10 Ways Founder CEOs Can Create High-Performing Leadership Teams
Great teamwork will be your sustainable competitive advantage
Many leaders have high IQs, and some also have high EQs (Emotional Intelligence). But only the minority have high WeQs (Collaborative Intelligence).
Too often, you come across teams with individual IQs of 120 or more where the team functions at a WeQ of 70 or less, meaning they’re performing at less than the sum of their parts.
Most CEOs understand why teams are important (e.g. teams usually outperform individuals or groups of individuals) but very few Founder CEOs are skilled at creating a high-performing senior leadership team.
To create a real team involves everyone in the team taking risks involving conflict, hard work, interdependence and trust. It can be a messy and challenging process transitioning an ordinary team to an extraordinary one but ultimately hugely rewarding.
So why should you care about creating a high performing team?
- More likely to succeed. The world is fast-moving, complex and uncertain. It’s not realistic to expect one person, the CEO, to possess all the skills necessary to lead a company through the rollercoaster ride of scaling up. Teamwork is almost always lacking in companies which fail and is present within companies that succeed.
- It’s a myth to believe that leadership has always resided in the CEO. Successful companies have distributed leadership across the business. If you are a sports fan, you will have regularly heard how important it is to have a team of leaders on the pitch, not just rely on one.
- High performing teams have more fun! Fun includes celebrations but also fun sustains and is sustained by team performance. The most rewarding source of enjoyment comes from “having been part of something larger than yourself”.
Why is a high performing leadership team so rare?
- It’s hard! If you have 6 people in the room there are 15 different relationships to maintain. Working in a team is not the same as working as a team. If you want your senior leadership team to work as a team you have to pay a lot more attention to many different areas e.g. communication, listening, supporting, collaborating etc.
- It’s got harder!! Remote work, hybrid and distributed teams have made working together more difficult in the eyes of most Founder CEOs.
- Systemic not linear. Teams are part of a complex adaptive system i.e. teams are systems made of systems within even wider systems. Most of us think about improving team performance in a linear way. Poor performance is more complex and nuanced than we like to think, and is likely to be multiple elements (e.g. lack of resources, lack of common purpose, poor internal communications) interacting with each other.
- And it’s not in our DNA. There is a bias towards individualism, particularly in the West where it is ingrained. Many of us have grown up with a focus on individual accomplishments.
Don’t get me wrong, teams are not the answer to all problems. Moreover, a dysfunctional team can destroy value and a business. But teams usually do outperform individuals or groups of individuals.
The ‘best practices’ I talk about in this essay are not meant to be exhaustive (although ten is quite a lot!) or prescriptive but more of a guide to help your team find its unique way of achieving high performance.
Here are 10 ways to guide you through creating a high-performing team:
1. A high-performing team understands stakeholders’ expectations
If you assume a team is part of a complex system (which I encourage you to do), then thinking about what your different stakeholders need from you is fundamental.
A stakeholder is anyone with a legitimate interest in what the team is doing and the outcome of its activities. Stakeholders for a senior leadership team are both internal and external. Internal stakeholders include other teams or board members. External stakeholders are customers, suppliers, and partners.
Leadership teams need to think beyond the obvious stakeholders and bring external stakeholders ‘into the room’. An effective team has a good balance between internal and external focus.
Let me give you an example of why it’s important for your team to actively engage with them and to reflect on their needs regularly:
Let’s say one of your company’s values is to treat people fairly. However, when you sign up suppliers, you don’t bother to find out how they treat their employees, focusing on the financial terms only. Then one of your team members further down the organisation finds out that this supplier uses child labour. This then puts in doubt the legitimacy of the leadership team and whether they can be trusted. And this has all kinds of knock-on effects.
If, for instance, the team had actually or metaphorically brought a customer into the room when deciding which suppliers to use, do you think they would have been happy with the team’s focus on the financials only?
So figure out who your stakeholders are and reflect on how they may influence the team, each other and the wider system.
2. High-performing teams have a common purpose
Nearly all team research shows that the number one requirement for successful teams is to have a team purpose that everyone understands. A purpose is why your team exists; the greater good you want to achieve.
The senior team tends to see their team’s purpose as synonymous with the company’s purpose. Yes, at one level, the top team is responsible for the company’s purpose, but then again, so is every other team in the company.
My advice is that even the senior team should set its own distinctive purpose so that it can set its own performance goals to measure itself against.
