Creating the High Performance Team
In the book First, Break All The Rules What the Worlds Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman share a truth if you will regarding building teams. I think it flies a bit in the face of traditional wisdom and wanted to bring out their views. They have captured the following revolutionary insight common to great managers:
1) People dont change that much (when selecting someone, select for talent)
2) Dont waste time trying to put in what was left out (when setting expectations, define the right outcomes)
3) Try to draw out what was left in (when motivating someone, focus on their strengths)
4) That is hard enough (when developing someone, help them find the right fit)
So what does that have to do with leading software teams? I think plenty. The first insight really applies to hiring new team members. Im going to put that one aside for this discussion.
What I really want to focus on here is how software leaders need to view their role in team building from an internal perspective. You have walked in the door to a new team. You have always had a history of building high performance teams and want to reframe this team in that same fashion. So, where do you focus? And what do you do?
Ive been a software leader for over 15 years. I used to think that leadership was about driving teams to improve through correcting weaknesses. HR reaffirmed that as well. Each time I would fill in a performance review, I might spend 20% of the time discussing strengths and 80% providing corrective and improvement guidance.
However, after many years and some good and bad experiences, I have come to the same conclusions that Buckingham and Coffman came to. You achieve much higher performance levels within your teams if you:
- Spend most of your time with your high performers say your Top 20%
- Focus on leveraging and improving individual strengths rather than improving individual weaknesses
- Look to find the right fit?? or role and function for developers, testers, and other team members
- Focus on finding the strength of your overall team and fully leverage and improve upon it
Accentuating Strengths
So if the real goal is accentuating strengths, one of the challenges is finding them. As a manager or leader, much of your team assessment is based on perception and narrow observation particularly if you are leading a large team. You simply can't be everywhere, all of the time, to directly observe and gather data that illustrates each team members performance.
The problem with this is that it can often be an inaccurate way to evaluate your staff. The truth is, you need details and cross-team comparison information to truly gain a feel for overall individual and group performance in order to determine individual strengths and weaknesses leading towards your improvement planning.
Thats where 6th Sense Analytics comes in. You can gain great insight into individual and team productivity as a total and within specific tasks / technology areas. And this isnt anecdotal data, but highly accurate, unbiased data that reflects the reality within the team.
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