Category: Productivity

Building a high-performance team

This month, I got my hands on a copy of Amp it up by Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake. The book is a follow up to his LinkedIn post with the same title. It was one of those articles, I shared with my team as soon as I read it. Based on the book, I created a small manifesto for high-performance teams in the modern workplace.

Raise the bar

How you do anything is how you do everything. Whether you are building a product or cleaning your desk, do it to the best of your abilities. Hold yourself to the highest standards and take pride in your work.

The easiest way to get an item checked off your list is to lower the standard. This gets easier especially for tasks where there is no supervision.

There is a famous story about how Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple got his first lesson on raising the bar and caring deeply about ones work. Jobs was once helping his father build a fence around their family home in Mountain View. While working, his father, Paul shared a piece of advice with Jobs: “You’ve got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence, even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.”

There is a simple question you can ask to help your team raise the bar in everything they do. Whenever someone presents you with a proposal, note, feature etc ask them what they think instead of telling them what you think. If It is nothing short of ‘100% love it’ then everyone knows the bar is not being met.

Align everyone

For a boat to reach its destination, everyone should row in the same direction. This happens when everyone in the team is aligned with the same goals and vision. In misaligned teams, people start rowing in all directions. They will invent new personal metrics, side quests and optimise for those.

The easiest way to align everyone to the mission is to set OKRs at the start of a quarter. This is even better if the OKR setting is undertaken as a company-wide activity and not just at the leadership level.

Sharpen your focus

“Priority” should ideally only be used as a singular word. The moment you have many priorities, you actually have none.

There are 24 hours in a day and there is only so much you can do in this time. A team that tries to do everything they can think about or get their hands on will probably do none of it exceptionally well. If you want to raise the bar, sharpen your focus and work on fewer things at a time. Constantly re-evaluate your priorities and when a new task pops up, ask about the consequences of not doing it.

Have the same focus and clarity while you communicate the priorities to your team. Distil things down to their essentials and be crystal clear. Vagueness has a tendency to multiply as it moves down the org tree.

Pick up the pace

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Leaders in an organisation set the pace. When someone tells you they will get back by next week, ask them, why not tomorrow? This is a mindset change and once it happens the team gets an infusion of energy and urgency. Top performers crave such a culture. Every now and then, apply pressure to move things along.

There is a great article by Ben Horowitz titled Do you feel pressure or do you apply pressure. Give it a read.

Continuous growth

“To stand still is to fall behind.” Mark Twain

In the modern workplace, the fastest way to fall behind is to stand still. Things change on a daily basis. Just take a look at the tools, systems and processes you are using today compared to two years back. There is a simple test to check whether you are falling behind. Ask yourself, “am I doing the same things I was doing a year back at work”. If the answer is yes, then you are falling behind

Learn, constantly reinvent yourself and move forward in both work and life.

The Excellence Mindset

“I wish I could clone this person.”

If you have ever built a team, this thought would have crossed your mind at least once.

Most teams have that one superstar – a bar raiser who excels in her work and sets standards for the whole team. The rest fall somewhere in the spectrum between excellent to average. How you wish you could fill your team with Superstars. Well, building a team is filled with compromises – budgets, timelines and more often than not you end up with people who are excellent in some aspects while just average in others. Is there a way for you to make them go from average to excellent in all aspects? Can excellence be taught? Is it something that comes naturally? Can you find some common principles for having an excellence mindset?

Here are some of the common traits I came across people with an Excellence Mindset.

Care Deeply

People with an excellence mindset care deeply about their work. In fact, they care deeply about everything they do. Even, when no one is watching. There is a famous paragraph in Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.

‘You gotta make the back of the fence — that nobody will see —  just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you’re dedicated to making something perfect.’ Paul Jobs to his son, Steve Jobs.

Apple Mac Pro Internals
Apple Mac Pro Internals. Apple is known for creating beautiful products. Their beauty also extends to the internal parts of the product which rarely few customers ever see.

 

Think Different

Thinking and acting like everyone else is the shortest path to mediocrity. Whenever you come across a problem, here are a few questions to force yourself to think different.

  • Can I fundamentally rethink this? First Principles thinking
  • What can I do to make this better?
  • Think backwards. Think about the end goal and chart a path back to your starting point.
  • Invert. Always invert.
  • Remove components. Strip down everything and rebuild
The Sextant SM31 Shaver (1962). When the Sextant SM31 shaver hit the markets, it was unlike any other shavers that came before it.

 

Push Limits

When you have an excellence mindset you try to push the limits in everything you do. Even things as simple as optimising your daily schedule by 1%. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to keep pushing the limits

  • Can we improve this? Even if it is just by 1%?
  • Can we improve this even if no one will notice the difference
Evolution of Dyson Digital Motor. The latest Dyson Digital Motor is half the size of its predecessor and twice the efficiency

Attention to Detail

Measure twice, cut once

Perhaps the hardest but the most trainable quality in Excellence Mindset is ‘Attention to Detail’. Attention to Detail simply translates to being more precise in your work and being less shoddy. You can get 90% of the way there by simply checking your work once before sending it across. If you are a writer, careless mistakes, typos, grammatical errors, alignment issues are some of the most basic things you can catch in one round of revisions.

Consistency

80% of success is just showing up

We all have come across one-hit-wonders and people whose performance fluctuates between highs and lows. To be truly excellent, you need to be able to repeat your performance every single time. If anything it needs to become better each time.

There is a quote by Woody Allen that says “80% of success is just showing up”. Consistently showing up every day. following through on plans and making progress every day are the easiest ways to cultivate an excellence mindset.

