A Counterintuitive Secret to Team Excellence
How Manufacturing Early Wins Transforms Team Performance
Have you ever noticed how the biggest ambitious projects struggle to get off the ground?
There's initial excitement followed by a peculiar inertia. The bigger the project, the stronger the resistance.
Here's the counterintuitive truth I've discovered after years of working with high-performance teams:
To get a team to work together to deliver something big, make them deliver something small first.
This simple principle has transformed how I approach team development, and it's the foundation of what I call the Performance-Boosting Team Charter. Let me explain why this works and how you can implement it with your own teams.
Why Our Brains Resist Big Projects
Procrastination isn't just a personal weakness; it's a predictable response to certain conditions. And big projects create these conditions in abundance.
The two biggest drivers of procrastination are:
Fear of failure
Not knowing how to complete a task.
Big projects trigger both of these responses simultaneously. The word "ambitious" alone can evoke visions of failure and create an immediate grumble of reluctance in your heart. "Oh no, lots of risks ahead."
When my son was younger and he started to play games, whether that be a board game or a video game, he would choose the games he could win easily. When he started playing soccer he also liked playing teams his team could beat easily. Winning is everything, isn't it?
When my son would say these things, I would answer, "Don't you want to challenge yourself and learn?" He would just look back with a blank stare. Now he is older. Recently, he and his team played a match on a sunny Sunday morning here in Belgium. Halfway through, they were winning 10-0. By the end, it was 20-1.
You would think that he would be ecstatic; he wasn't.
He could not stop complaining about how boring it was.
This mirrors our paradoxical relationship with big projects. We want the challenge intellectually, but emotionally, our brains scream that it's too complex, we don't know what to do, and we're going to fail.
Add in the requirement to work with new people across disciplines or organisations, and your brain says: "Stop! Time to go scroll the news instead."
How can we find a way to challenge a team but avoid the resistance that results from a fear of ambitious projects?
The familiarity factor
Teams that have previously worked together perform best. Adam Grant uncovered in his TED WorkLife interview that the legendary US hockey team that beat the Soviet Union was not comprised of the very best players in America.
Their advantage?
Many of them had played together before and even had the same coach, who was also their Olympic team coach at the time.
They were familiar with one another.
Keith Sawyer in Group Genius points to Broadway for another example. There is an optimal mixture of familiar and unfamiliar teammates. Broadway shows with the optimal degree of cast members who were familiar with each other experienced the greatest box-office success.
But here's the key insight: it's not that trust builds performance it's that performing together builds trust.
Teams of experts who haven't worked together do not outperform teams of non-experts.
The social dynamic between team members determines collective intelligence more than individual brilliance.
A team in which the members relate to each other well will be able to collectively come up with better solutions to challenges and is less likely to be stuck in a "What do we do next loop". Such a team will be more confident that the team as a whole can take on more ambitious projects. They will have more agency.
So, what do you do when you can't assemble a team that has worked together before?
Manufacturing Familiarity Through Early Wins
You manufacture familiarity through early, achievable wins.
In my experience, team performance elevates dramatically when the team works together to produce something tangible. All the planning sessions and team-building exercises in the world don't increase confidence like actually getting something done.
So, does this mean we just have to be patient?
Another counterintuitive aspect is that it doesn't matter how difficult or important that initial output is. In fact, it's best to get something done as quickly as possible something simple that engages the whole team and contributes to the broader mission.
Actionable insights to improve team performance.
When you are setting up a team as part of a big project, it is best to have some early deliveries, but these need to be simple to accomplish, engage the whole team, and contribute to the broader mission or vision of the project.
This aligns well with the fact that big projects perform best when they have an early adaptive development phase. The performance-induced elevation of the level of trust transforms the complexity of working together on a big project into a strength, not a liability.
The challenge is to design the project in such a way that the opportunities to perform happen early in the project, are likely to be successful, and contribute to a bigger mission. There is a natural tendency to delay deliveries, particularly when the end goal is ambitious and the work is anticipated to be complex. This is exactly what you do not want to do.
If the project plan is already written and does not include early deliveries, do we need to rewrite it?
Kind of.
Often a big project is built around a so-called detailed plan. Whenever a larger amount of funding is made available, a detailed plan provides a sense of security to the funders, albeit a false sense.
Carve a piece out of a bigger task or deliverable and shape it into an early delivery. It may not seem exciting or special as the end goal, but achieving that and then communicating about that achievement will be a huge benefit towards building team culture.
You can use this on an individual level as well when you join a team. Come up with a simple and easy-to-achieve sub-project. Maybe it is just an outline or a set of top challenges or a worst-case scenario description.
Implementation: creating a collective team mindset.
Ultimately, you can bring all of these elements together into a team charter. A team charter can be boring and uninspiring or it can be a sort of strategy document that guides the team. It creates a collective team mindset.
A major determinant of big project success is team performance. By speeding up the process of team members becoming familiar with each other, we can do a lot to improve team performance, even if it is a team of total strangers.
Here is how to create a performance-boosting team charter.
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