Focus on the basics — the four needs of high performance team members

I interviewed someone for a job for the first time in 1998. The interviewee had a slightly unnerving habit of pecking with his whole body like an absent-minded pigeon whilst answering questions. He was clearly ill-at-ease, but I think a casual observer would have been hard pressed to tell who was more nervous.

I’d had no training in how to conduct an interview and had suffered through only a few interviews of my own. I suspect it was one of the worst interviews in the entire history of recruitment, but I got through it; I hired my first developer (although not the pigeon-pecker), and then a few more. Since then I’ve learned a great deal, through reading, management training and old-fashioned trial and error. I’ve learned more about how to coach, how to manage good and bad performance and how to structure teams themselves.

Building teams and developing people is probably where I derive the most satisfaction at work. It’s a thrill to build a software product or novel technical architecture, but the feeling of success from taking a disparate group of individuals and watching a team evolve to solve grand challenges is much more fulfilling.

Background to the four needs

Over the years, I’ve formed an opinion of the four ‘needs’ that I believe are critical to allow team members to perform at their peak. These aren’t drawn from extensive or scientific research, but simply my own experience and countless conversations with team members and peers over my career— some excited, some unhappy, some engaged and performing well, some in a long term spiral of low performance.

Although the four needs are no more than my opinion, I have been strongly influenced by real research . Two Google projects have looked deeply into this area; Project Oxygen (in 2008) investigated what makes a good manager, while Project Aristotle (in 2015) followed up by researching what makes a perfect team. I was strongly influenced by Katzenbach’s Wisdom of Teams, leaned heavily on the principles of agile, lean and particularly Toyota itself. I have also worked with elements of team and individual personality assessments like Belbin and Hogan, implemented a performance management structure similar to that developed at Atlassian, and a team structure similar to that at Spotify. So, it’s not all just made up for a blog post…

My reason for writing is to share my view of the four needs required by individuals to not only to perform well, but also to maintain high performance. This individual performance then translates into exceptional team performance.

The Four Needs of Individuals at Work

People need to feel useful
People need to keep learning
People need to feel respected
People need to understand both what to work on, and why.

People need to feel useful

Without question, the worst jobs that I have had are not the filthy, dirty, smelly low-paid ones (and one of my jobs was stomping around in a skip to squash food waste until the rats jumped out). The most demoralizing, unsatisfying jobs have been sat in a warm office, in a comfortable seat with nothing to do except look busy*.

The basic level: Have enough work to do

While it’s important to make sure that there is a good flow of challenging work, this basic state can be improved. Instead of simply being genuinely busy with valuable work, the happiest staff are working hard at something that they believe harnesses their best talents.

Some, but not all, people want to believe that they are better at the job than other people around them (a truth that’s harnessed in any sales leaderboard). But for most people, a sense that they are contributing from their best skills is a significant motivator.

The advanced level: Do something that you’re genuinely good at, and has an obvious contribution

In a team, the leader’s job is to ensure that members are busy and contributing, ideally with their best skills. While people may tolerate picking up work around them, true motivation and engagement comes when people feel that they are contributing to something meaningful, and using their best skills to do so.

In conversation with people in performance reviews and at interview, I’m always keen to understand what they love doing. I’ll often acknowledge that there is considerable scope in the role, but try and understand where the passion lies — for instance, a developer has a lot of different day-to-day tasks, but may love spending time eking out the most performance from a piece of code. The next developer in line may love exploratory testing, while a third may have a secret passion for writing documentation.

These conversations give a glimpse into the skills that those people value about themselves. Where you can focus team members on using skills that they are both good at and enjoy doing, you have an ideal opportunity for productivity.

People need to keep learning

The long serving high performers I’ve had the privilege of working with have one thing in common — they are never satisfied. They all want to do more and to know more, seeking out novel situations and opportunities to learn wherever they can.

In one team, we started to offer a new learning tool, Pluralsight. This online tool provides a wealth of courses for developers, and also a good set of usage analytics for managers. In reviewing the reports of usage it was perhaps unsurprising that those with the most consistently high performance were also the same people who consumed the most hours of learning. I don’t have the data to say whether this is causation or just correlation, but correlation it was — high performers tended to more actively seek learning opportunities.

This is also reflected when hiring talented people. I spent many years not recruiting for a big brand name — we weren’t Amazon or Microsoft, but we did successfully win staff from those brands. Part of the ‘pitch’ in the interview was always about the strength of our learning culture — 20% time, hack days, project opportunities and the strength of the mentoring they would receive from the team around them.

Toyota embed this focus on learning deeply in their culture as one of their core principles:

Principle 14. Become a learning organization through relentless reflection (hansei) and continuous improvement (kaizen).

Such is the importance of learning to Toyota’s success, that Jeffrey Liker wrote, “Toyota has raised continuous improvement and employee involvement to a unique level, creating one of the few examples of a genuine learning enterprise in human history”.

Toyota’s culture aside, recent Gallup research of 1,700 US workers found that for all generations, and especially millennials, over 40% of respondents believed that ‘the opportunity to learn and grow’ was ‘extremely important’

On an individual level, team members are more likely to join a company if there are learning benefits, become more valuable within the organisation if good learning opportunities are provided, and are more likely to be remain with the company if their learning is consistent. It’s a win all round.