Deep Expertise & Range

Excellence cannot be achieved by dabbling in things. It requires time, patience, effort and the will to go in-depth to gain deep expertise in an area. Expertise cannot be created over weeks or months, It takes years of work, one day at a time. Often people with deep expertise in an area gain it at the expense of something else. You must have come across lone geniuses and solo warriors who are really good at one thing but basically suck at everything else. If you really want to cultivate an excellence mindset it will serve you well to gain exposure to things outside your area of expertise. It is when you develop this sort of a range that you can truly push the limits of your expertise by bringing in newer perspectives to your area of expertise.

Tenets of professionalism

Over the last 12 years, I have worked with hundreds of people. Here are some of the top traits I have seen in people that are true professionals.

Tenets of professionalism

  1. Professionals take ownership of their work. Whether they are serving their notice period in an organisation or just starting out they take complete ownership of their work.
  2. Professionals have a clear definition of ‘Done’. Even in multi-team tasks, they don’t sit back once their part is done. They ensure that teams down the line don’t drop the ball
  3. Professionals believe in how you do anything is how you do everything. Not everything you do at work will be seen by others. However, a true professional does everything with the same diligence no matter how big or small the task.
  4. Professionals have a razor-sharp focus on attention to detail. Lack of time, bandwidth etc are never reasons for a professional to do shoddy work. They check and recheck everything they work on for the smallest of errors. As a result their work never requires someone else to do a QC before release.
  5. Professionals don’t leave a mess behind. Like a Masterchef who doesn’t leave behind a dirty kitchen or a developer who writes readable, well-commented code, a true professional always delivers tip-top work without leaving a mess behind.
  6. Professionals are punctual. They set reasonable deadlines and always stick to them. They don’t forget appointments or give last-minute excuses.
  7. Professionals are consistent. Professionalism is not an option. It is not a choice where you can pick the dates or tasks to be a professional at.
  8. Professionals don’t whine and crib. They are solution seekers. They solve problems and don’t complain about what is wrong with the rest of the world.
  9. Professionals take initiative. They don’t wait for others to roll out the red carpet. Above all, they fix issues they come across even if it is outside their circle of concern.
  10. Professionals love what they do and Inspire others with their work.
  11. Professionals are technically sound and know the nuts and bolts of their discipline. They are always working on their craft and becoming better each day.
  12. Professionals are transparent in their dealings. They never hide information, mislead or use information asymmetry as a source of power.
  13. Professionals are respectful and humble irrespective of whether they are dealing with people above or below them in the reporting structure.

If you are interested in similar articles, here is one I wrote a while back on ‘Learning from my life’

Making progress through continuous improvement and step changes

“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.” ~ Charlie Munger

This quote by Charlie Munger embodies one of the principles I try to follow in life, which is to get a little better everyday. Progress is vital in any aspect of your life be it professional or personal. Some times progress is made through continuous improvements and other times by adopting radical step changes. The journey of continuous improvement is like a marathon and radical step changes are like 100m sprints.

One thing I have come to realise is that life is a long marathon interspersed with many short sprints. It pays to be aware of which method to use to make progress in any aspect of life. But first let’s try to understand what works for and against each of these methods.

Continuous improvement is unsexy

Simply because there is little to show immediately for the effort whereas step change gives you the bragging rights. There are no pivotal moments or momentum shifting events when it comes to continuous improvement. Step changes gives you a pivotal moment..like BC/AD…the time before the change and after the change. It makes it easier to anchor your conversations around the event.

Sprint vs Marathon

Continuous improvement is all about the daily grind. You have to summon the energy to do things every day even when the results don’t tell the story. A step change is more like a rallying cry for the leader to pull his team around and lead the charge. It’s like a sprint where you have to spend your energy in a short bust.

Agility

Continuous improvement works like mini loops or cycles where you make a change, observe the feedback and slowly progress to the next loop. This makes it difficult to make any large direction change whereas step changes by nature are suitable for making quick direction changes. Because of this with step changes you get the agility and flexibility to explore more opportunities.

Silent Compounding vs Radical Innovation

Continuous improvement is like compounding. It happens silently in the background. No one notices it daily. Step changes however are different. They stir things up. People take notice. Books and case studies are written about it and business legends are created.

Choosing between Continuous Improvement and Step Change

When you have a long term horizon continuous improvement is a better method as the benefits compound over a period of time without disrupting. Step changes are a bit disruptive, so whenever you adopt a step change in one aspect of your life more often than not some other thing breaks or suffers. So for long term horizon things like health, relationships, learning etc a continuous improvement strategy helps.

Instead of deciding to wake up at 5AM, hit the gym 7 days and go on a diet in one go to loose 8kgs in 8 weeks. Expand your time horizon, think of it as a lifelong marathon and not an 8 week sprint. If you wake up at 8, may be start waking up an hour early first. If you haven’t set foot in a gym ever, may be start going on alternate days first. Instead of going in to a calorie deficit diet from Day 1, may be reduce the portions and avoid soft drinks first. This way while you are trying to get healthy the other aspects of your life like work, relationships etc can go on smoothly instead of being sapped out of energy by putting it all on getting healthy.

Step changes can be useful in getting things accomplished where the time horizon is short. Want to set up a new home office or tidy up your room? Want to clean up your code base or hire a new team, in such cases step changes help so that the real work can start.

Tips & Tricks

Here are some tips and tricks before we wind this down

  • If you need to radically improve an aspect of your life, start with a step change upfront
  • Follow a step change with a calm period. This allows you to get used to the new normal
  • Run multiple experiments before committing to a new direction and then aim to become a little better everyday
  • Monitor progress daily and avoid the temptation of churning things up every day
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