The first thing needed is an assessment of what’s wrong. My advice is to meet with each member of the team individually, make your own assessment of the information you are receiving. A few key dimensions to collect and assess are team structure, individual assignments and roles (whether the team has the right skill sets, are they motivated in their roles and are there any prevalent bad attitudes), and leadership style within the team. Also note the current success and failures of the team.
What has worked well for me in the past is to define a mission statement for the team – what are we trying to do and why? Each member of the team should be able to state and defend the mission and why its critical. A shared understanding and buy in is critical for the team to rally around and cooperate. Remember the Star Trek Enterprise episodes always started with their mission statement – “Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Define SMART (first defined at GE) and Stretch goals. Smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timeline based. Stretch on the other hand may appear to be more than possible, but are the ones that spark remarkable innovations.
Setup team norms that ensure psychological safety (Charles Duhigg – Smarter, Faster, Better – The Transformative Power of Real Productivity). The following is an excerpt from the book that describes this concept and some of the other critical building blocks for a high performing team: A team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.
1. Teams need to believe that their work is important.
2. Teams need to feel their work is personally meaningful.
3. Teams need clear goals and defined roles.
4. Team members need to know they can depend on one another.
5. But, most important, teams need psychological safety.
Where “Psychological safety” is a shared belief, held by members of a team, that the group is a safe place for taking risks. It is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up.
Next address the tactical issues of failures and risks. Secure stakeholder agreements to ensure that targets are achievable. Reassign or repurpose team members with bad attitudes.
Some general principles that have helped me throughout my career are as follows –
- Keep criticism private
- Roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches
- Achieve short term wins; Praise achievements and celebrate
- Inspire and motivate – “We can and We will”
Finally measure what you value and put it in a cycle for continuous improvement.
For example, for an IT team, the metrics to measure may be the following:
- Cadence of delivery
- Delivery throughput
- Quality of code delivered
- Stability of the application/platform/system
- Scalability
- Usability measure
- Business continuity
- TCO – total cost of ownership
While for a product team, you may want to measure and improve these:
- Effective product lifecycle management
- Product market position
- Rate of new / modified products being introduced
- Success rate for new / modified products
- Ability to deco/sunset loss making products
Or for an Operations team, the following may be relevant measures:
- Cost per unit work
- Quality per unit work and rework %
- Risk mitigation/avoidance and quality tolerance
- Average turnover in the team and morale
As always, feedback is always welcome…