Brazilian company Semco has done away with expense reports. CEO Ricardo Semler's view is that requiring the reports implies that you are questioning either whether the worker actually incurred the expense or the individual's judgment in doing so, in either case, diminishing the sense of trust.

• Make sure processes are efficient, tasks are well managed, and roles are clearly defined. Collaboration is seriously compromised by processes that waste participants' time and by unclear and ambiguous role definitions that force people to parry over authority and control. The leader's responsibility is to provide clear, well-structured roles.

• Leave the approach itself to the discretion and creativity of the team. Tasks that are too tightly prescribed inhibit collaboration and innovation. Why bother, if there's little latitude in the approach? Think of the emergency room in a hospital as the model of clear roles and ambiguous tasks. The role definitions among the team members are precise. When beginning to work on a new patient, there's no need for discussion about who would like to do the surgery that day. However, the nature of the challengewhat will be wrong with the patient and therefore what steps will be required for treatmentis unknown, and the precise steps required are therefore ambiguous.

Ask Compelling Questions

Great leaders pose great questions that are ambitious and novel. They frame intriguing, memorable, essential, and worthy challenges that ignite the organization. This responsibility represents perhaps the most significant departure from conventional views of leadership. The leader's role shifts from making key decisions to posing questions that allow broad participation in forming a response. Use your expertise, wisdom, and intelligence to shape better questions, to discern trends earlier, to frame more intriguing challenges, and to articulate them in compelling ways. Asking great questions is particularly important for innovation, but it means giving up some of the traditional notions of the leader's power and the norm of imposing top-down edicts. There are few things more likely to stifle any hint of innovationto freeze people in their tracksthan to command that they "innovate." Leaders who make statements like "5 percent of our revenue must come from new products"are almost certainly dampening the organization's ability to respond.

In contrast, John F Kennedy's ambitious and intriguing goal for space exploration was an inspiring challenge: "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." The goal brought the scientific community together in an exciting collaborative quest to solve a seemingly insurmountable technical challenge.

Robert Shapiro, when he became the CEO of Monsanto, issued a similar challenge. Rather than exhorting people to "be more innovative," Shapiro spoke about the powerful new developments in biotechnology and the pressing need to address the problems of world hunger. He challenged the organization with the intriguing question of whether Monsanto might use biotechnology to solve some of the world's food shortages. His challenge inspired tremendous collaboration throughout the firm, resulting in thousands of suggestions for new, innovative solutions.

Both are examples of a leader rallying an organization around what I call "intent" – a powerfully worded question or goal. Like the idea of "strange attractors" in chaos theory, intent becomes a touchstone that drives people toward new levels of creativity and commitment, a galvanizing force to align people around the new challenge.

Embrace Complexity and Seek Disruptive Information

Acknowledge complexity head on, without attempting to minimize the difficulties or ambiguities. Research has found that ignoring or oversimplifying challenges does not work, largely because of the stress it places on the organization, which quickly sees through the facade. Leaders are responsible for grappling honestly with complex issues. Your genera-tion's shared tendency to reject absolutes, to accept that there is no final "right" analysis of events that tops all other analyses, no single rationality, no universal morality, no crisp sound-bite solutions for multidimensional problems is a great asset.

This leadership responsibility also embodies seeking disruptive information and bad news. It requires challenging your own assumptions, absorbing new perspectives, adopting new technology, and exploring new ideas. And it means exposing the organization you lead to provocative thinking. Leaders must disrupt their stable system by ensuring that new insights are continually introduced. Pragmatic paths to diverse perspectives include:

• Hire mavericks

• Expose the organization to social, political, demographic, and technological trends

• Tap a wide range of problem solvers

• Explore thoughtful "what if" perspectives through scenario development and options analysis

• Feed the mind and the imagination with exercises to think more broadly and look at things in new and different light

• Arrange visits to other innovators, not only those in your industry or facing the same problems you face, but all types of innovative organizations.

As you bring in new people and new ideas, you'll need to deal with the paradox I discussed earlier. Because the people who are the most likely to share information are the ones that know each other well, bringing in new people requires a continual investment in forming new relationships.

Leading a high performance team requires creating a context that will encourage all team members to contribute to their fullest – by sharing information and ideas to meet intriguing challenges in an atmosphere of trust.