The Four Components of High Performing Teams

Do you have a great team & a great mission but don't understand why the pace of delivery is so slow? Architecture & tech stack is only one part of the story.

I believe high performing teams need four things to be effective:

Mastery - The skills & knowledge needed to do a great job, and a clear path to get to the next level.
Autonomy - The space to figure out their own solution to a problem & how they want to work
Purpose - A clear sense of direction, and the knowledge of how what they’re working on fits into the big picture & helps their team succeed.
Safety - A team that is afraid won’t take risks or experiment, a team that is afraid of finger-pointing won’t learn from mistakes.

In this talk I explain why those four things are key to teams being successful and give examples of how I’ve turned teams around by fixing the lack of one or more of them.

Transcript

1. The four components of high performing teams
2. About Me Lisa van Gelder VP, Engineering @ @lisa_van_gelder
3. About Me
4. How do we instill a sense of urgency into the team??
5. Why is our pace of delivery so slow??
6. Debugging teams
10. • Mastery • Autonomy • Purpose • Safety
11. Mastery
12. Autonomy
13. Purpose
14. Safety
15. Measuring pace of delivery
16. Cycle time
18. Safety
19. Purpose
20. Mastery pt 1 Don’t assign stories
21. Mastery pt 2 Skills matrix
22. Levelling
23. Skills matrix
24. Change toolkit
25. Nemawashi Informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project, by talking to the people concerned, gathering support and feedback
26. Give engineers power to control change
27. Kaizens Small experiments that lead to "continual improvement “ Lean manufacturing - Toyota Way
28. Reward hard feedback
29. Admit when I’m wrong
30. End Result
32. Acme corp
33. Autonomy
34. Mastery
35. Purpose Build it & they will come?
36. Safety
37. Find the user - find the purpose
38. Mastery E2E Tests
39. Autonomy
40. End Result
43. Safety
44. Quality
45. Autonomy pt 1 Operational ownership
49. Oncall training
50. Oncall
51. Cycle time
52. Autonomy pt 2 No sub tasks
53. End Result
54. How do we instill a sense of urgency into the team??
55. What to look out for..
56. You get what you measure….
57. Safety
58. Mastery
59. Autonomy
60. Purpose
61. Questions? @lisa_van_gelder