There’s much debate about how to build high-performing teams. Various approaches include creating the ‘right’ daily habits, hiring on EQ instead of IQ, building soft behavioral skills, and the role of a leader in creating bonded-driven groups.
Scores of books have been published on the subject. In fact, throughout my career, I’ve read 100+ books on leadership and 100+ books on self-development and learned through ups and downs in the field. I’ve been fortunate to work alongside great leaders and world-class operators like Sir Clive Woodward (the only winning Rugby World Cup coach for England) and learned from their approach.
This is where I first learned about an analogy called Sponge vs. Rock. In essence, it’s the same theory as growth or fixed mindset. I learned from Sir Clive on leadership: you must build a group of individuals with a growth mindset (sponge) and bring them together in a shared vision.
This is your foundation for building a world-class team.
Image: Medium
There is a distinct, overwhelming list of tactics, playbooks, and strategies you need to be successful - how do you create a high-performance environment with consistent results? With the changing macroeconomic environment, effective leadership is more important than ever. Some of the playbooks that worked previously now need adapting and refinement to deliver results in the present. Covid has had a further dramatic effect on management and leadership because of employees working remotely. It’s even harder than ever.
Whatever your understanding of leadership, the fact remains that when you arrive as a new CMO / CxO, you’ll likely be presented with the core challenge of building a team.
This might mean improving outcomes with an existing team or building a new one. You'll likely start very small if your business is Series A / Series B. This is an exciting problem to have. You can create a culture and team dynamic entirely from scratch.
Regardless of the scenario, nurturing a high-performance environment remains one of the biggest obstacles to sustainable growth. Perhaps that’s why so much literature is published on the subject.
Perhaps that’s why, although there are playbooks to follow, its application is ultimately based on you and your traits.
What are the prerequisites for transforming a ‘losing’ team into a ‘winning’ team or a newly formed team into a high-performance machine? We will cover this.
This post introduce you to the structure, processes, and behavioral leadership qualities you’ll need to implement this and build a great team. I hope to distill ideas and concepts that have worked for me. Albeit I was never perfect, at all - I tried my best!
In my experience, the key ingredient in every high-performing team is clarity.
What do I mean by clarity?
Create clear expectations in the minds of your team around their roles and behaviors, and regularly share the exact direction you wish to set.
Clarity creates the right environment for individuals to act independently and purposefully without your presence. Without clarity, expect inconsistent results.
For some, creating clarity amongst a new team might seem straightforward. As a new CMO, you can embed the right culture with your first hires.
But training one or two people is easy because you have time to explain your purpose and the behaviors needed and inspire new hires with a clear vision.
The problems come as your team grows.
How can you properly train a team of 5? or 10? 50?
Do you have enough time to explain your vision to everyone? You need to. You also need a process for scaling.
As the team expands, it’s your responsibility as a leader to build processes that create clarity for the entire team. This clarity should exist with or without your presence.
Use the tools at your disposal to put clarity at the center of your management. Think about:
When you make your first hire, every additional team member further strains the clarity. The more people you add to the team, the more conscious you must be of clarity disintegrating.
Look out for lapses of clarity amongst your team roughly 6-10 weeks after you hire. Most colleagues will feel clear about what they need to do during the initial onboarding phase. As the team grows, expect that clarity on roles and expectations will become muddied.
After 6 weeks or so, a new hire might begin working independently on projects. This often creates uncertainty in their minds. They worry about whether they’re hitting the right goals, which lessens clarity amongst the group. This unclarity can spread to the entire team if you're not careful.
Find out when this ‘honeymoon’ phase ends for your new team members, and think carefully about how to start supporting high performance to support them from the outset.
It’s your job to ensure your team continuously has clarity about their role, expected behaviors, and the direction you set for the department.
Always ask this simple question:
What am I making confusing for you?
Recommended reading:
L. David Marquet’s book is a fantastic guide to creating clarity in teams.
‘Turn the Ship Around!’ focuses on a naval commander who turned the worst-performing submarine into the fleet's flagship. The commander instills clear guiding principles on people's operations and work. He focused his leadership on the legacy the group wished to leave, creating a clear future vision of the team’s achievement.
Create clarity in your team's mind, and your vision will fall into place. Although you’ll never have 100% clarity all the time, it’s a leader's job to reinforce openness and discussion week after week.
