You Can’t Buy A Winning Team

I have been spending a lot of time lately looking at the internal health of my own teams. In leadership, we often fall for a very seductive myth. We believe that if we just hire the smartest people from the best universities and the best families, we will automatically have a winning team. We believe we can simply buy the winning team.

This is simply not true. You can put eleven superstars on a soccer pitch and still lose the game. High-performing teams are not a collection of individual cleverness, rather they are a science of alignment, behaviour, and collective skill.

As I look at taking over the marketing function in my business right now, I can see where the friction lies. It isn’t a lack of talent. It is a lack of clarity. To fix a team, you have to move past the resume and look at the health of the system itself.

The Four Boxes of Team Health

To evaluate a team, I use a framework of four specific categories. If even one of these boxes is empty, the organization suffers.

• Configuration: Are the roles clear? Do you have a mix of perspectives, or is everyone thinking exactly the same way? In my recent audit, I found that role clarity was the first thing to crumble.
• Alignment: Is everyone moving in the same direction? If the leader is looking north and the team is rowing south, you are just burning energy.
• Execution: How well does the team actually carry out the work? Do they meet deadlines? Are they proactive or merely reactive?
• Renewal: Does the environment allow people to thrive? You cannot expect high performance if there is no way for the team to replenish their energy.

The Three Archetypes of Performance

Once you understand the health of the team, you have to decide what kind of "race" you are actually running. Not every team should function the same way. I like to use three metaphoric configurations to help leaders visualize their structure.

• The Cycling Team: These are individuals on their own bikes. They have a collective strategy and a shared goal, but their output is based on individual power and gear.
• The Relay Team: This is a serial process. Think of a software development team. One person finishes a feature and hands the baton to the next. The hand-off is the most critical moment. If the baton drops, the race is over.
• The Rowing Team: This is total synchronization. Like a surgical team in a hospital, everyone is in the same boat working on the same patient at the exact same time. They must cross the line together or not at all.

Finding the Intrinsic Fire

People often ask me how I identify the "right" people for these seats if I am not just looking at the most clever person in the room. The answer is hunger.

I look for "intrinsic fire" rather than "extrinsic fire." Extrinsic fire is driven by money or titles. It is short-lived and flickers out when things get tough. Intrinsic fire is a desire to get better. I look for indicators like participation in sports, because sport requires the discipline to show up when you don't feel like it. I look for continuous learners who study outside of work. I look for people who give back. These are the people who will drive your business forward when the road gets rough.

The Leader’s Audit

Your team dynamic will change depending on the task at hand. Delivering an onboarding for a new client might require a relay team approach, while a crisis might require a rowing team approach.

Your job as a leader is to visualize what needs to be done and then configure the seats accordingly. Are you speeding the process up by creating clarity, or are you slowing everyone down because nobody knows which boat they are in?

Look at your people today. Are they superstars who can’t play together, or are they a hungry crew moving in total synchronization? If you want the results of a high-performing team, you have to stop hiring for resumes and start building for health.