Building Team Effectiveness in High Growth Technology Businesses Three Part Series - Part 1

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Building Team Effectiveness
in
High Growth Technology Businesses
Dave Litwiller
Three Part Series – January, 2021
11

2. OVERVIEW
1. Team Effectiveness, Collaboration and Diversity
2. Rapid Formation, Reformation and Gelling of Teams
3. The Art of Delegation

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Part 1 of 3:
Team Effectiveness, Collaboration
and Diversity
33

4. TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Two things matter most to team effectiveness:
1. All team members sharing a common goal
• Even though knowledge will grow and other circumstances will
change to alter the optimum form of the goal as time goes on
2. All team members having common practices and values in
collective learning
• Ultimately, this distils to learning how to learn best together
• Learning to learn requires not just reflection, but validation of those
reflections and timely action to improve

5. TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
Cardinal rules:
• Subordinate functional roles to overall team performance, and limit team goals to
overall deliverables as much as possible
• Involve people who understand the entire system under development, and the
environment in which it will be deployed
• Mix age and youth, creativity (idea people) and rigor (detail people), perspectives and
backgrounds. Include people with broad-based experience delivering analogous or
similar work items/products
• Engage people who recognize and value the different perspectives and unique
knowledge that other team members bring

6. TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
• Connector individuals within the team grow in importance as the
development’s complexity and innovation climb. These are people who know
how to find resources within the business and outside to solve tough
challenges quickly
• Select team members who share excitement over the team’s goals, and who
are willing to help teammates through setbacks and difficult periods
• Mix teams from one project to the next, to prevent cliques and rivalries from
forming
• Focus on system performance, rather than sub-components

7. TEAM EFFECTIVENESS
• Invest heavily in design of the work item/product architecture (or subsystem or
component)
• Keep customers involved. The development specification document should
not be the only tool telling the design team what is important to the customer,
especially as circumstances evolve
• Be flexible enough to change direction, and,
• Reward success, both with recognition and monetarily
• As well, favour group over individual rewards, most of the time

8. LEADING EFFECTIVE TEAMS
• Show passionate curiosity, crave new insights and give team members the
opportunity to reveal them
• Have controlled confidence; be able to bounce ideas back and forth with
strong collaborators, without it turning into a competition
• Be mildly obsessed, showing that you care more about the collective mission
than about personal benefit
• Inspire outcomes that are greater than are what any one contributor could
achieve
• Show undivided attention when talking to individuals or groups on the team
• Exhibit and cultivate great personal execution – this is the only way to build
strong teams

9. LEADING HIGH
PERFORMANCE TEAMS
The Leader
• Pushes the team strongly, but pushes him or herself harder
• Takes the problem to be solved to heart
• Is deeply competitive with the outside world, yet, collaborative within the
enterprise
• Is self-reliant, and demands the same of others

10. LEADING HIGH
PERFORMANCE TEAMS
The Leader
• Leads from the front
• Is as good at analyzing human problems as technical ones
• Both individual and relationships
• Tends to know what everyone is doing, all the time, with a sincere and personal
interest
• Is everywhere as the battle is raging
• Real-time sense of the ebb and flow; otherwise responses and decisions
become too slow or obsolete

11. LEADING COLLABORATIVE
PROJECT TEAMS
• The paradox of sustaining great collaboration in a high velocity, deeply
technical environment:
• The leader of the project or business process is able to make good decisions on
the spot, but not in an arbitrary way
• Decisions are made without unduly curtailing the autonomy of individual
contributors
• The leader needs to be willing to hear others out with an open mind, even if a
different direction has to be taken, in order to maintain ongoing commitment of
team members

12. DIVERSITY
• Diversity helps gain perspective and keep creative juices flowing to build the
competitive edge
• There is an element of diversity though that sometimes needs to be managed
to achieve best advantage
• It is about how people relate to each other
• If there is a lack of cohesion, impediments can arise
• People need to be able to communicate and work easily together
• Management’s role to capture the strengths and sidestep potential issues with
diversity in teams is to consistently attend to team dynamics and
communication to ensure fluid interaction

13. DIVERSITY
• People on a collaborative team need to be able to move between followership
and leadership as issues as the life cycle of the team evolves
• The highest leverage skills change as a team matures, and as a task moves
from requirements definition to high level design, detailed design, debugging and
life-cycle support
• People need to be encouraged to seek situational leadership when their profile
of skills, knowledge and aptitude are at the forefront of near-term challenges the
team faces

14. INTERACTIVITY
High Performing Teams Generally Show the Following Communication
Characteristics:
• There is energy in the dialog (proxy for engagement)
• People talk and listen in similar proportions; individuals don’t routinely dominate the
discussion
• There are strong connections between team members outside of group meetings;
they connect peer-to-peer, and not just flow their dealings through full group
meetings or the leader
• There is social sensitivity among team members to the emotional state of others
(much more easily done face-to-face than over text-based communication media)

15. INTERACTIVITY
High Performance Team Traits (cont’d)
• People can maintain respectful, collegial relationships while still being able to
provide mutual constructive criticism about the work product
• There is responsibility on both sides of each pair-wise relationship in a
collaborative environment to keep communication up, while being able to explore
alternative ideas and best approaches
• In many ways, this is the core of an ego-less, high performance culture
• The leader is sensitive to the emergence of cliques, groupthink, or intellectual
silos, and is able to shake things up when needed to refresh interaction
capacity

16. REINFORCING CONSTRUCTIVE
BEHAVIOURS
• Lead by example
• You are what you promote, both exemplars of success and correcting the
wrong kinds of failure
• To help people absorb learning fast:
• Have them say one, do one, teach one

17. LEADING RESILIENT
PROJECT TEAMS
• The leader is able to overcome unforeseen circumstances, without blowing
time, cost or technical budgets
• Often this means
• Countering emergent performance or schedule limiting component bottlenecks
by returning to the most basic forms of how to alter the phenomena at issue, and
then,
• Building back up to feasible alternatives leveraging the full gamut of system
technologies and enterprise strengths
• The leader distinguishes between excellence and perfection
• The leader is able to let team members hear the siren call of perfection, while
driving toward timely delivery

18. UP NEXT IN PART 2 OF 3
Rapid Formation, Reformation and Gelling of Teams

19. FURTHER DISCUSSION
For additional discussion about building team effectiveness in high growth
technology businesses:
dave.litwiller@communitech.ca