Recipe for high performing teams

Every year the National Basketball Association (NBA) turns to fans to vote for the players they think are the best in the league and should participate in the All-Star game. 

Not only do the television stations love the jump in ratings, but fans finally get the opportunity to watch their favorite players play with and against each other.

Take the 1997 NBA Eastern Conference All-Star team as an example: Penny Hardaway, Grant Hill, Michael Jordan, Dikembe Mutombo, and Scottie Pippen. These are some of the greatest basketball players to ever live and were featured on one team (granted only for a night).  

But here’s the inevitable question many like to pose: would an All-Star team actually be the best team if they played together during the regular season? 

On one hand, the level of talent on the 1997 Eastern Conference All-Star team would likely make the rest of the league obsolete. But there’s no guarantee that these players would actually play well together if they were traded to create a “super” team.

For instance, the Golden State Warriors did end up building a “super” team and won 4 out of 7 NBA championships from 2015-2022, with the likes of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala, and Draymond Green strewn across those years.  

Whereas the Brooklyn Nets tried a similar “super” team build in 2021, uniting James Harden with Kevin Durant, Ben Simmons, Kyrie Irving, and Blake Griffin. Ultimately, they had a good season but lost in the second round of the playoffs to the eventual 2021 NBA Champions: Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Milwaukee Bucks.  

This is why there is often so much struggle in building high performing teams - talent is often only a fraction of what is needed for a team to be successful.

So, what made the Golden State Warriors or Milwaukee Bucks better than the Brooklyn Nets?  In other words, what else makes up the recipe for building a high performing team outside of All-Star talent?  

Interestingly, Google took this question head on. In 2012, they launched Project Aristotle which studied hundreds of engineering, sales, and marketing teams across the company and sought to understand why some teams performed very highly and others did not.  

The constant in Google’s study, of course, was the talent of their people: Think the same caliber of people as the 1997 Eastern Conference NBA All-Stars or 2015-2022 Golden State Warriors but of the corporate tech world.  

After studying both high and low performing teams, Project Aristotle researchers concluded that what distinguished the high performing teams from the dysfunctional ones was based on how teammates treated one another, and that “understanding and influencing group norms were the keys to improving Google’s teams” as a whole. 

The right norms, in other words, “could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.” 

For instance, teams with the norm of ultra-efficiency and “going by the book” were very optimized in the sense of keeping eliminating “fluff” from meetings and generating the bare minimum and accepted outputs, but never produced results that created lasting change or positively influenced the trajectory of the organization. 

Whereas teams that had a norm of sharing about life outside of work and being vulnerable (“fluff”) created an environment where teammates felt more open to sharing and receiving feedback and throwing crazy ideas out to the group. This allowed them to produce more effective and impactful outcomes despite making it normal to spend extra minutes at the beginning or after meetings to shoot the wind (for more on vulnerability read Leaders’ Book Club post #3).  

So, Project Aristotle is a “reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.” 

Even though both the ultra-efficient group had the same level of talent as the “fluff” group, like perhaps the Brooklyn Nets did, the Golden State Warriors players were known to be very close to each other off the court and trusted each other.

Coincidence that trust between team members improves results?

Not at all. And, as such, the Google researchers were reminded of Amy Edmundson, a famous Leadership researcher at Harvard Business School, and her coining of Psychological Safety. 

Psychological Safety describes a “team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.” 

In other words, Amy Edmundson says that psychological safety is “felt permission for candor” and unlocks conversations or actions that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred.  

This is important because every time we withhold feedback or an idea, we rob ourselves of the means of an outcome that would make a lasting and positive impact on the team or organization.

So, when thinking back to the high vs. low performing teams at Google, psychological safety is what the researchers eventually concluded as the underlying determinant of team performance at the company.  

The teams that had a psychologically safe environment based on the norms set up by the team manager and individual members allowed them to have bring their full selves to work and maximize their contributions to the broader goals for their team.