Let’s look at how you can begin that process:
Creating clarity is easy when you approach it in four key stages:
Think ahead now—how will you share clear expectations during the interview? Be frank with candidates. Share the expectations output. You will measure how people fail in their roles and what good looks like, and discuss your vision of what high-performance (in your view, looks like) looks like. Be super transparent about what it’s like to work for you.
This connects the individual, you, and the team from the interview stage. It also ensures you find the right fit. A tip I often deploy is to put people off the role/company as much as possible - everyone wants to work at a startup or scaleup. But do they? It’s not as cool as you think - the work is highly pressurized and relentless, and it’s only imaginable when you’ve had first-hand experience. You can’t comprehend the experience otherwise.
Write a guiding manual for your team. This should cover:
I called this document ‘Hi, I’m Edwin.’ It was to each new team member on the first day they join. It was then shared regularly to reinforce the culture.
Share this with new hires to generate excitement about the team and why they were chosen. This also creates an easy-to-share process for creating clear expectations from day one. New hires know what they need to do and how to act.
Lots of companies already have shared values. But what about your team? Create shared values specifically for your department. These should relate to what’s important to you. What is your desired team culture? What behaviors will you need to foster to get you there?
This document should be simple and easy to understand while also being linked to the overall business culture.
Design a process first for how you will onboard and lead your team. This creates clarity. Don’t hire a team then design a process for managing performance afterward - this will confuse you.
How will you continually reinforce your goals? Think about how you can embed the language of your team’s behavior every week.
Set yourself reminders on how and when you need to interact with the team and add the specific language you want to use and the exact outputs you want to see.
Remember, your job as a leader is continually reinforcing your team's expectations.
Poorly performing teams often result from leaders who don’t deliver clarity.
Team well-being is the second most important issue to clarify when creating a high-performing team. First and foremost, you have to remind yourself of serving others in support of their well-being. Even though you (as we all need support) will need it simultaneously,
Wellbeing means different things to different people, but for me, it’s about focus, energy, and purpose. A bias towards outputs, not activities. Notice I don’t say to have fun or enjoyment: let’s face it, the job is not always fun. People are too obsessed with that narrative. Although, it is good to have fun if you can!
High-performing teams often have a good work-life balance and high well-being scores. Low-performing teams might be unproductive because they are overwhelmed. They lack clarity and do lots of activities but do not feel like they have momentum. Momentum is an individual and team friend.
Your role as a leader is to protect the group from being overwhelmed.
We should ditch the ‘hustle’ mentality. It’s dated, and it doesn’t work.
For your team, set yourself the following goals:
Don’t expect your team to be online 24/7. Instead, take a more realistic approach. Encourage focus, not long hours, but also ensure that your team gets plenty of time to reflect. It’s common for teams to be running so fast that they often pause to understand the value of their outputs and what they are trying to achieve.
Build a team where well-being is discussed. Care about how your team works and what they deliver. Treat mental health seriously, approaching it with the same tact as you would any other well-being issue. If you pressure your team to overload, expect to see increasing mental health problems and falling productivity.
Understandably, CMOs and CEOs focus on productivity, always making a presumption of poor productivity because nothing is ever fast enough. Well-being seems secondary. Luckily, we’re learning that well-being is, in fact, central to focus.
Solve wellbeing issues by being clear about output and supportive towards colleagues’ lives. Build a regular cadence of communication with your team around wellbeing, and it won’t be an issue.
The workplace has evolved beyond 9-5, and so must you. Today, we work smarter and focus on output over input.
To prioritize your team’s well-being, you must look at your own.
Reflect on yourself for a moment.
You might wish to re-evaluate if well-being isn’t important to you yet.
Motivating younger generations in the workforce starts with a commitment to understanding mental health and wellbeing. If you ignore this issue, it will worsen.
Start thinking about processes and systems you can introduce to uplift the well-being of your employees. A talented, happy team will be the ones who get you results.
Create your philosophy.
During your 1-1s
Aim to foster open working relationships with your direct reports.
Ask these questions:
And a few out of this list:
With the foundations of clarity and well-being, you can build a high-performing, happy, and focused team.
But you can’t get great outcomes without robust processes for monitoring and tracking progress.
If you want to create consistent results, you must accept that you cannot sporadically apply aspects of management as a leader. Monitoring and measuring when you feel like it will cause disturbances in performance, output, and clarity. Accept that you need a formal process.
