Key Philosophies to build High Performance Teams (Evolving, dynamic doc with continuous updates)

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Key Philosophies to build High Performance Teams (Evolving, dynamic doc with continuous updates)
Photo by Alain Gehri / Unsplash

These are few of the key philosophies that have helped me build high performance teams across multiple Series A to Series E funded setups. Generally, the mandates have been to progressive take the firms to next levels, in terms of team sizes, operational structure & business metrics.

These are impeccably applicable to Product - Technology teams, as that has been my core operational domain, however from a first principles perspective, these would definitely unlock a similar value in any other knowledge intensive domain as well.

  • Good Team + Great Culture = Great Product + Great User Experience (there is no other combination that drives the same result, for example, it cannot be Great Team & Good Culture, cos people have to stick together over longer time, translating their strengths to impact)
  • High Performance Teams = High Trust + Empowerment + Transparency + Ownership & Accountability + Collaborative Leadership + Psychological Safety
  • Culture you want to have = Recognizing (+ rewarding/incentivizing) & celebrating the key behaviors that would drive business outcomes, and align with core philosophy - Unwanted behaviors that getting tolerated/non-penalized/ignored
  • Execution, Constant Communication, First principles thinking & aligning to Why are key constructs to creating High Performance & sustainable value
  • Effectiveness > Efficiency, effectively, it is Doing right things > Doing things right
  • Speed of execution >= Speed of Decision Making >= Speed of Collaboration >= Speed of Experimentation, especially during growth & scale-up phases
  • Culture = High Performance + High Work Satisfaction + Trust + Transparency + Empowerment + Capability Growth (Yes, Culture eats Strategy for breakfast)
  • Alignment = OKR, different from Performance Reviews & Evaluation
  • Experimentation & New learnings > Status Quo; Making Mistakes > Not trying new things;
  • For driving Change management, starting with Why, Upside for everybody in the system, hand holding + micro pilots, recognizing the champions & micro pilots, scaleups
  • RnR = Recognize Critical Behaviors Champions (Critical behaviors are basically key behaviors that are directly attributable to business outcomes and core philosophy of the organization) continuously, Recognize Teams with High Performance, Reward High Performances of teams/members with direct impact on business metrics
  • To ensure high growth setups are continuously creating value, % of roles directly accountable for Revenue/Customer metrics v/s. % of roles accountable for Non - Revenue / Customer metrics, ideally, anything better that 3:1 should be a good value creating setup
  • High growth setups (generally startups with high traction) must keep incentivizing the 0-1, irrespective of the scale they achieve. That would keep the innovation curve ongoing, keeping internal creator ecosystem on the roll. Creation is the core dna of startup & the dna must not change irrespective of the scale or success of setup. The number of people it takes to do 0 - 1 & the time are critical parameters of ongoing success in any given system
  • Uncorporatization with practices & policies to ensure speed of execution remains similar across the growth stages
  • Capability - Impact yield in engineering - product - product design can be as high as 10 - 20x, levering this to reality is a huge game-changer.