The characteristics of a strong collective purpose are:
- It connects with each team member’s personal purpose
- It is supported and illustrated by stories
- It connects up to the company’s overall purpose
Senior team members often say they are all aligned on the team’s purpose, but when you ask them independently to write it down, you get several different responses.
Finding your team’s purpose requires more work than many are prepared to put in — don’t make that mistake. Purpose influences all the other high-performance pillars of success. Shared purpose leads to shared learning, gives the confidence to listen to others’ views and enhances the relationships as everyone feels they are in unison.
Once you are clear on why you are here, you can set the strategy and the goals.
3. High-performing teams contain the right people
The conversation about who is right for your team should start with a reflection on your team’s purpose, values and goals and what success will look like for your team. Then figure out what knowledge, experiences and skills are required to get you there. Against this backdrop, you carefully compose your team.
It is understandable to choose team members who are a good ‘fit,’ but you may find you create a homogenous team that has a good time but doesn’t achieve much.
So yes, get comfortable with the fact you can work eight hours a day with this person for a few years (scary thought!), but also ask yourself, “What unique and valuable contribution can this new team member bring?”
Technical and specialist skills will depend on what you need them to do. You want enough compatibility and rapport — i.e. similarity — but you need complementarity too — i.e. difference.
My number one metric for a company is — percentage of key seats on the bus filled with the right people for those seats. Stop and reflect: What percentage of your key seats are occupied by the right people? If it’s less than 90%, this is your number one priority!
4. High-performing teams play to team member’s strengths
Ideally, you want to ensure your team members are doing what they are good at but also have a real enthusiasm for it.
Granted, it is unlikely you can spend 100% of your day every day on what you love doing but to be the most impactful team member you can, it should be the majority.
When people are playing to their strengths, they are more likely to be in the zone, working harder and more effectively, and more comfortable being uncomfortable with stretch goals.
Using your strengths — dialling them up or down depending on the context — is a skill you can learn to get better at.
A high-performing team knows what energises and de-energises each other and allocates roles and responsibilities accordingly. This requires you as the leader to be honest with your team members about your strengths and weaknesses. This will encourage your team members to do the same.
5. High-performing teams have team operating guidelines
“We all know how to act when we’re together, right?”
Don’t be so sure!
We each bring different expectations and assumptions to our teams, companies and relationships. When you discuss your team’s guidelines for how you will work together, you may be surprised at the different assumptions people hold.
An operating guideline is a principle for working effectively together and agreed upon by all team members, and used by all members to hold each other accountable.
You want to have between six and ten operating guidelines. Focus on behaviours you do want, not behaviours you don’t want i.e., honour the team commitments and build the reputation rather than don’t miss deadlines!
For example, if you are a distributed team, you should consider guidelines that address the ‘remote’ challenges. They might be set around frequent communication and check-ins or how the team will manage communication and collaboration synchronously and asynchronously.
As well as setting the guidelines themselves, you need to measure how your team is currently performing against them and discuss how you will respond when these guidelines are not maintained.
6. High performing teams continually work on their relationships
In many good teams, there is a focus on high standards, but in great teams, there is also a closeness. The team members understand each other at a deeper level.
As an ice-breaker in a team coaching session, I sometimes ask, “Tell the group something surprising about you that no one in the room knows.” The answers are usually very interesting and create genuine surprise and some smiles. I used to be a ballroom dancing champion, said the CTO, followed by I used to be a kickboxing champion from the CMO. Really? You!?
The point is that people want to be understood, and through attentiveness, observations and questions, you can come to understand the layers of who people are. When people feel team members have invested in understanding them, they move toward them relationally.
Sharing the critical experiences that have made you who you are — the challenging moments in your life, your passions, who is important to you, what bothers you, your psychological assessments — may feel vulnerable to do but is what strengthens relationships.
You don’t need high EQ to show that you care about someone. Instead, do it through understanding who people are.
7. High-performing teams cultivate psychological safety
A team with high psychological safety feels confident that no one will punish or embarrass them for offering a new idea, admitting an error, challenging a point of view or asking a question.
A conversation, where team members are willing to share their honest views and argue about what they believe in, is a sign of a psychological safe team. Psychological safe teams also are more willing and able to handle conflict and to back each other up when mistakes have been made.
A team not making mistakes or having little conflict may feel good, but I would question whether they are fulfilling their potential.
Great Founder CEOs emphasise “you’re only as good as you’re willing to be bad.”
