How to dramatically accelerate your team’s performance
We are hearing a common theme amongst our clients recently that they want their teams to dramatically accelerate progress on key initiatives - especially when faced with complex, high stakes tasks.
It’s one thing as a leader to delegate clear cut tasks like asking one of your high performers to chair a risk committee and quite another to delegate responsibility for a complex initiative like developing a data strategy that transforms the organization. How can we improve the odds of your team making great decisions when faced with hard to solve, complex, high stakes tasks?
One answer is to build an approach to decision making based on a set of leadership principles.
A principle is a basic idea or rule that explains how something should work or how we should think. Principles give us a framework that speed up how to think so everyone in a team contributes to making even better decisions on complex topics.
Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at MIT, found that the incredible wealth generated by the top most valuable companies in the US share four leadership principles for how decisions should be made. Here is our summary of those principles:
Evidence based: we base our discussions on data and conduct evidence based arguments so that the team makes better decisions, predictions, and estimates.
Autonomy: we are clear about our team goals and how they are aligned to the goals and values of the organization so that we can work with minimal bureaucracy, fewer cross functional processes, and spend less effort in coordination.
Speed: we place bets and experiment rapidly to accelerate learning and progress. The focus is on speed and learning through iteration and less on planning and certainty.
Openness: we welcome challenging the status quo and increasing common knowledge to combat defensiveness. Vulnerability is an essential part of openness, and openness is the best defense against the slow-acting poison of defensiveness. Defensiveness leads to brittle companies and toxic cultures.
Effective principles should
Be few in number so they can be remembered. Consider a maximum of 3-5
Use plain language
Championed by senior management
Clarify the intention or impact of the principle
Add clarity with contrast about what not to do
Putting principles into practice: Define, Share, Learn & Adjust
Introducing principles signals change to an organization – we all know that can be difficult so here are 3 practical steps to help make them stick.
1. Define the principles: take time to create principles and share them with the people who are intended to use them. The principles should be in service of the organization’s mission and strategic priorities. Draft a set of principles where you want thinking to change - fewer is better. Give them a name – ‘The Toyota Way, Amazon’s Leadership Principles…’
2. Share: Help people understand the new context by crafting a compelling story and need for change. Take the opportunity to acknowledge that practicing new ways of doing things will lead to unexpected outcomes at first. Set an expectation for your team to persist through the trickiness. Talk the principles out to understand what they look like in new behaviours and agree to check-in along the way. Agree with your team to pilot the principles within a project or key initiative so they can practice and learn.
3. Learn & adjust: It’s one thing to create the principles but it’s key to keep coming back and debrief what you are learning. Keep testing the principles in conversations where important decisions are being made. For example, ‘we are thinking about doing X - is that what we mean by Speed over Certainty?’ Or, ‘we did X and we had Y result, are we willing to accept that?’ These are important moments for you as their leader to reinforce and acknowledge that this is the thinking and behavior you wanted, or if it’s not, then offer some course corrective feedback.
Helping your team learn better decision making is an important and tricky task for any leader. Defining and revisiting a set of leadership principles helps create the way to a better future.
Over the last 30 years, enormous value has been created by organizations taking a principled approach to how work gets done. What might be the principles your team needs to dramatically accelerate their performance? We’re passionate about guiding leaders through the process of developing inspiring visions and principles. If you’d like to have a conversation about aligning your team's efforts to drive meaningful strategic outcomes, let’s talk!