Your process checklist
Think about:
I’ve found it a huge help to have a timeline and roadmap of your management process and personal operating system so that the team understands the value of consistency.
Upskilling your team should be an ongoing process. The skills required to be effective in modern marketing and revenue teams are constantly evolving (at an extreme pace).
Yet many CMOs might be expected to reinvigorate a large inherited team. This team might comprise a mixture of roles, individuals, and skill sets, and that’s a daunting prospect for some.
As with many things, however, starting with your behavior is the best way to effect change.
As leaders, we should be constantly upskilling ourselves and our teams.
Learning is a mindset - something to be enjoyed and embraced, not avoided. As such, it needs to be a daily event for you. Here are some ideas on how to build capabilities in your people:
Encourage and foster daily learning habits.
Smart leaders will not leave training to chance; instead, they will see it as a way to foster awareness of behaviors and raise capabilities in individuals every day.
The sheer speed of change in the modern work environment demands continuous improvement. So make your upskilling strategy a daily priority, and use it as a force for positivity amongst the team. With the right approach, you’ll boost morale, reduce staff turnover in the long term, and improve results. Your success as a leader is how well you build people's capabilities (write that one down!)
Yourself
I used to write a daily motivational email and set up a devoted Slack channel for sharing knowledge. My first action for the day is to send out a link, article, or helpful piece of content that my team would enjoy.
The idea isn’t to force people into learning but to encourage curiosity about skills, behaviors, and approaches to work.
Your team
You might think you don’t have time to coach your team individually, but I built upskilling elements into the structure of my regular meetings with direct reports.
Look for opportunities to find common challenges among colleagues. Could these groups work together and coach each other? Peer learning and cohort learning are proven techniques.
Hired help
Find mentors and coaches for your team. Having permanent help within the team can greatly benefit the company. Leaders are time-poor, and employees value external mentoring. Well the high-performers certainly do.
The final component of building high performance is connectedness.
Image: Jostle
As your team grows, how can you mesh individuals together?
Typical Go-to-marker teams consist of multiple roles and responsibilities, including
The issues we have discussed (clarity, well-being, process, and upskilling) get you to a certain point. Beyond that, though, the key ingredient is team connectedness.
You don’t want to build a group of individuals focused on their performance. As the business grows, this leads to high staff turnover, and people are only vested in their interests. We all are, but we love being part of a journey and team.
Aim to create energy in your team environment. A shared sense of purpose, drive, and connectedness is the key to bonding people.
Grow the team together
“Under poor leaders, we feel like we work for the company.
With good leaders, we feel like we work for each other.”
Simon Sinek
Humans crave connectedness to purpose and meaning. This is a crucial facet of building high performance in any team.
Traditional ways of bonding teams don’t work like they used to.
When you think more carefully about wellbeing, would team drinks create the right culture? Going for beers every Friday seems old-fashioned in 2019 when roughly a third of 16-24-year-olds choose not to drink.
Create a structure for team connectedness
What could you do weekly with your team for 1-2 weeks to create connectedness? How can you use each team meeting to drive connection, such as icebreaker games at the start of the meeting? If that's not your thing, decide how you can make meetings more fun (from the perspective that people value them, they are productive, and they drive team cohesion).
Create roles for Responsibility
As the team grows, find leaders in the group who naturally gravitate to building on the culture part of the team. These people can organize regular team bonding ideas - for example, Thursday morning breakfasts or group fitness activities. Anything that sets the appropriate tone for your vision.
The more people you can get to relate to each other, the better connected the team will become. How can you encourage different individuals to understand others' perspectives? Think about building a weekly or monthly program of varied activities and methods. The best team exercise I ever did was to sit team members opposite each other (with me) and rotate like musical chairs every 2 minutes around a question. Each team member answers this question to one another.
That question is, “How do I make you feel?”
Make connectedness an ongoing experience rather than a one-off.
There are four levels of employees:
Show this to your team, and make them understand how they can develop themselves and the teams around them. People always found it quite eye-opening.
Throughout my career, I have taken a statement from a previous CEO, who always reminded us, ‘Don't be the person moaning at the water cooler.’
What he meant in practice was that moaning does not help scenarios and doesn’t give the perception of someone who is negative. I fully agree. At the same time, I believe it’s important to be positive regardless of situations—see the best in things, not the worst. It serves you better, and it serves the people you work with better.
It serves the business better. Plus, it’s just a better outlook on life.
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