Building a high performing team by design.
Edition 13 of Forward+
1 big idea worth considering.
The belief that the only way to build a high performing team is by recruiting and hiring the best of the best is a broken model (and has rarely worked out in my experience).
What works instead?
Hiring and retaining a capable team, and designing their day to day experience in a way that high performance is the natural outcome.
Before we jump to the how of high performing teams, I think it’s helpful to start by taking a closer look at what we know we don’t want our teams to be - dysfunctional, low performing, and unhappy.
This dysfunction and low performance looks different company to company, but there’s a few tell-tale signs that we can look for:
The individuals on the team don’t have a clear idea of what success looks like in their role and/or don’t know the path to that success.
There is a lot of time wasted - pointless meetings, endless amounts of meetings, new projects or distractions seemingly every week.
The team feels blocked and unsupported when they ask for resources and surface ideas that they believe would help them in their role.
The antidote to low performance and dysfunction lies in these tell-tale signs.
Great leaders understand that the above inputs lead to poor outputs and proactively build systems that empower the team to be productive by default, spend their time on the most important work, and enable them with the resources they need to do their best work.
Here’s a simple framework for the how.