Team performance: An exploration

This is going to be a series of explorations into what influences team and individual performance in companies, and most importantly, what methods can be used to improve it. This is an especially interesting topic right now, as we are witnessing a pendulum swing quite violently, as evidenced by the sometimes disorderly restructuring activities in companies in response to the downturn return to normalcy.

The difficulty here, of course, is connecting a delayed end outcome (such as revenue or market share) to the actions of individuals and teams within companies that may have influenced that outcome. It's important to note that when we use the word 'influence', we must also consider the many other factors that can affect outcomes, including timing, macroeconomics, competitors' mistakes, unexpected events (such as the failure of the Silicon Valley Bank last weekend), and pure randomness. As humans, we have a documented tendency to misattribute good outcomes to our own skill and bad outcomes to external factors beyond our control.

Keeping that in mind, let's reframe the problem as 'how can we deploy our people most effectively to address our most important priorities?' Sounds simple, right? (Note that we're not asking the question 'where do we draw the line on projects?', which could be a topic for another discussion in the future.)

Lets decompose this problem further:

1. Who are our best people?

2. Who are the right people for priorities we want to execute on and in what team configuration?

3. What are risk parameters of our plan?

   because we know  that “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” - Donald Rumsfeld

4. Are people and teams in fact working on executing our plan and to what extent or they are working on something else (could be equally important), or something else entirely?

5. How do we monitor and maintain most productive configuration as conditions change? In other words - how do we minimize inefficiencies that will otherwise negatively compound.

6. Finally - what other levers do we have to improve intrinsic team performance over time?

There is often an analogy drawn between running teams within companies and running professional sports teams, and it can be a useful comparison. However, in my experience, teams within companies operate quite differently from sports teams. Firstly, sports teams are driven by rules, which allows for a more straightforward connection between team performance and measurable outcomes. This is much more difficult to achieve in a business setting. Secondly, sports teams follow a much more regimented routine, including training, recovery, and nutrition, all focused on maximizing individual performance. This can hardly be equated with sprint planning over pizza and beer. We will delve into this topic in more detail later.

In the next post of the series I am going to start with the easiest topic - and that is the topic much “loved” by managers and employees,  the performance reviews.

We want to ask a specific question about the application and efficacy of a particular tool in evaluating both team and individual performance.

Those who know me are aware that I have expressed less than charitable opinions not only about how companies conduct performance reviews, but also about whether they are useful or actually impede performance in their most contemporary forms.

In the meantime, please let me know which topics from the above or any related topics you find most interesting and would like to explore in greater depth.