Building An Infinite Team - Part 2

Last week, I shared the things I had learned building teams over the last 15 years to make them more impactful. You can read it again here. In this article, I share the next layer of ideas to help take your teams even further.

6. Actively shape your team's culture - or someone else will do it for you

A few years ago whilst working in the US, I took my team to an event to learn Raku pottery. This was a 16th-century Japanese tradition for making various tea bowls and other pottery.

What interested me was that we would start with a slab of clay, shaping it and passing it through intense heat, turning it into a beautiful object. However, even slight nudges during the process could affect the final shape and the final appearance.

A team's culture will transcend everything that it does, how it solves problems and whether it will be innovative or content with the status quo.

If you do not actively shape your team's culture, outside forces and day-to-day demands will gradually shape it for you. Once the clay sets, it can be much harder to change later.

How can you shape your team's culture? There are many ways but a few that I have found worked:

• Clarity of purpose - being explicitly clear about why your team is here and what your team needs to achieve.
• Knowing when you are succeeding as a team - the best leaders make it easy for the team to know what good looks like. This can be through describing the impact you are having on business partners when things are going well or comparing to competitors as role models.
• Weaving into decision making - using opportunities when making decisions to demonstrate the culture you are trying to implement. For example, if you want your team to be more innovative pick decisions that are bolder with bigger impacts even if it carries additional risk.
• Rewarding those adopting the new culture - highlighting and rewarding when a team member shows the behaviours representing the new culture.

7. Become predictable - adopt principles your team can use without you

Ray Dalio is the legendary investor behind Bridgewater Capital, one of the world's best performing hedge funds. He has successfully helped his clients navigate several global events well before other investors or analysts were able to react.

I loved his book, Principles, which laid out a framework for anticipating events early to take advantage of them. He talked about finding patterns in past events and adopting principles to react when such situations would occur again. Studying thousands of years of history, he found that whilst the specifics may be different, most 'new' events are often very similar to past ones.

The key to scaling teams is to make yourself predictable. It takes time and effort but if you can take the time to explain to your team the principles you are using for making a difficult decision on a complex topic then they can apply that framework when it happens again. Coupled with a continuous improvement mindset, this can be a powerful combination to make a high impact team.

8. Manage your team's energy, not just its time

Imagine you have a striker in your football or soccer team. They are amazing and you can rely on them to surprise even you with their creativity and ability to get past the competition to score a goal.

What would happen if you played the striker day in and day out without allowing them to rest? What would happen once the striker got injured, or worse, decided to join another more sustainable team?

It amazes me how many leaders take their best talent and grind them into the floor and then wonder why they are not performing at the same level or why they left the company.

As a leader, it is your job to constantly look out to the horizon for what is coming and manage the energy levels in your team. This includes smart strategies to find or create quiet periods for members of your team so they can rest, recharge and energise for the next sprint.

I still have much to learn in this space but have found a few ideas that help:

• Ensuring my team book all their holidays at the start of the year and ensuring that it is all taken
• Focussing on business outcomes to help prioritise. I will actively coach and help my team develop the skills to prioritise whatever we have on our plate based on what has the biggest impact on business outcomes. Everything else we will relentlessly eliminate or if important renegotiate with the stakeholders on approach and timing.
• Focussing on business outcomes to help on approach. I make sure my team understands the outcome we are trying to achieve for a given project and then we explore what is the simplest and most effective route to get there. For many things, 80/20 is good enough (eg. some types of internal analysis) whereas others may require more accuracy (eg. external reporting).
• Once a week, we have a 30 mins weekly huddle where we look ahead at the week, quarter and year. I have a team calendar developed by my team where they input the peaks and troughs across the year. The calendar highlights when we are in danger of having too many months of peak activity. We then discuss how to re-prioritise and shift things around to create more space.

9. Reward good decisions, not just outcomes

We are living in a world where things are changing rapidly and the same decision taken twice could have very different outcomes. The key then is to focus on the quality of the decision and not just the business outcome.

Regardless of whether a business outcome was good or bad, taking time periodically to step back and reflect on how a decision was made, what data or insights were used, options considered etc and what did we learn is a powerful way to improve a team's probability of making more effective decisions over time.

10. Build a hive team approach - when one person knows, the full team knows

In today's rapidly evolving world, it is key that information both horizontally across the team and vertically up and down flows effortlessly. If done well, it can have a multiplier effect as you can take multiple sources of information to help make decisions more quickly based on emerging signals in the market or company.

Many companies try to adopt a group-wide information sharing approach but this can be time consuming to implement, expensive and often does not work.

I have found simple mechanisms work best. These are often arranging frequent town halls or webinars and storing information in a simple repository that is easy to access (with security of course if confidential). In my team, we have a shared OneNote with common pages or themes where each of us will jot down a few notes from our respective meetings on topics where others were not present. Any of my team can skim through to get updated on what is happening. This is helpful when for example we are reviewing a business forecast and want to understand what is driving it.

10.5 This does not happen on its own - you have to make time for it

At the heart of the ideas I have shared is that it does not just happen on its own. As a leader, you have to make time for it no matter what else is happening around you. I have found the return on investment to be really worth the effort.

I am still learning what makes a high impact and scalable team. What ideas have I missed that have worked for you? Would love to hear from you.