A high-performing team meets or exceeds its clients’ expectations, becomes more effective over time, and helps all members learn and grow. A high-performing team is not merely highly productive; it is anti-fragile. Teams reach high performance through a complex process of development. How can you tell if it is moving along that path or needs a corrective nudge? By monitoring three key team processes.
Monitoring Team Processes
For teams that deliver infrequently or all at once, it can be hard to tell what their clients think about their work. This makes it difficult to evaluate the first criteria while the team is still working. (It’s also an argument for keeping teams together over time and having them deliver frequently or continuously.) It can be challenging to observe the learning and growth within a group. Fortunately, you don’t have to do any of these.
As I often do, I find Hackman and Wageman’s work with teams to be helpful here. They note:
[T]eam effectiveness is a joint function of three performance processes: (1) the level of effort group members collectively expend carrying out task work, (2) the appropriateness to the task of the performance strategies the group uses in its work, and (3) the amount of knowledge and skill members bring to bear on the task.” –Richard Hackman & Ruth Wageman, “A Theory of Team Coaching”
They argue that any team that expends sufficient effort in its work, approaches it with a strategy appropriate to the task at hand, and brings enough knowledge and skill to bear on it is likely to become high-performing. On the other hand, teams that operate in a way that misses the mark with one or more of these processes are unlikely to do so. Teams whose members expend insufficient effort, use inappropriate strategies, or apply inadequate expertise in their work are likely to remain mired in low performance.
These three factors influencing team performance – effort, work strategy, and expertise – are emergent. The processes by which the team applies them are observable but not directly controllable. They are, however, present from the first day the team begins working together. If you want to know if a team is progressing towards high performance, look for how each process operates. And if you’d like to help a team, look for obstacles to each of them.
Effort
The level of effort team members put forth is primarily an issue of motivation. While it can be tempting to ask, “How can I motivate this person more?” the more helpful question is, “How can I remove sources of demotivation?” When team members aren’t working hard enough towards team goals, it’s usually due to one of two factors. Either they believe that the team goals are less important than some other goal they’re working toward, or they’ve encountered enough barriers to accomplishing those goals that they’ve gotten frustrated and given up. If you notice that people’s level of effort toward team goals is low, get curious about what’s happening in the environment that is diminishing their motivation.
About a decade ago, I worked for an organization with a very rigid stage-gate process for product development. On one 18-month-long project, we discovered about four months in that there were whole sections of the project requirements that were either incomplete or incorrect. We knew that changing these would involve a months-long struggle with the project planning group, the people who provided oversight during the execution phase of all the company’s projects.
Rather than engaging in what we saw as a useless battle, we worked around the situation. We knew that we couldn’t skip the poorly-specified features, but we also didn’t have access to customers who could tell us what was needed. Instead, we implemented them as minimally as possible and hoped internal users would find any problems. They did, and we fixed issues as they came out, but our motivation to do so was extremely low. We were tired of fighting with a system that was supposed to be helping us, and it showed in the effort we put forth.
Work Strategy
Using appropriate work strategies is about working smarter, not just harder. How can you tell if the team’s approach to its work is right? You need to know what their approach is, and you need to notice where problems arise. More importantly, you want to know that the team is aware of these problems and has been addressing them. If not, they are likely using an approach they’ve applied before without considering if it is well-suited to their situation.
I once facilitated a project retrospective for a team that had just delivered on an 18-month-long project. During the retrospective, the team discovered the working relationship between the customer and the director running the project had broken down during the seventh month of their project. They didn’t know this at the time because the director was shielding them from customer feedback. While the team had felt highly productive during that time, they realized in the retrospective that they weren’t meeting their customer’s expectations. The way they were working – the work strategy they were applying – hid this fact from them. As a result, the team and the director decided to change their approach to customer feedback for the next project.
Expertise
There are two primary questions to ask about a team’s knowledge and skill. First, do they have the necessary expertise to do the work, or are significant gaps not being addressed? A team can’t apply knowledge it doesn’t have. I once coached a software development team working on updates to a property management accounting system. As they started their work, they spent more time than expected, and their code contained many errors (which, fortunately, were caught by their automated tests). When they reflected on the causes, we realized that no one understood the domain they were working in. The team was motivated to work together and had a solid process for doing so, but they lacked some essential knowledge about their work. So we arranged for some basic training in bookkeeping and property management accounting. (I still remember the whiteboard in the team’s work area showing what happened when you applied a credit or a debit to a liability account versus an expense account). Within a few weeks, the team picked up speed, and the errors disappeared.
Having the required expertise is not enough, however. The second thing to consider is if a team is working in a way that they can apply the knowledge and skills they have. I’ve worked with a disappointingly large number of product development teams where each team member regarded their specialty as the essential skill for the product’s success. This belief led to software engineers not listening to product managers, product managers ignoring quality assurance engineers, and so on. These teams had more than enough knowledge about what needed to be done and how to do it, but they failed to use each others’ expertise effectively.
Adjusting the Conditions
Each of these three processes – application of effort, work strategy, and expertise – influences the others. They are all observable but not directly controllable. So what do you do when you notice a problem? You nudge the process in the right direction by adjusting the conditions around the team that matter most. The essential and enabling conditions for team performance are levers for action.
These two methods – monitoring processes and adjusting conditions – work hand-in-hand. To guide a team towards high performance, pay attention to how they apply their effort, work strategy, and expertise. When these fall short, consider which conditions you can address to correct that. The conditions you can influence depend on your authority and role within the organization.
Regardless of your role, if you want to know if a team is moving toward high performance, pay attention to the level of effort, the appropriateness of its work strategy, and how it applies its member expertise. Monitoring team processes points the way toward developing a team that meets or exceeds its clients’ expectations, becomes more effective over time, and helps all members learn and grow.
