Podcast: How Do You Really Build High Performing Teams?

Recently in Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute’s People and Performance Playbook Newsletter, Mike Budden and Gunnar Millot wrote a thought provoking article that may be contrary to your perceptions of how and why teams are successful. It was called "A High-Performing Team Is Not Necessarily a Team of High Performers."

Is that how things work in your organization? Do you just grab and group of the "hi-pos," the people generally considered to be the best in the company and throw them in a room and expect all the problems in your company’s world to be solved? And does that always work out for you?

Here's something they say in the article:   

Capability, affinity, and alignment don't add up to value, they multiply into it. This means you can stack a team with extraordinary capability and still end up with almost nothing to show for it, because anything multiplied by a number close to zero stays close to zero.     

That's the arithmetic of the superstar team that loses. And here's the part leaders tend to miss: affinity and alignment don't just show up on their own. They get built, or quietly torn down, by whether people trust the person in charge.     

That trust rests on three things: Is the leader competent? Do they actually care? And are they congruent, meaning do they walk their talk?

This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook where the experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. You can subscribe to the People and Performance Playbook Newsletter when you follow Chapman & Co. on Linkedin. On this episode, to challenge your expectations about high performing teams, is Chapman & Co.’s Gunnar Millot and Mike Budden. You can listen through the link above or through your favorite podcast provider.

Transcript

Gunnar Millot: Mike, I would love to start today by asking you to tell me about a team that you've seen that had everything on paper: the right people, the right position in the market or the right position in the organization, and they still lost. They still weren't that team that could go out and outperform everybody.

Mike Budden: I've had the incredible fortune to engage with many teams in the work we've been doing over the years, particularly looking getting teams to be more aligned and more cohesive. This is a piece that I've seen come up time and time again. One particular team I can think of was a bunch of really bright engineers. Engineers are typically smart people who have done exceptionally well. They were hired because they were smart. They got promoted because they were smart. We got the team together in the room. We really tried to think about a vision for them, where they're going in the future and how they're going to work together in the team to achieve that. They kept hitting obstacles and wondered why. The leader called me up one day and said, Mike, please come in and help me understand what's going on here. I started engaging with the team and seeing that these are smart people.

I liken this to a sports team that gets all the smartest players or the best players. They hire the best players, and then they put them on the field and are somehow ordinary players. Teams are actually beating them. I looked at this team. As I engaged with each one, each one had very clear ideas about what they could achieve and wanted to achieve. They all actually knew the destination they wanted to get to. Yet, they had not aligned and could not agree on the route that would get them there. I was talking to a team just this week about it. We know that we want to get to Cincinatti, for example. You have many routes to get to Cincinatti, and nobody tells you which is the right or the wrong route. Each one has its pros and cons. This is what this team was really battling with.

As I dug in more, they were struggling to find each other. If they couldn’t find each other and they really couldn’t create connection and belonging, it was going to be really hard for them to collaborate. They were finding it hard to be in alignment with each other. Dare I say, maybe some of the unambition and egos were getting in the way. As a result, we landed with a bunch of solo players here that were finding it really hard to find their way forward together. That’s the big thing. As we’re getting to talk about teams, how can we do this incredible work that you ought to do, but do it together?

Gunnar: Mike, I think you touch on something really important. It’s not about having that one person who can go and do everything. That’s not going to make a team. That’s not going to be, one, the highest-performing, or two, a team that can last. We have all probably seen team members who outshine their peers, but they get burnt out so quickly because they’re being asked to do too much. They’re being asked to do everything because you know they have that skill and ability.

Instead, there’s this opportunity to put the right people in the right positions and let them all function at their highest level. There’s also the reality of, you brought up my affinity for soccer, whether that be playing or coaching. I think back to when I was coaching U-13, or things like that. I’m not picking my team. It’s not like I’m a professional sports organization that gets to go out and recruit and select and choose top talent. My team is whoever signs up for the season that year. In that situation, to be able to generate and create a high-performing team, you have to figure out where you can best position people in a way that’s going to allow for group success.

I think that’s the same thing we see with teams everyday with clients that we work with. Sometimes you inherit a team. Sometimes folks get moved around, and you didn’t get to curate that team that you were trying to have march at the same drumbeat, if you will. How can you, as a leader, position those folks to say we are going to do this together to the best of our ability in these unique roles. This is something that is challenging today, and is definitely something that I don’t think is missed in corporate America or around the world right now.

Mike: Yeah. You know, you made a statement that it is to put the right people into the team, and for me, that brings up: What's the definition of right? We have to get them in the right position, but then there's another piece of the ingredient. At the end of the day, how do they work together? I'd love to hear from you, as you've even been coaching young sports teams. What characterized those teams—the years you were given and had no choice in choosing them—to, in your mind, perform better than the others? What were the ingredients to that?