People need to feel respected

Several years ago, I heard a television psychologist giving relationship advice to a troubled couple, and the message stuck with me. The counselor suggested that the most worrying behaviour that he observed in couples therapy was contempt or condescension between partners. It turns out that he was referring to one of Dr John Gottman’s ‘four horsemen’.

Gottman’s research suggested that of all relationship dysfunctions, contempt is the number one predictor of divorce. Whilst I found this a curious nugget at the time, the jangling bell of a connection rang when Google published their work with ‘Project Aristotle’. Google’s research identified that ‘psychological safety’ was not only critical, but the most critical aspect of team performance. Team members need to believe that they can take risks, and be supported by their team. Condescension between team members is a team killer.

The most important way to demonstrate respect is to ensure that team members feel that they are listened to and that opinions are treated with equal respect regardless of tenure or hierarchy.

It’s been my experience that the most disgruntled, disengaged or downright unhappy employees also perceive (whether true or not) a lack of respect from their team or manager. Whether it be a belief that they are not listened to by peers or teams, that they have been passed over for promotion by a manager, or aren’t receiving equal credit within an organisation, a lack of respect is by far one of the biggest motivators of lost engagement and motivation.

An interesting example of the power of perceived respect.

Many people would naturally consider that salary is a significant individual motivator, however in my experience tends to feature in two particular conversations between employee and manager.

The first conversation always follows a trigger in the team member’s life — a new home, a new addition to the family, a big purchase. Suddenly, reality requires a bigger pay-cheque, and understandably so. This type of trigger event is normal and normally harmless.

The second conversation is more concerning; salary becomes a motivator where there is a perception of unfairness. A typical trigger can be the perception that a fellow team member is doing the same job but earning more. This can become particularly divisive if the antagonist is also perceived to be a poor performer. The issue here is one of fairness — and the lack of fairness directly indicates a lack of respect between company and employee.

Whether it is salary, a feud between competitive team members or a team leader who doesn’t appear to listen to her team, feeling respected is critical to individual performance.

Respect within teams and companies is a responsibility of the leadership team and of managers within the teams. It’s critical that the culture does not tolerate disrespect or inequality, but equally important that managers are well trained and supported in identifying and resolving situations which may indicate that team members are dealing with the impact of a lack of respect.

People need to understand both what to work on, and why.

At the most basic level, it’s important to explain the immediate tasks at hand, and how an individual effort contributes to the team delivery. Taking time to explain what successful completion of a task looks like is a requirement to satisfy the most basic criteria of high performance.

However, explaining short-term outcomes isn’t good enough in the long term, or in any but the most manual labour. Most of us work in environments which benefit from motivated staff and high retention rates, and in these companies it’s critical to explain not just the short term but also how they contribute to the bigger, strategic picture.

This can be approached in two ways — first, take time to explain the company strategy and how team and individual work contributes to the overall company success. Second, take time to explain not just the what, and the how but critically the ‘why’.

A question I often put to members of new teams that I work with, especially those that may not be performing at their optimal level, is whether they know why they have been asked to do something. In my experience it has been almost universally true that teams who are struggling to perform are rarely able to answer this question effectively. Conversely, the few times that the question has been answered meaningfully have been when talking to happy, motivated and productive teams.

Commander’s Intent

One of the most powerful tools that I have come across is the concept of ‘Commander’s Intent’, an approach popularized in the military. Whilst it is important to ensure that people understand the everyday tasks that are necessary for their role, it is more important to explain at a high level what the outcome for the team is, and how individuals in the team can contribute.

In military terms, the commander’s intent should not be to take a specific hill, but rather to afford a strategic view of an impending conflict. By understanding the intent (provide reconnaissance), rather than just the tactic (take the hill), the squad can make informed and creative decisions if things don’t go to plan.

As a more common workplace example, it may be critical to hit a team project deadline. Rather than attempting to micro-manage the tasks of the team members for them, a team leader should bring the team together and explain both the impact of success (hitting an important client deadline for a pilot project to go-live) and the overall elements needed for success (creating documentation, sending out communications, finishing bug testing). Trust that the team know their individual responsibilities, but seek commitment from the team to achieve the overall objective.

Simon Sinek’s famous TED talk has taught many of us the importance of ‘why’ for our company strategy. On a personal level, people need to know what the mission is and why the commander wants to achieve it. ‘Why’ allows us to feel part of a bigger picture and a greater good, whilst also giving us the flexibility to react creatively when things fail to go to plan, which, let’s face it, is most of the time.

The wrap up

I’m not sure — because I don’t have the data — if these really are the most important four needs of individual team members. But what I do know is that over and over again these have been the core of conversations with unhappy employees or the reasons for the success of happy and productive ones.

It may not be scientific, but I can guarantee that ensuring that your team feel useful, keep learning, feel respected and understand both what to work on, and why, they will be categorically more awesome than the rest.

Footnote

In a future post, I’ll follow up with Anti-patterns (or the dysfunctions to look for in teams), and a discussion of the tools I use to try and make sure that these needs are met.

This was also the job where one of my key tasks was to choose which coffee machine to buy…