Building and Mobilizing High Performance Teams

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Building and MobilizingHigh Performance Teams

• Steve Hummel

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Building and Mobilizing Teams

• Attracting and interviewing powerful talent
• Landing the candidate
• Positioning the team for success
• Motivating high performance
• Keeping them committed
• Best practices
• Summary Discussion

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Attracting Powerful Talent

• Specify the ambition you need to fill the role
• Seek top 10 performers with a proven history of
  producing results
• Know what you want, but be open to something
  different
• Dont rely on the HR or hiring manager
• Carefully craft a job description
• Brand your company
• Use a recruiter they are the experts

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Interviewing Powerful Talent

• Share your passion
• Be a positive possibility in their future
• Use patient listening, encourage dead air
• Leverage thoughtful questioning
• Probe for character, humility, accountability
• Find out if they realize how much they dont know
• Give them permission to interview you
• Understand that this initial interface will start
  to define your future working relationship

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Hiring Decisions

• Include your team in the discussion
• Have a conversation with all references
• Always sleep on a hiring decision
• Know when to draw the line
• Follow the No Asshole Rule
• Dont let the candidate control the process

The No Asshole Rule Building a Civilized
Workplace and Surviving One That Isnt, by
Robert Sutton, Harvard Business Review and Warner
Business Books
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Building and Mobilizing Teams

• Attracting and interviewing powerful talent
• Landing the candidate
• Positioning the team for success
• Motivating high performance
• Keeping them committed
• Some best practices
• Summary

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Landing the Candidate

• Be a positive possibility in their future
• Explore your mutual ambitions, and highlight what
  resonates between you
• Be authentic
• Set clear expectations for the role
• Dont promise what you cant deliver

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Building and Mobilizing Teams

• Attracting and interviewing powerful talent
• Landing the candidate
• Positioning the team for success
• Motivating high performance
• Keeping them committed
• Some best practices
• Summary

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Positioning for Success

• Expect excellence of yourself, and of your team
• Live up to the obligations of your role first
• Situate your team with the necessary tools and
  environments to do great work
• Articulate and communicate thoughtful, clear
  goals and objectives for the entire team
• Sense and rapidly address issues with
  coordination and cooperation
• Engineering Goals and Objectives v3.4.doc

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Building and Mobilizing Teams

• Attracting and interviewing powerful talent
• Landing the candidate
• Positioning the team for success
• Motivating high performance
• Keeping them committed
• Some best practices
• Summary

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Motivating High Performance

• Connect them to their ambition and their
  obligations
• Set the tone by filling your role first
• Encourage leadership and contribution at all
  levels
• Lead by example by continually being the best
  student and best listener on the team
• Contribute to your team powerfully and often
• Keep them connected to the positive possibilities
  in your mutual success
• Lead the A players, coach the B players if they
  are inspired, marginalize the C players

You Dont Need A Title To Be A Leader, by
Mark Sanborn, Doubleday Press
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Promote Clear Communications

• Build a culture of effective communications
• Define effective as producing the desired
  action, not but I sent them an email.
• Encourage the order
• Face to face, then phone, then email
• Build the practice of making clear, explicit
  requests
• Set a culture of documenting assumptions,
  directions and conclusions as a team

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Work To Build Trust

• Hard to build, easy to damage
• Build a culture where trust is not entitled, but
  earned
• Is not granted by title, age or experience
• Earn their trust in you first
• Respect chain of command dont undermine your
  leaders
• Deliver, deliver, deliver

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Building and Mobilizing Teams

• Attracting and interviewing powerful talent
• Landing the candidate
• Positioning the team for success
• Motivating high performance
• Keeping them committed
• Some best practices
• Summary

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Keeping Them Committed

• Invest in building their career toolbox
• Coaching, skill building, experiences,
  cross-training
• Partner and mentor
• Fight for their success
• Hold everyone accountable
• Address weak or problem performers early
• Look for windows of opportunity to offer
  inspiration, praise or encouragement

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Define Effective Action

• Effective Action is producing the result, not
  doing things
• Movement is not action
• Clearly specify what results you are after
• Do not tolerate mediocrity
• Set standards of performance
• First, hold yourself to those standards
• Second, hold your team to the same standards
• Third, produce positive and negative consequences

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Be Human

• Understand that Life Happens
• Be approachable, be compassionate
• Offer PTO flexibility where it helps
• Share who you are, your motivations, your
  concerns
• Admit when you make mistakes
• Share that you hold yourself to a high standard,
  and so should they

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Building and Mobilizing Teams

• Attracting and interviewing powerful talent
• Landing the candidate
• Positioning the team for success
• Motivating high performance
• Keeping them committed
• Some best practices
• Summary

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Best Practices

• Listen
• Expect failure
• Promote cycles of learning as positive and
  welcome events, where missteps become
  opportunities for improvement
• 360 degree reviews
• Stick to performance review dates - it
  communicates that they are an important and
  valuable individual on your team

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Best Practices

• Take time to find out what motivates them
• Set a culture of humility
• Keep people in their roles
• Create time for play, for reflection, for
  creativity, for self-care
• Say thanks a lot

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Example of Mtg Ground Rules

• This is not a meeting where we engineer,
  pontificate, design by committee, waste the
  rooms time or chat about woulda-coulda-shoulda
• Stay in your role
• Be crisp communicate the decisions that you own
  and ground those decisions with data
• Where there are gaps, commit to a completion date
• Mind the moderator
• Well use the Parking Lot where appropriate
• Capture your actions and be proactive about
  fulfilling

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Summary

• Pay attention to yourself first
• filling your role
• holding yourself accountable
• delivering effective action
• Be a positive possibility in their future
• Earn trust and obligation
• Manage to the A players
• Fulfill your mutual ambitions