Gunnar: I think there were a couple of things. One, it was the effort that each individual person was willing to put in.
Sometimes it wasn't necessarily based on talent, but it was based on the shared effort and the shared drive toward that common goal. I think that a lot of other times, you had great captains, right? You had great on-the-field leaders who were maybe not even given a title of captain, but somebody who, when on the field, you know that they're going to step up and lead by example or be that commanding presence on the field. You sometimes have to rely on this ability for folks to look around them and see everybody else giving that same level about fruit and same level of commitment. It drives them to do the same. Sometimes groups think and be a pressure is not a great thing, but when we look at how we're going to work together, work well together, sometimes it can be really special.

Mike: Yeah, wow. So, there's that special. And that's the magic. It's like that's a piece that creates, the unity, the magic in the team, when they know actually how they can do together, and I think sometimes the best captain is not necessarily the most skilled player either. It's interesting, as you relate that in a sports context. In business, we often have put the most skilled person as the most senior leader.
And that doesn't necessarily make them the best leader in the world. And then, similarly, putting a bunch of incredible, capable, skilled people together doesn't mean they naturally just pull together, connect and do incredible work together. That really brings me to a little formula that a mentor of ours gave us many years back, and it's guided me so much in my work and just made so much sense when I saw that and wrestled with why some teams were getting it right and why some weren't.

It wasn't the time. I mean, I'm now talking 20-odd years back, when I started really in this work, was a time when many of the big consultancies were talking about the war for talent. We all have to win the war for talent. Talent was defined as smart. And yet, if you got all that great talent, it didn't mean you actually achieved greatness relative to other organizations or teams. That's when I sat back and thought this formula I gave us makes so much sense. And so essentially said, if you want to build long-term sustainable value, you need people with the right capability and skills. All that comes with experience.

But that is not enough, and we want to multiply that with affinity, a sense of belonging. I share the aims and the ethos of this unit, this team, this organization. And I also want to multiply that with alignment. We all know what's going to drive success, and we're all on the same bus, and we all know where we want to get to and how we're going to get there. Those are three things that stand up for me.
Capability, affinity and alignment. What I started to see and experience with through that lens is that you can have all the capability, but people don't have the capacity to have affinity with each other and the capacity to align. That is going to end up actually not resulting in getting that team to gel together and achieve, you know, the greatness they want to. Now, you can get away with short-term. I think short-term success and quick wins, and that just with capability, but it's not going to be enduring.

Gunnar: I think I've talked about this quite a bit, but when you think about that framework or that formula, when you think about how it's multiplication and not addition, right? Can you just speak a little bit more to why is that specificity, that distinction so important as leaders and folks on teams look at this and think about how they can apply it?

Mike: I love the question, because the small teams I've worked with, and the smart leaders, they've asked exactly the same thing. Why is it multiplication? Why is it not just an addition to? The reason is, as much as it can multiply, when it's positively there, it can divide when it's not there. If the answer is to zero to any one of the affinity or alignment, or any of the three, actually, the answer is going to be zero. You could also have great affinity in alignment, and you don't have any capability.

Well, you're also not going to get anywhere. It's not to say capability is not important, but the point really being that traditionally, we valued capability, probably above the affinity alignment, but they are multipliers, and we see the more that happens, the more the whole system of the team gets better and starts gelling together better and multiplies their impact. So, that's just why we have used the multiplication as an illustration of what that can do.

Gunnar: I think that there's this level that sometimes folks, when they hear things like this are like, OK, well, everybody can't be nice all the time. You can't just expect every team to get along and have zero conflict or zero levels of tension.
I just want to point out that I don't think that's necessarily what you're saying here is that it's not about being nice. It's more about how do we have this level of trust, this level of commitment to one another, this level of loyalty to the team? Not loyalty meaning I have to stay at this organization for the rest of my life, but loyalty in terms of I am going to be there and be present, put in my effort, put in my time. That's what allows that growth to happen is that heightened level of trust and alignment and everything else. So, it's not, I have to be nice or have this sense of toxic positivity all the time. It's more about, how do I recognize that the relationships and the way that I show up with the people around me matter just as much as how talented I am?

Mike: Absolutely. I think affinity, the ability for a team to collaborate well does not mean it's nice. In fact, the ability to collaborate and have the capacity for affinity means that team has a high level of emotional and context awareness. Why? Because it means we're able, one, to know when we trigger each other, and when I get triggered, when you do, and then for us to be able to be co-elevating each other, and lifting each other up to be better at what we do. Now, to do that, that only happens from feedback. So, you know, the point of this is like, there's none of these things in isolation; this all hangs together at the end of the day, as one ecosystem, it starts happening in this team. Yeah, it's certainly not being nice. Maybe to help a little bit about that. How does it happen?

