How do you build a high performing team? Here are the 6 elements.

Welcome to today's episode of the leadership question. Let's get stuck in today's topic, which is around building kick a$$ teams. So high performing teams and a concept have been around a long time. But what we're actually interested in what I'm going to share with you today is a bit of a behind the scenes on a model that I use with every team that I work with. It's something I put together a number of years ago, and the aim was to go well, look, there's high performing teams models, but I think it's missing some things. And I know it's missing these elements. Because when I go out and I work with teams, these bits are still unresolved. Now, if you're someone who likes Lencioni, his work or other models out there, there isn't a conflict between this model and those, what my model does is enhances those elements and brings them in and adds the things that are definitely missing. So I'm actually going to take you through the six key elements of a kick a$$ team or exceptional team if you don't like the swear word. And a couple of tips on those, obviously, you know, I run a full half day workshop on this. So you could spend a half day learning and being immersed in picking this apart. But I'm not going to go through at that level of detail, what I will give you is just two behaviors for each of the six areas in the model. And that'll give you enough to go back to your team and start to pick apart Well, hey, are we on track? Or oh, we've got some work to do. And I'm gonna have my work cut out for me up until the holidays. Awesome. Now, before I get into the six elements, I do think it's interesting to unpick what are some of the problems you might be seeing if you don't have a kick a$$ team. And those are things like rework. Well, what the h3ll's rework have to do with having a poor performing or mediocre team? Well, poor performing teams do lead to a lot of rework one for you, because you're picking up the pieces, trying to fill in the gap and make it all work. And two, because they're not talking to each other, and they're not working effectively, or they're avoiding hard conversations. So things are getting lost or redone in between an unnecessary work and rework both happen, then you've got infighting. Raise your hand, if you've ever had team members in conflict with each other. And I don't mean healthy conflict. And we'll talk about that in a couple of moments. I mean, unhealthy, dysfunctional, I want to scratch their face off conflict. Next is becoming a therapist. And I think that's one that you probably are familiar with, it's this idea of, okay, you aren't effective in how you're dealing with each other. So I'm hafting, the council, each of the members of the team just to keep them at least engaged, if not happy to some degree, attrition then becomes the worst form of Team disengagement. And then ultimately, what that leads to for you is reputational damage, if you cannot keep a high performing team operating underneath you, your reputation will be all about you, people won't stick around there. And if that's not a good team to work, I wouldn't go for an internal promotion to that team, you don't want that. So that's what we're going to tackle today. Now, if you get this right, as a leader, you get better choices and how you spend your time, which I think is super important. Think about how you get to spend your time and what you focus on and all the crappy stuff you have to do versus the things you actually want to be doing peace of mind, real calm and clarity around the things that matter versus the things that are just noisy. And then ultimately for you better career prospects, because you get to determine how you spend your time and what projects you work on. Because you've got a functional team underneath you. Great. So what are those six elements, let's get started. And these build off of each other. If you do not have the first one in place, and effective, all the other ones will be impacted negatively, and you won't get to level six, not even close. Even teams that have the first four done really well struggled to do five and six. I've only worked with who two teams that I can say and one of them I have been working with for several years that were at level six. Most of the others vary between level one and up to kind of four ish. But that doesn't mean it's not possible. It just means that hadn't done the work in that space. So level one, psychological safety. We hear a lot of rhetoric around this in the workplace. But I think it's important and I'm actually not anti, a lot of the noise that's being made in that space over the last couple of years because I still think we do it really poorly in the modern organization. So psychological safety. And there's two things you can look for as behaviors because remember, I said I'd give you two behaviors per area in the model to see if they're in place. And the first is direct communication. There are people speaking directly to each other, not about each other, not to someone else about someone who then tells them it's Do they speak directly to each other? And then second is merit based feedback and contribution. So do we assign value to things based on the quality of the idea? And do people feel safe that, you know, maybe they're not the new, they're not the most senior person, they're not the person who's been there the longest, but their idea is a good idea. So they're gonna put it forward, and they don't get beat up for putting it forward, or people don't sneer or give them funny looks. You know, it's based on the merit of the idea itself. And the contribution it makes overall to the agenda of the team. Those are two really quick behaviors, you can look at that say, oh, there's probably about psychological safety here. If the inverse of these are true. Great, then once we've done that, and people are kind of feeling a little bit trust trusted in each other, and that they can kind of say certain things, and they're not going to get whacked, we can move to level two. And that's communication and structure. This is super important. Because if we feel safe, then we can start looking at well, what's the most effective way to work together with each other? And That's level two. So the first behavior you can look at is the right meetings on the right topics run the right way. So what the h3ll does that mean? means we've got meetings that we actually require not just because someone wanted to hold a meeting, it's on the right topic. So yeah, we could have a meeting with these people. But do we actually have the right topics being covered in that meeting? Eg the agenda? And is it run the right way? Does it have a facilitator? Does it have clear actions captured? Does it have due dates does have owners, and there's a real protocol and process to running effective meetings, in my experience, most meetings are run really