Define “high performance” metrics

We all know a great team when we see one. Some are famous such as Apple Computer’s McIntosh team and others are quiet influencers such as Linux and Mozilla. What do they have in common? They consistently win. They score points, make money, affect social/environmental/political change, and somehow move the world “forward” in a very measurable way. So if you want to do the same, start by knowing your success metrics. For engineering managers, it might be achieving product milestones such as prototype, alpha release, beta release, first customer shipment, and then revenue ramp. For marketers, it might be the number of quality leads handed to sales, citations as a thought leader in key publications, and revenue growth.

Be a high performer

To attract high performers, be one yourself. Bernard Guidon at HP was a legendary for his performance as an executive. He was magical with employees, customers, and partners in that he made them believe HP could have a billion dollar business in UNIX servers at a time when IBM AS/400s and Dec VAXs ruled the earth. He would drop in engineers’ cubicles to understand the issues they personally faced. He would call up CEO’s of software companies and pitch them on why UNIX was a revolutionary platform. He was fearless, visionary, hardworking, and incredibly charismatic when it came to creating a belief system needed for success. Even if you don’t see yourself as “rock star” type leader, you can model high performance by doing things that matter most.

Build and communicate a shared mission

High performers want to know why. Leaders must make it extremely clear to the team how their contribution fits into the grand scheme of things, and why that’s worthy of a hard fight. Steve Jobs understood the importance of mission while he was recruiting John Sculley, then President of Pepsi, by asking him "do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?" Why does your project team matter? What specific difference will your team make to the company, to your customers, and to your shareholders? And you don’t necessarily have to answer the question all by yourself. Create the shared mission with your team and other stakeholders.

Create an overriding sense of urgency

One of the high performing teams that I will always remember is Firetalk Communications. We had 2M consumer subscribers for a voice chat service which was not too unlike Skype. Bruno Tapolsky was the CEO, an intense and passionate Frenchman who was once in the equivalent of our Navy Seals. He assembled a very capable executive team and created an overriding sense of urgency. One useful practice that created both urgency and accountability was the weekly status report. Elise Bauer, Firetalk SVP and now Pacifica Group partner, had every employee and manager submit weekly emails due each Friday documenting:

• What results had I promised to produce by this Friday?


• What results did I actually deliver?


• What results do I promise to produce by next Friday?

Commitments with a time attached support a culture of urgency. This email gave managers an opportunity to coach individuals, kill tasks that didn’t make sense, and lend resources to those that did accelerate results. It's also a chance to distinguish between activities and results. See our blog entry on Leadership Focus: Activities vs Results.

Show you care

One of the most basic of human needs is validation. It’s the need to know that you make a difference. Great leaders have a knack for noticing people’s diligent efforts, understanding their challenges, and recognizing their victories. High performing teams don’t need daily ego strokes but rather a sense that their individual efforts are noticed and make a difference. As a leader, your job then is to walk around, literally, and to show people you care about them and their work results. Book time on your calendar (maybe 2-3 hrs) each week just to wander around.

• Listen – ask your team members how they’re doing, what’s frustrating, and what’s exciting?
• Acknowledge – tell them what you’ve heard and thank them for their efforts
• Coach – if you see an opportunity for improvement, put it in the form of a challenge. Ask them, "have you thought about ….?” Or offer them your own experience and knowledge. "A" players love to learn.

Reward team results

Celebrate victories and acknowledge performance at each milestone on the road to achieving the big success metrics. For example, reward the whole team at key milestones leading up to the big one. I was never a big fan of the many, cute rewards you see in books like “101 Ways to Reward Employees” preferring rather to structure team bonuses (cash and stock options) based on team results. Wim Roelandts, CEO of Xilinx, used to tell us at HP (paraphrasing), “it doesn’t matter if you say your wing on the airplane isn’t on fire but your partner’s is because we’ll all go down together unless we act as a team.” Yes, it’s a rather negative framing but does make the point that team performance is more important than individual performance.

Individual recognition is most effective when personalized and not divisive. Rewards can be promotions and peer recognition, one of the most powerful of motivators. For example, Taiai Ergueta, former HP executive in the laptop business, used to hand out pencils with an embossed “thank you from Taia”. Surprisingly, these became quite the prized possession as employees provided input on who should get them.

Build a team of “A” players

It won’t be easy but strive for 100% “A” players. “A” players need clarity on objectives (the “what”) so that they can use their full creativity, resourcefulness, and passion to achieve the objective as they see fit (the “how”). Focus on the “what” not the “how”. By doing so, you’ll actually attract more “A” players because they prefer autonomy and being accountable.

