Giving it away

tl;dr The best way to guide a team to high performance is to prioritize behavior over process.

Best practices for high-performing teams tend to focus on building a team from scratch. Put some skilled people together. Define a common purpose. Clarify roles. Deploy excellent processes. Ensure there's open communication. Perhaps add a trust fall for good measure.

You get the idea.

You didn't have a high-performing team, and now you have one. Well done.

In practice, I find this idea to be a little frustrating. It's rare we have the chance to build a team like a carpenter might build a chair or a table. It's much more common that as leaders, we act like gardeners. We cultivate team culture. We plant people in positions where we think they'll thrive. We give them sunlight and water, then we see how they grow.*

This type of high-performance gardening (now there's a show I'd watch) is a nuanced task. It's about balancing process with culture — product with people. If you've ever overhauled a company-wide process, you know how painful it can be. And it's not the nuts and bolts of the process that's tough. Transparent communication? Yes please! But every organization has interpersonal dynamics; every team has a memory. People find it hard to be transparent when they've been burned, or embarrassed. It's not enough for leaders to say "let's all communicate transparently from now on, ok?"

The solution to this problem is to focus on behaviors instead of processes.

Behaviors can be modeled by leaders. They can be recognized and rewarded, and they can be celebrated by the whole team. You can squeeze them onto powerpoint slides (if you must) but unlike process and principles, you can feel behaviors — every member of the team can experience them.

And if there's one behavior that's been the secret ingredient for every high-performance team I've ever been a part of it, it's this:

Generosity.

The thing about generosity is it that it's big, and plentiful. Generosity is more than kindness, it's an abundance of good things. I think that's why it works so well with high-performers; they always want to do more, they want to win, push themselves and everyone around them. Generosity is the positive way to do that. It can act as an overwhelming force for good, a disproportionate response to opportunity.

When I was a kid, the phrase "like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut" was used to dismiss an approach as excessive and wasteful. But if you put your best people in a team, and they're generous with their time, attention, and talent. They become a metaphorical sledge hammer, cracking nuts all over the organization.

It feels good for the team too. They get to throw themselves into the highest priorities for the business, they get to use their skills, but most importantly they can operate with freedom. Generous acts build on one another. Someone might start a document to capture the ideas, another might start sketching. Someone else might take over and contribute more ideas. Another person might help animate a visualization. There's cumulative impact for generous creative teams, a pattern of behavior that builds momentum.

I say all this because every organization is focused on efficiency right now, and knowledge work—particularly design work—doesn't comply to those same principles that made Toyota and General Electric so good at driving operational efficiency.

There's no production line for design, and the efficiencies to be had can seem counterintuitive. If you have 5 designers and 5 priories, it can be less efficient to give each designer a priority. The nature of the work means teams are faster and more impactful when they're working together, riffing off one another's ideas, and challenging each other.

It's not easy, but if you're trying to figure out how to guide a design team to high-performance, don't focus on the mechanics. Don't think of them like resources that need to be optimized.

Imagine the future state, visualize how you want the team to be operating.

Think about the behaviors necessary to make that a reality.

Now write those behaviors down.

I bet generosity is high on that list.

*I am eternally thankful to Alison Gopnik for the brilliant carpenter/gardener framing, and I hope my daughter will be too.