poorly, and that but it's an easy fix if you have this in place. And then behaviors role clarity, including a strong leader, and we often say that an ideal team size is kind of that six to 10, you're gonna have a few more few less. But when you start having 3040 60 people, it becomes hard to label that as an effective or even high performing team because they just can't have solid relationships with each other doesn't work that way. Then we move to level three, which is accountability. And the first behavior we look at is parity and roles of individuals and their accountability for actions and goals. What that means is it doesn't matter if you're Trisha or Bob or Jane, if you're in the team, you're held to the same standard, no one gets a pass, no one's given any exemptions. No one has favor with someone higher up, who then gives them a pass, everyone is held to the same standard, super important accountability can exist if it's not reinforced and not consistently applied. And then second is social contract with clear behaviors and agreements. When I start working with a team, one of the first things we do is set up that social contract, which basically outlines how we intend to work together. For example, if I need to give you some difficult news, or if I want to tell you that, you know, I feel like you let me down, what's the process we agree to abide by to make that happen? Now, I usually spend a half day just getting this lined up and right after I take them through the model, but you'll find once that baseline behaviors and contract are set in place, it's amazing how quickly the team can start to improve, because it tells us it's almost like the rules of the game. How do we work with each other? Cool. So that's level three accountability, then we move to level four, which is friction. And immediately when I show this to people, they all freak, I don't I don't want to friction. Why would I want friction? It's like, well, friction without friction, you don't get fire you need. It has to how can you know? How can you not have friction? So we end up having that conversation quite often. But what we're looking for here is really healthy conflict. Not unhealthy, not dysfunctional, but healthy conflict. So the first behavior separation of ego from constructive feedback, can I park the way I feel about what you're saying, to the side to actually hear the quality of feedback you're giving me and take it for its merit? You know, that goes back to that psychological safety. And then two is welcome discourse that's not taken personal. So if someone disagrees with me and says something contrarian or against what I'm thinking or even against the whole group, and a meeting, we don't take a personal, we don't get grumpy we go. Let's better understand what that means. And if it is a great idea, we've missed something, let's modify our approach. That's friction level for now, if you could do just those first four, you will have a pretty da*n solid team. Because in my experience, decent, if not good teams have those four down, or just that those four level, anyone who doesn't have those four is just dysfunctional. Then we move to five integrated goals and measures. Now this is where it starts to be a bit of a stretch for even good teams, is connected goals that reinforce and interrelate across the team. And then competing goals engineered out and I'm going to cluster those together. Just for the sake of this podcast episode, but what we mean here is that there are goals that we understand across the team, and they reinforce each other where possible, and that if they do have some conflict across them that they're either engineered out in terms of conflict, or if they still have to be at odds with each other, then we account for that and make sure that we manage it effectively through meetings, communication, etc. So a classic example on that would be growth teams, in a lot of corporations, growth teams is the trend a couple of years ago, and in growth teams, you would end up sales, marketing and product all on the same team. Well, generally, those teams have very different goals. No sales just wants to get the money in marketing wants to make sure people are aware of the product, so then sales can get the money and, and then product has to deliver what's ultimately been sold and marketed. And often previously, before growth teams, there was conflict, because sales would sell something and product would be like What the h3ll, that's not a feature, we can't build that. So putting them in the same team was an aim at removing some of that unhealthy friction, and integrating their goals by having a single unified approach and leader across the top. And then six, and finally, in the levels of a kick a$$ team is everyone. So if we call impact first behaviors, everyone brings their A game and seeks to co develop themselves. So it's like when I show up, I f*cking show up like I'm here, I'm ready to do this. You know, I might have a bad day, from time to time we all do. But on the whole, I'm here to perform. I'm not cruising, I'm not just waiting to get out of this place. I'm not just here to collect the paycheck, yes, I need to be compensated fairly, etc, etc. But I'm here because I'm going to do this thing properly. And I seek to develop myself, I always want to get better. So I'm chasing new skills, I'm getting coaching, whatever it is, I'm working to be better every day. And then second behavior is clear cause and effect between the work being done and the outcome. So where I do see really high achievers are developing themselves bringing their A game have all those other levels locked in but are feeling disengaged is this behaviors, they're doing things but there's not like I'll do a and then there's no b that comes as a result of it, I can't see how my work is leading to an impact for the Corporation for the team for whatever I'm working on. And that starts to disengage me because we want to do meaningful work. And if you take that away, even the best player or a great employee will go I don't think I'm adding value here. So that's the six levels of the kicka$$ team model. As I said, this gets used I've literally use this with dozens, if not 100 or so teams. In the last couple of years. It does work. The question is consistency of application and depth of application and then sticking to it and being transparent with your team on the expectations around this model. That's today's episode. If you want to find out more about the model and some of the aspects of it, you can always subscribe to our newsletter at Team buffalo.co/newsletter where you'll find really good content like this, I go more in depth on some of these bits and pieces. And if you want to chat more about applying this with your team, you can email me at admin at team buffalo.co And we can have a chat about moving forward. Thanks for tuning in today's episode and have a kick a$$ weekend.