This comes the piece around a little bit of what we wrote in our article. So, you know, when we're talking about the construct of the team, but then we're also talking about how those teams form, and how this happens, and at the end of the day, it happens because of how the leader actually creates an environment for their team, to have affinity in alignment. And that comes to us being able to trust our leaders, and how does that get built? Well, there's some other work that I came across in my journey on this. It's work-based on investment leadership, which was written by a gentleman named Jim Ware. Jim went and researched asset management companies that consistently outperformed their peers and consistently hit the top quartile performance for their clients.

When he started unpacking that, he noticed one thing was the culture and the ability of those teams to pull together and be aligned, and, hey, let's face it, asset management's a very competitive environment, and there are some people with really big egos in doing asset management. I don’t want to generalize, but they're competitive for a reason, and they get the results for a reason. The hallmark of those organizations that consistently outperformed was that there was deep trust in leadership. He unpacked that trust into three components. He said, the people trusted because they were competent. They also trusted because they cared, and it wasn't a soft caring. They cared in their team's growth, to be able to give them the tools that they needed, to be able to give them the feedback that they needed to grow. 
It wasn't a soft, wishy-washy, we love and hug everybody every day. They were congruent. Congruent, for me, is that they walk the talk, who they said they were and their values. That's what they saw. If you think about capability multiplied by affinity, multiplied alignment, there's a direct correlation. Higher trusting leaders are capable, competent. They care, and they’re congruent. That also talks to affinity and alignment. This is what I've seen.

Gunnar, the team I referred to just now, they had a bunch of smart people. What was interesting in their team was that although they could all think and were smart, many of them didn't speak up in the room when I was with them, and even more so, what they told me, if I wasn't in the room, they definitely typically didn't speak up. Why? Because they had an incredibly smart leader who was very persuasive. He was one of those leaders who had success in his whole life upbringing. He was the head boy of his school. He went on to get a legal degree. He did incredibly well in that as well. And then just continued being on the success trail in many ways. Together with that, he was quite a dominant personality. He liked to be in control. But as a result, his team really feared speaking up, and if they did, he was very quick. He was very quick with his words. He could quickly respond to them or quickly ask them a difficult question that put them on the back foot. And so, the fear just crept in that they wouldn't challenge him. They wouldn't bring their thoughts, their ideas. That made him increasingly frustrated because he knew, and he told me this one day. He said his biggest fear was that he was so persuasive that nobody would challenge him, and he would take his business down the wrong path. He was pretty smart himself, but that was his fear.

In the background, our consulting team used to joke about this as we debriefed and worked out how we could support the team. We said, hey, Grant’s never fallen off his bicycle. It was a sense that the more he didn't, the more fear he had that he actually was going to. The fact of the matter is, one day, he did fall off the bicycle. The business did start tanking. And that's where he had his epiphany moment and his aha moment of, hey, he's smart, but he hadn't been able to get his team rallied around, and they weren't confident enough to speak up to him. Now, this was starting to become an existential crisis for him, because what was going to happen when he moved on one day, and there was nobody who was actually being allowed to be strategic thinkers and give new ideas and thoughts?

That comes back to the leadership trust piece for me. One, the team needs to have the capacity for affinity and alignment. Two, the leader needs to create the environment where that can actually happen and flourish.

Gunnar: Yeah, I think that's a really important thing. There's a really important point. There is an ownership piece both within the individual team members as well as in the leader. 
Does the leader create the environment that allows for people to reach certain levels of ability and skill? Is the leader self-aware enough to recognize when they might be actually the hindrance to the high-performance because there's people standing around them in either fear or anxiousness or apprehension. Finding where that’s stemming from is very, very important. When it comes to team members, sometimes you're going to recognize the fact that not everybody wants to be there for the same reason. Not everybody wants to be there to be that team player, be someone who's going to put in that effort.

Then it's: How do I, from a Truly Human lens, put this person in a position that they're going to be successful? Maybe that's a different team. Maybe it's a different set of responsibilities. There's a reality that you're not going to have a perfect team all the time. It's the responsibility of the leader to continuously recognize, what can I do to make this better? What can I do to make this so that all the folks who are on my team get to go home at the end of the day and think, I had a good day today, just because of people I get to work with, the work I get to do. I feel fulfilled by my experiences at my job, which I think is something that is lacking. There could be a sales team that's hitting some crazy numbers.

They are completely outperforming everybody else in their organization, potentially in the market, in the industry. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are a cohesive team by performing. There might be a high-performing work group. They might be people who all work on the same thing, and they all are individual high-performers, but if you want a high-performing team, there's a certain level of cohesiveness that you have to foster; you have to build.
It does take time and intentionality, but it's definitely needed.