You want to encourage teams and team members to take risks, push themselves out of their comfort zone, make mistakes and to learn from them.
Often it requires an outsider like a coach to assess how psychologically safe a team is. One way to do that is to observe a team meeting. You can learn so much from doing this. It’s also interesting to observe a senior leadership team without the CEO in the room to see how similar or different the conversation is. A good sign is that it is not too different!
8. High-performing teams hold each other accountable
Are you individually and mutually accountable for the team’s purpose, goals and guidelines?
This is a key question to ask all your team members. You are not a team and not an effective one unless team members can hold themselves accountable.
At its core, mutual accountability is about committing to the team’s purpose, goals and approach. Mutual accountability arises from having clarity of purpose, goals and approach. And the clarity of purpose, goals and approach, in turn, fosters accountability.
When this mutual accountability is in place, team members hold themselves and each other accountable for the team’s performance and results.
Is there a sense in your team that only the team can fail?
9. High-performing teams embrace positive conflict
It’s less about getting rid of conflict or helping teams resolve conflict and more about generating more positive conflict.
Positive conflict results in honest, open and sometimes passionate dialogue about topics important to the team. The right kind of conflict results in better decisions. Why? Because there is greater creativity, group think is avoided, and all the different perspectives are aired.
But it is a difficult balance to maintain. You want just enough conflict to give the dialogue energy but not too much where it descends into conflict getting personal. As Patrick Lencioni points out in his book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you want a balance between artificial harmony and mean-spirited personal attacks.
The reality is that at some stage, the team will step into the wrong kind of or too much conflict, but if you are committed to working through it, you will recover and develop more closeness and greater confidence in the relationships.
In my experience, different teams manage conflict in different ways — some perform well with high levels of healthy conflict, whereas others with very little.
To become a high-performing team, you will need to learn how to master conflict. The first step is to determine your team’s conflict profile, i.e., understand everyone’s viewpoints on and comfort levels with conflict. People’s relationship with conflict will be determined by various factors — personality, cultural background — and a high-performing team will establish a conflict culture everyone understands and commits to.
10. High-performing teams keep reflecting and learning together
The senior leadership team in a scale-up has its hand full just on the day-to-day operational matters. Finding time to step back, reflect and learn seems like a luxury.
I would argue that your team’s rate of learning (“ROL”) is a very strong predictor of future growth and success. And that learning is likely to be one of your most sustainable competitive advantages in this fast-moving world.
The Founder CEO and the senior leadership need to get ahead of the growth of the business, and the best way to do that is to learn continually and relentlessly and apply that learning.
It’s about taking active responsibility for developing yourself and the other team members.
But for a team to be a truly effective learning machine, it depends on what it learns, how it learns and whether and how the learnings are applied.
Here are some key principles to help you become a more effective learning team.
- We are learning all the time unconsciously, but your best learning is done consciously with purpose, directed to the accomplishment of the team’s purpose
- Find a process where individual knowledge and learning are passed onto the collective — too often, people keep tightly hold of their knowledge
- Connect up individual learning goals to team learning goals and develop a team development plan
- Exploit the power of feedback to accelerate each other’s learning as well as get feedback from your stakeholders on how the team is performing
- Ensure there is a clear link between effort and recognition for learning
The bottom line is that creating an effective team is hard work and a never-ending process. Team members will come and go, and requirements and expectations will change.
Arguably there is nothing better than when you are part of a high-performing team.
Teams are part of a complex, adaptive system which means you are unlikely to solve any problems with linear solutions. Each of the 12 areas I have mentioned will be inter-connected. They will influence each other.
As I finish this essay I reflect on one of the best teams I have recently witnessed.
They had a clear purpose, they understood each other’s strengths and weaknesses, they pushed each other hard, they supported each other, they cared about one another, they were all leaders in their own way, they felt able to express their unique talents, they came through adversity to get stronger, they had a great team coach and they celebrated their victories … I’m referring to my son’s unbeaten under thirteen rugby team!! Proud Dad.
If you would like to find out more about creating a high performing team, check out Team Coaching on my Fit to Lead website.
Keep well. Give > Take.
Mark
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p.s. If you enjoyed it please share it, spread a little love. Mark’s Scale Up Essays are created by Mark Farrer-Brown, scale up Coach, Investor and Enthusiast. You can find out more about Mark’s writing and how he helps Scale Up Founder CEOs at Fit to Lead website.
