Team performance inherently consists of two vital traits: effectiveness and efficiency, foundational pillars that (according to Peter Drucker) encapsulate doing the right things and mastering the art of doing things right.
Therefore, teams must track both efficiency and effectiveness to elevate their performance. However, from my observation, development teams often eagerly (sometimes dogmatically) focus on efficiency— ensuring tasks are accomplished correctly and in adherence to processes — while losing sight of effectiveness, the essence of business value, and the fundamental reason why specific software (and its value to end users and stakeholders) is needed.
How can we change it?
People from the best-performing Teams I have encountered have consistently exhibited two significant traits: shared trust and a sense of ownership. When those two were present the performance was high, and the team was working on the right things in the right way.
These qualities don’t necessarily emanate from organizational culture books or agile manifestos but are linked to the leadership with whom teams interact and report.
The Elephant in the Room
In the IT industry, there is often an overlap between organizational workflows, sometimes enforced agile methodologies, inconsistent team roles, and leadership expectations. All of these different layers lead to substantial overhead. Stakeholders’ expectations often conflict with agile principles, resulting in a mix of agile (scrum) and waterfall methods, which tend to be costlier and slower, hindering the team’s performance and morale.
How it is at your organization?
Our Goal: Building Trust and Fostering a Culture of Ownership
In the remote reality, building trust among team members and cultivating a culture of ownership is paramount to enhance performance. Here are my strategies to achieve this:
Setting Up Clear Goals
Establishing clear goals is imperative for steering a team in the right direction. These goals should come with distinct boundary conditions and delve deeper than just the expected outcomes outlined in task descriptions. It’s essential to concentrate on the fundamental „job that has to be done” and address the „pains.” This approach ensures a thorough understanding of the task’s core purpose and what it aims to resolve or achieve.
Giving Context
Providing a thorough business context is essential to align solutions with needs and to avoid overthinking and over-calibration common in IT. By ensuring that the team has a comprehensive understanding of the business context, it becomes easier to tailor solutions that are both relevant and practical, avoiding unnecessary complexities and ensuring that the developed solutions are fit for purpose.
Focusing on Communication
Equip your team with the right tools and frameworks to communicate effectively and work smarter, capitalizing on their specialist expertise. The implementation of psychometric tools like FRIS® or Facet5 can significantly reduce communication stress and interpersonal tension when used correctly.
Leave Room for Interaction
Allow team members time to interact and understand each other better. Like soldiers sharing downtime to bond, teammembers too benefit from casual interactions that foster understanding and efficient communication.
Recurrent Feedback and Lessons Learned
Embrace a culture of candid feedback and learning from mistakes for accelerated growth. While it might be challenging and inconvenient (I’m sure it is!), it is essential for team development.
The Right Leaders
Leadership is pivotal. Equip leaders with the right tools to guide their teams effectively. Leadership roles should balance both people and domain skills to influence employees positively and manage both people and projects efficiently.
People in management roles often have packed calendars, leading to imbalanced priorities and a lack of presence among their teams. It’s essential for management team to present a united front, setting a unified strategy and direction for the company. For a lone leader or CEO, having a reliable sparring partner is a must to view problems from a fresh perspective and devise effective solutions.
How About Some Practical Application?
I want to leave you without something tangible after reading this piece. To start, I’d like to share a checklist of factors that, in my view, impact team performance. It is in the form of a simple spreadsheet. Just as you measure financial aspects with precision, it is equally important to track factors influencing performance, which often play a crucial role in overall productivity.
I’ve compiled a selection of questions based on the list above into a spreadsheet, aiming to provide a starting point for reflection. I’m confident that every organization can create a tailored list of questions that aligns seamlessly with its unique context. And of course, feel free to adjust the weights assigned to each aspect according to your specific priorities and objectives!
The spreadsheet is available here.
Next steps
Having tracked the factors influencing performance in the spreadsheet, it’s now time for reflection and action.
At the beginning you need to focus on identifying factors that score low across the entire organization, signaling organization-wide areas for improvement and specific issues within individual teams that need immediate attention, prioritizing those teams that are underperforming. There is always room for growth, now it is the time to create a structured plan of action.
From a helicopter view, it might look as follows:
Planning
Initiate both organizational and team-focused planning sessions to map out actionable strategies and address identified issues.
Tactics: Organizational-Wide Program
Create a development program that spans the entire organization, focusing on areas such as goal setting or providing business context, depending on the needs identified.
Operations: Prioritizing Team-Focused Efforts
Establish priorities for working with each team, breaking down and addressing the most pressing topics first to ensure effective resolution.
Tackling such comprehensive approach can seem like a lot of work. Still, you can always search for an external consultant, who is both capable and eager to understand your organization in-depth and can provide valuable assistance. For larger organizations, this consultant can collaborate with leaders and line managers to develop tailored solutions, ensuring that the strategies implemented are well-suited to the unique needs and challenges of the organization.
Striking a Balance: Key Components for Boosting Team Effectiveness
Increasing team performance is a multifaceted challenge that needs a balance between efficiency and effectiveness. Central to this is fostering trust and ownership, clear goal-setting, contextual understanding, focused communication, interpersonal interactions, constructive feedback, and the right leadership. When these elements coexist, they create an environment where teams can thrive, pushing the boundaries, particularly in the rapidly evolving landscape of IT.
Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash