What Makes Good Teams Great

For all the years I’ve been helping teams grow, I’ve rarely met one who felt that they were exceptional. It’s one of those quirky things where, in one conversation, the leadership will proclaim how great their teams are, and the next, pull me aside and beg for help. There are always issues, so I thought I’d write about some things I’ve noticed that turn good teams into great ones.

Impact on Decisions

One thing that really helps teams reach past the work in front of them is when they can tell they have an impact on the decisions around them. This isn’t quite the same thing as having a seat at the table. It’s more like they feel their voices are heard, suggestions considered, and the resulting decisions conveyed in a way that lets them know they were taken seriously.

Sometimes, these decisions are small, like what to do with the training budget. Others can be quite large, like what technology stack or architecture to pursue. Personally, I love seeing when development teams get deeply engaged in the product work and want to offer alternatives to features and help add instrumentation to better measure impact.

How do I help make this happen? I often have to work with both the team and the leadership. Most of the time, the team doesn’t know how to communicate their ideas in a way others can easily understand. Also, leaders almost always have information that the team doesn’t. By coaching leaders to share more and teams to speak to their audience, they can partner more closely.

Sense of Team

This may seem odd, but many teams don’t feel like teams so much as work units. That is, they don’t feel any particular identity to what they’re doing and with whom they’re doing it. This differs from when folks say they like their co-workers or will miss them when they leave. I mean that they feel attached to the team and its identity.

When you move from a work unit to a real team, you see a few things happen. First, that team will fight to stay together. Oddly, they don’t often shun new people but work to bring them in. Because the team knows they’re better together, quickly incorporating someone helps. You will also see a united voice when the team wants something. They can weather rough news and situations as a group instead of a set of individuals who go in different directions. As a leader, the team becomes the unit, and it feels like you can tell them to take any hill you want, and they will.

How do you create a sense of team? Well, it isn’t easy. I like to do an intensive workshop where the team explicitly designs their team, relationships, and how they want to work through challenging situations. From there, I remind them to hold onto that new team.

Mastery

This one should seem familiar, but great teams are relentless in getting better at their craft. While it may not happen openly like in retrospectives, great teams always seek ways to make some improvement somewhere. This sense of mastery often happens without specific encouragement from leaders and will even happen if someone asks them to stop.

Why would someone ask them to stop? They are worried the team isn’t getting enough done and is wasting time. This sentiment is never informed by data.

So, this team that believes in each other and the team can have conversations and coach one another more effectively, leading to faster growth and mastery. Imagine you did a terrible job at something, and you were about to hear feedback on it. One person who gives the feedback is a co-worker, and the other is a co-worker you trust. The first set of feedback is as likely to be discarded as it is to prompt defensiveness. The second set is way more likely to cause reflection and growth.

This constant pursuit of mastery often starts slow. In a few months, teams who struggle daily will no longer fighting against the same problems. They seem unburdened, and constantly find ways to solve yesterday’s problems.

How do I foster a team’s sense of mastery? Sometimes, it involves me showing them something new. Other times, it requires breaking old patterns so new ones can emerge. My favorite, though, is when a team brings up a small issue they want to fix. I tell them to fix it and then show them how nobody got mad.

That’s not all

Of course, I only focused on three things in this article, but you’d be right to imagine more ingredients go into great teams. If you can create a sense of these things, you’ll be well on your way.