Want High Performance? Have the Village Idiot Run Your Team!
I often hear that building a high performance team is really pretty simple. All you need to do is get the best person, for example the best engineer, and put him in charge of a team of strong engineers. Once you do that, that’s enough, right? The fact is, when you can build a team like that, it doesn’t take all that long to move from a team that’s operating at, let’s say, a “1” to one that’s operating at a “10.” Don’t get me wrong; moving from a 1 to a 10 is pretty good.
The problem is, they could be at 100. That’s a pretty sizable difference; it’s certainly a lot better than Spinal Tap’s famous “but it goes to 11.”
Unfortunately, scarcely one team in five will ever reach 100. Most teams barely make it much past that 10. Why? Because they aren’t putting the village idiot in charge of the team.
Village idiot? That’s an error, right? Well, not really. It may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.
One of the most interesting, and powerful, aspects of high performance teams is the degree to which members argue with one another. The fact is, members of high performance teams are really good at arguing; it’s one of the things that they do best. Part of why they’re so good at it is that while members of high performance teams like to be right, they don’t need to be right. Thus, team members are able to argue, evaluate, make a decision, and then all get behind that decision. Learning to do this is why you need the village idiot.
When the best engineer is running the team, particularly if she is also doing engineering at the same time, there’s a problem. It’s very hard to turn against your own solution. The stories I hear from different people are all oddly similar: at first, it’s great being on a team run by the expert engineer. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to being on that team run by the person who was always yelling about milestones and who didn’t understand anything about engineering. And there’s a real element of truth here: being on a team run by a bookkeeper isn’t necessarily much fun. But sooner or later, and it’s usually sooner, the people on that team run by the expert engineer find themselves increasingly frustrated: he always knows the “right” way, and it’s always his way; She’s doing the most interesting work because it’s “her” idea; No matter how much we discuss it, he always finds a way to prove that his solution is best; I never know when she’s going to jump in to “save the day,” whether or not the day actually needs saving.
The issue here is that an engineer succeeds by being an excellent individual contributor. A manager, however, succeeds by making the people who report to him excellent. It’s hard to be an excellent individual contributor and also make everyone else excellent as well. It’s hard to let someone else be right when that means you might be wrong. Are there people who can do it? Yes, of course. How many? A small fraction of those who believe they can do it. But when companies insist that’s the best way to run a team, what they are really doing is saying they’re happy with a 10 when they could be at 100.
The role of the leader is to build up others and to think strategically. Even if you’re running a team and not the whole company, building your team, making them excellent individually and collectively, and considering the ramifications of your work and different ways it can help company strategy is a non-trivial job. Being a really good team leader is not easy. It only looks that way, in the same sense that experts often manage to make the impossible look easy… until you try it. So what are some steps toward becoming the sort of leader who can get from 10 to 100?
- No matter how well you know the subject matter, invite ideas and suggestions from others. When you lead off with your expert opinion, you immediately anchor the team. Keep your opinion to yourself as long as possible. Help others come up with the brilliant ideas.
- Don’t make decisions based on your expertise. Help your team make decisions based on their expertise.
- Admit when you don’t know something. In fact, make a habit of being curious: “I’m not sure I understand. Could you explain it to me?” Be the village idiot.
- Lead the discussion, but don’t own the discussion. Bring others in. Help people learn to argue and don’t worry about being right. As the team gets better at arguing, rotate the job of running meetings or brainstorming sessions. Participate when someone else is running the session.
- Be predictable. As Google found when they crunched their data, boring, predictable, leaders are better than heroic leaders. Team members need to work with your strengths and your weaknesses. The more predictable your behavior, the easier it is for your team to configure itself to maximize everyone’s strengths and minimize everyone’s weaknesses.
- Find ways to build people up. Great leaders know that performance increases when you build people up, not when you tear them down. Encourage team members to do the same.
- Do steps 1-6 all the time, not just when the pressure is on. How well your team performs, particularly under pressure, depends on how effectively you built the relationships ahead of time.
Okay, so maybe the leader isn’t really the village idiot. Or perhaps they’re the sort of village idiot who knows the right questions to ask, helps their team argue effectively, somehow encourages people without threatening them or competing with them, and who manages to make everyone around them excellent. That’s not such a bad village idiot to be.