And accountability means firing if necessary. High performers do often beat themselves up for falling short of expectation but they quickly self-correct. Lower performers, on the other hand, make excuses and seldom improve. The regret I hear most often from managers is not firing people sooner who deserved it. So pull the trigger and replace bottom dwellers with “A” players. Everyone wins when you do.

Provide ongoing feedback

For this section, I will quote my dear friend, Frank Ma, a former executive of Symbol Technologies and HP: “All of us have blind spots, regardless of who we are. Regular, direct, candid, and unthreatening discussion of an employee’s performance is critical. The most effective feedback is given right after the occurrence of the actual event. The feedback does not have to be a well written document or even in a formal sit-down, but it must be clear and persistent. The two parties agree on a remedy and the manager monitors the progress.”

Resources:

• PMI – ”Leading High Perfomance Project Teams”
• Guy Kawasaki !– “The Art of Evangelism”
• SDForum “Building a Top Tier Management Team”
• Bob Nelson -- “101 Ways to Reward Employees”

© Sridhar Ramanathan Pacifica Group

Sridhar:

I think you've developed a good mix of tactical and strategic points in this thread. To augment your point on "creating a culture of urgency", it's very important to ensure that there is a continuous feedback loop in the operations of a team. It's way too easy to define a mission, set goals and develop a plan to reach those goals, but not have an effective way to feedback the real world results into a revised plan to reach the original goals and targets. The real world may not change the goal, but it will definately change the method used to get there and anticipating this happening is important. This can be a useful way to analyze the points of urgency and provide the individual and team feedback you mentioned.

Also, one of the challenges I've seen working with "A" team members is that they often will chose the "best" way to perform a task (usually avoids any assumptions or limitations to the approach taken), but it may not be the "right" way (usually uses assumptions or influences based on corporate history or that are cast in stone). "A" team people often don't like sacred cows that will influence their creativity, but will likely accept them if they understand the reasons. Managers must be prepared to justify and explain why the "right" way may superceed the "best" way.

Posted by: Steve Seal | July 13, 2006 8:12 AM

There are a few pieces of advice I’ve picked up from others that I believe in and use daily and a few lessons I’ve learned that are perhaps less common.

I believe in the somewhat common model that a high performance team needs to take into account people, process, and (for engineering) a good architecture. Missing on any one of these fronts can significantly degrade the performance of the team. People – you need a motivated team that knows what needs to be done and is not afraid to fill in where needed and take risks. Process -- it needs to be right for the size of the organization and the skills of the team. For example, extreme programming works best with a team that is experienced and has worked well together whereas a more prescriptive methodology works with a more junior team. Architecture--- I believe a good technical architecture helps the team divide the work well and allow for more independent and faster development. When I go into an organization which needs to be “turned around” and made into a high performance team, I use this basic model and look into the talent, organization, process and architecture.

On the less common/perhaps more controversial front: every engineer spends some time with customers. I’ve had significant debates about this with other VP’s of Engineering and managers. There is a tendency to want to “protect” the engineering resources and sometimes a desire by the product manager to “protect” their role as the voice of customer needs. The highest correlation of successful projects for me has been how much every individual writing code understands the customer. In implementing this I make sure that the customer interactions are efficient (they can be just listening in on conference calls, filling in for online support, up to onsite visits). I always make sure that the product managers are present and empowered (I give the team a little speech before their first customer visit on how the PM does this for a living and you are seeing a single customer sample and should have the PM debrief the engineers post visit). I’ve never felt that a customer visit was wasted and I’ve seen large engineering mistakes avoided by a (sometimes junior) engineer pointing out that “this won’t work in a real customer environment”.

Quality is measured by the customers. When you’re going through a release process and needing to make trade-offs, sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the release metrics and lose site of how Quality is really perceived. Adding in a feature based on feedback during beta may be much more important to the perceived quality than making sure the code complies with the specs. This isn’t saying that quality processes are not important – they are key to understanding the quality of what you’re about to ship. It’s just important to keep the end customer in mind when making those key trade-offs during shipment. One of my favorite quality metrics is defects found post release by customers. If the defect was known prior to release, a mistake was made in the release decision, if the defect wasn’t known at release, the testing process fell short.

High performance teams need passion. There needs to be a purpose the team is emotionally attached to. That passion will give the team the extra push to get the results, and it will also create a caring so that some team members will not let other team members make mistakes. So, as a leader, how do you create passion? Create a sense of purpose, engage the team in a shared vision, and let them see the results from the customer’s eyes and through a personal connection with the team.

Posted by: Gary O'Neall | July 17, 2006 7:59 PM