How do you take a group of competent individuals and bring them together into a high-performing team?
We take a look at the presumptions, rules-of-thumb, and particular actions a Chief Delivery Officer can take to raise the water level so all the boats float higher.
And then we discuss how things can get off balance and the potential to sink a happy ship, the strange tidal forces both inside and outside the team.
We begin our conversation talking about 'normal times', taking a group of people and doing the hard work to gel them into an effective team and lift them to high performance.
Beginning with an assumption of individual expertise in each of their fields you're aiming to create a 'one team' mindset, all working towards a single goal:
- This is what we’re trying to do
- This is how we’re trying to do it
- This is how you add to that
We then discuss some of the practical actions to get there, including:
- Shared outcomes
— everyone owns it, the good and the bad; learning and improving together - Show-and-tell
— demonstrate what you’ve done, describe why it’s important; receive recognition, and maybe a platform to display that, internally or externally - Praise, credit, and encouragement
— direct, one-to-one; within the team; to the wider business and/or clients - Standards
— establishing, achieving, and maintaining standards; lifting the bar - Personal development
— Who do you really want to be? What do you really want to do? How can we get you there? - Offboarding people
— sometimes you need to recognise dead wood and do the tough task of trimming
In the second half, the conversation turns to those things that can cause your sleek powerboat to sink.
First, we discuss rock stars and divas in delivery teams.
They can be a huge asset, the big guns that you can pull out to deal with difficult problems or important achievements. But rock stars can get frustrated, bored, or even resentful and cause all kinds of chaos. There's ways of responding to that, which may mean keeping them out of the ongoing work of a delivery team, but could also mean using them as ambassadors for your organisation's rock star capabilities.
And then we talk about less containable outside forces. We look at the impact of micro-managers in the executive or other parts of the business. And we talk about commercial pressures — commercial performance in the business, which you may be powerless to resist, and commercial dynamics in the market, which may force you to pivot.