A superstar team? Or a team of superstars?
At Third House we work with both scaling teams and established businesses alike, and in both cases we’re often asked to help teams work better together. The conversation always starts in the same place – why isn’t our team of brilliant individuals functioning as well as they could. They’re all brilliant in their own right but something’s just not clicking.
With every team, there’s an opportunity to for the individuals to be greater than the sum of their parts but so often, it can feel as though it’s not coming together as well as it should.
Before we think about how to address these concerns it’s worth taking a few steps back to look at the sorts of people that make up leadership teams. In my experience, the sorts of people that make it to the top of an organisation are intelligent and good problem solvers with a strong belief in what’s right and wrong. They are experienced and dare I say it, not without ego.
In many ways, to even get to the top, you have to be willing to stand alone. You have to put your head above the parapet – there’s only one spot at the top and to even occupy that space you need to be comfortable working independently. To be a leader, in many ways, you need to expect people to follow you.
Can you start to see the picture? I’m sure you’re starting to see the problem.
Without intervention, many leadership teams operate as a team of superstars rather than a superstar team. In a recent HBR IdeaCast episode, they explored the idea of superstar teams. What that characteristics are and how to create one.
It’s quite a fascinating listen. For me especially because we often struggle to help teams to make the leap from understanding that high performance is not about capability or capacity, but about how they work together to make decisions, solve problems and move to action. These things can feel hard to pin down but when they’re in place they create a kind of alchemy – that magical, elusive ‘click’.
So what do superteams do that sets them apart from the rest?
Experiment more
Only 8% of the teams that Ron Friedman, author of Superteams, studied hit the ‘superteam’ mark. But all of the teams in that 8% conducted what he calls ‘experiments’. This means trying new things to see what happens – and not being afraid of the outcomes. Experiments don’t need to span your whole business. In fact, for many of his examples, they were small things like A/B testing or trials of different ways of communicating.
Practically speaking, in the bigger businesses we work with, this would require a mindset shift from leadership down. Time and resources are so precious in our often overstretched and overwhelming day to day operations that experimenting, unless it’s culturally acceptable, might feel inefficient. The risk is that you end up tying people up in knots trying to explain why they took a punt on something that wasn’t a dead cert.
Most of the scaleups we work with already experiment liberally! In both cases though, it all comes down to intentional experimentation. And that means paying careful attention to the conditions and the results.
Identify barriers
Superteams have one question on repeat… ‘where are you stuck?’ It’s a way of identifying barriers and taking out whole swathes of unnecessary meetings which are just about information sharing and sharing what’s already been done. Asking ‘where are you stuck?’ gets right to the heart of what meetings should be about. Problem solving in the moment with all of the people whose role it should be to support each other in finding solutions to problems and moving forward.
Feedback and continuous improvement
I loved the way that feedback was framed in this podcast. Freidman talks about continuous feedback ‘framed in the future’ as a way to ensure that the team is consistently learning and growing together. It becomes part of the dialogue between the team members. What could be better going forward? What needs to change before we attempt this again? The more you hear this kind of feedback and the more positive impact it starts to have, the more you welcome it and even seek it out.
This feeds in to another key area of how a superteam operates – improving for what’s to come. How can we apply what we’re learning so we’re always getting better, even when things are good.
More focus, fewer distractions
Busy, busy, busy…. But are you busy on the right things? Superteams are focussed on what matters. And what matters is the strategic priorities. As leaders, this is also about giving your teams permission to focus on what matters. What that requires you to do though, as both individual leaders and as a leadership team, is to force yourself to get clear on what it is that matters.
Shoulder to shoulder with their teams
I had to spend a bit of time pondering this one, as we talk to our clients a lot about working at the right level and not getting stuck in the weeds. But unhelpful bungeeing or micromanagement is very different from being willing to roll your sleeves up and get into the trenches with your team when it matters. One is role modelling what is important and the other is checking up on your team. Superteams are willing to get down into the detail with the wider team when it counts. For me, this is all about judgement.
What does this mean for you?
When I reflect on this podcast and the summary points within, it all comes back to intentional leadership. Superteams are intentional about being a team. They put energy into making the system the operate in, and the people they work with, function better through feedback, focus and conscious improvement. When we operate in silos and in our roles, we are in transactional mode and missing a bit piece of the picture.
Strong leadership development can support you in understanding how you’re functioning as a team and the things that might be standing in your way – often the things that you can’t see for yourself. If you suspect your team could be functioning better, why not drop us a line for a chat.