Mike: Huge amount. I want to go back to something you said a little earlier, that it starts with self-awareness. What happened for Grant, after he had this bit of a Pippen experience, is he actually asked for himself, and he's co-senior leader, to do a 360 assessment to get more information from his team. It came out. He was incredibly controlling, very demanding. In and of itself, no, it's not bad to be demanding, but if it goes too far, it becomes something that people fear.

He committed himself to a journey on that. They joked that there was a grand version one and a grand version two and a grand version three. But that says that they committed to growth. He was never perfect when the pressure came on. Still today, if the pressure comes on, he can default to that quite easily. But knowing it and declaring it with his team and then going on a journey. He asked me to coach his team members to start having the courage and confidence to speak up. He created that environment, and that has shifted incredibly for that team. They have now got a way more sustainable performing team than what they had before when it was largely relying on one person trying to just cajole the rest of the team into achieving these things. What you said there was so important: It starts with that self-awareness, but then also him moving from self-awareness to how do I create the right environment for the team to step up and step in as well?

Gunnar: Mike, as we begin to wrap up this conversation, I would love to hear from you and then I might provide some thoughts as well. There's a senior leader, CEO, VP of HR, Head of Finance, they're listening to this conversation right now. They’re like, that's all great, well and good. What am I supposed to do Monday morning? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to do that's different that can allow me to start taking the steps to developing an environment where there is the opportunity for a high-performing team to exist. What would you say to that?

Mike: I would say Monday morning, am I checking in and opening up my own eyes to see how my team is engaging with each other? How am I observing them trying to set up their fellow team members for success? Do I witness them trying to push and promote their team members rather than themselves? That is one of the things I would encourage them to think about. I would say this, which is the harder piece, and it comes back to a little bit earlier that this is not all nice and fun. Am I excusing and tolerating smart and clever and even achieving great results at the expense of the cohesion of the team and the alignment and the collaboration of the team? Because we do end up excusing one for the other.

Yet, we know that in the longer term, that is doing more damage to that team and will impact the performance of the collective team. This isn't all nice. It may mean I've got to do some tough stuff. If I have a team member that has not got affinity and not encouraging and engendering that and finding it hard to align and people in my team are not trusting their intentions, I would say those are real big flags for me and I would need to be thinking carefully about the future membership of that team member if I truly want a collaborative, cohesive team.That's the hard part I'll put out there right now.

Beyond that, I think hopefully my team is largely that and we all got our blind spots and we're all going to have our triggers. What am I doing to create the environment where my teams can foster great relationships with each other, find each other? And help us align around the things that we need to achieve together.

Gunnar: I think there's something to be said for the recognition that something is going to have to be different sometimes. If you are going to make an active effort to change or to change a circumstance or to change a behavior, there's going to be some friction. There's going to be some level of potential resistance. It's not necessarily just going to be a quick flip of a switch. Oh, hey, guess what? This is how we operate now.

Sometimes managing that change and committing to that change is one of the hardest things to do. It's not the initial action, but sometimes it's actually continuing that action that becomes the bigger challenge. We just invite anybody who's going to make that effort to commit to it, dig in and really try to see what those results can be.

Mike: Yeah, I want to share something just as we close on this. Something that happened for me in this week. A longstanding client, we're doing feedback for them on their culture. They are struggling with cross-team collaboration. That's one of the things that they're calling out. I excuse the most senior leaders in the room. Immediately as they left, the team members started talking about the relationship of the team members above them, their leaders. They said they know they're not aligned. They know they're butting heads. They said, we're not stupid. We can see that. And we know that whilst that is happening, we are never going to be able to collaborate with our teams, with the other teams across the business, if they are not aligned.

But what was interesting is I was sharing this with the HR executive, he started saying to me, hey, Mike, is this just not is this just not like normal? Are we not trying to look for something here that we can't do, but on most teams like this, most senior teams, and I stepped back and I thought, you're right, most teams are, but that's average. And in fact, their results for their culture is average. I said, well, that's average. Yes, most teams are. That's what sets the teams apart that get this right and make them high-performing. That's what sets it apart.

I think you just said the most important thing is that it takes great intentionality. Being a great team is a strategic choice. It doesn't just happen. We have to give our time. We have to invest ourselves. We have to be open to feedback and be open to change. That's what it takes, but if it were so easy, we would have many high-performing teams around. It is not the norm. That's the encouragement and the challenge to listeners. Put your hands up to try and create something that is not the norm. It will have an impact not only on your performance, but it will have an impact for the people on that team and the way we show up in the world.