High Performance Teams - what is it in practical terms and how do you achieve it with a team?
Both working in and leading a high performing team is rewarding and brings out the best in everyone and gets the most impactful results.
As a leader you can promote a high performance mindset by removing distractors around but also inside the team, and set up metrics which reinforce the behaviours and culture you want to achieve.
In this episode Christian and Jonas share their experience and provide you with tangible pointers to how to get started as a leader.
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Partial transcript:
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But the point is to not become a point of friction every week, twice a week, three times a week, but to help the product move forward. So those will be the two first outside actors I look at. What about you? So Christian, to build on what you said regarding roles who are there to serve the product and the core team, I made it a habit to encourage people in those roles to regularly meet with the team members and the team as a whole.
Ask them the question, how do I best add value to the work you do and to where we want to bring the product? And then quietly sit on their hands and listen to the feedback they receive. As a leader, obviously you sit outside the team. And what you're looking to is to promote a culture, a line to set up behavioral traits that enables a team to become high performing.
This requires you as a leader to be able to put up some guardrails around the team that gives you the confidence that you're constantly on tap with what's going on inside the team. And then you can step in in a supporting role, supporting, unlocking through mentoring any issues on the path to high performance. Trying to formalize a little bit what you just talked about.
It's not exactly for every team. Some teams are very early stage and they prefer a little bit of we move fast and we don't have time to measure. So they just prefer that and it can work.
But one of the things to explore is could you formalize these metrics into a sort of like a health dashboard for a team? So if you can, whether it's cadence, whether it's time to decision, whether it's how impactful was our launch, whatever your KPIs are, whatever the metrics are that you choose, if you put them together on a health scorecard, then that allows you to fill that in regularly, put in the values and review them with the team. And when you review them with the team, you get to the point where you say, we're improving, we're status quo, we're becoming worse, who knows. But the point is that the measure allows you to then take action in case some things go adrift.
So as usual, having data makes things transparent. What you probably as a product lead need to do is, your product team will probably have to take a little bit of this. Not everybody likes to measure things or to write down how long it took for things.
But your product team is well placed to capture some of these metrics. And so I would say that's a really high, really performant tool. The other thing I would say as well is, once you actually set up these things, you set up a team scorecard, you're working, you reduced meetings, how do you keep it up? I think that's the last tail end of this discussion would be, how do you monitor your team continuously in a way to keep the performance high? And so you have a team scorecard that you continue doing.
But I would actually suggest as well, sending out surveys, ask the team to assess themselves and maturity on the different aspects. And use that to then review what you're doing and do retros, include this in your regular retros and feedback the data you collect into the process. So that you can keep the team at a high cadence and high performing.
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