Unfortunately, the Google study stops there and doesn’t shed a ton of light on how difficult building this type of psychologically safe environment can be and what actionable steps can be taken to do so.

So, where can we begin in creating this environment for our own teams?  

As a start, take what Steve Magness, author of “Do Hard Things”, draws from his breaking down of psychological safety.

He refers to psychological safety as a derivative from what University of Rochester researchers, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, call the Self-Determination Theory (SDT).

SDT breaks down psychological safety into three basic psychological needs:  

1) Autonomy - the feeling that one has choice over their actions and influence over the outcomes that affect them.

2) Competence - the experience of mastery and being effective in one’s activity or craft.

3) Relatedness - the connection to and sense of belonging with others or a wider purpose or goal.

When our social environments, such as at work or on a sports team, are more supportive of these psychological needs, the quality of our motivation is more autonomous - meaning we are more naturally motivated to succeed.  

Alternatively, when our psychological needs are not met, the quality of our motivation is more controlled. When people are more autonomously motivated, they are more likely to achieve their goals in a more impactful manner and quickly over time.

For instance, when discussing the Golden State Warriors’ success in “Do Hard Things”, Steve Magness calls out what that Steve Kerr, the Warriors’ Head Coach, did in the middle of the 2018 season.

Coach Kerr let the team run the team.  

Following a sloppy win against the Sacramento Kings shortly after the All-Star break, he turned the reigns over and let varying players take over varying coaching duties, such as running practice or video sessions.  

The autonomy Coach Kerr gave his players instilled a renewed sense of ownership and trust amongst themselves.

Simply by fulfilling their first pillar of SDT, Autonomy, the team completely changed the trajectory of the season and went on to bulldoze their way to the securing 2018 NBA Championship rings.  

So, in a practical sense, give your team the autonomy they need to solve problems themselves, lift each other up, and take ownership over the outcomes they are looking to achieve.  

Let them run team meetings, give each other feedback, allow one of them to take on a project originally assigned to you, etc. Autonomy will look different for every team, but all you must do is create this environment and occasionally change from a “leader-led team” to a “team-led team”.

As for creating a sense of Competence, fulfilling the second pillar of SDT, check in with your team during team meetings and individually every week on topics or workflows they would like more enablement on.  

Or, better yet, shadow each person for a day to do a “reverse demo” on how they approach tackling a problem or simply how they do their work day-in and day-out. Maybe you’ll learn something the whole team should adopt. 

The bottom line is if they feel they are competent enough to succeed, success will follow.  

As for ensuring Relatedness, ask the team to narrow down 3-5 core values and actions / metrics that align with those values. These will evolve and change over time, of course, but think of these core values and associated actions as norms. Hold your team accountable to norms and practice them yourself.

I’d also recommend you consistently remind your team of the “why” behind every project or ask you make of them. What is the desired outcome? What are they going to learn and how will they benefit?  

In other words, if you learned anything from Simon Sinek’s book “Start with Why”, leaders who start with the “why” never have to beg their team to buy in to the mission, they inspire them to do so.  

Furthermore, as Amy Edmundson says, it is quite clear that a “key lever leaders have for creating, supporting and sustaining psychological safety is how they design and lead their teams.” 

So, like Google found, design and lead your team with and around vulnerability. Start every 1:1 asking about life outside of work. Share equally as if you were in your team’s shoes…maybe be the one to open up first. Remove the notion of putting a “work” face on.

The suggestions can go on and on…

Nevertheless, as you deploy any strategy to fulfill your teams' psychological needs and create a safe environment, make sure you’re deliberate in everything you do as a leader.

Do a pulse check every month or so: inspect and assess the norms of your team and those that you perpetuate as a leader.  

Whether you’re the coach of an NBA basketball team or a people leader at work, if you want to create an absolute advantage (not just a competitive advantage), you need to not only influence how each member of your team works but how they work together - just like Steve Kerr.

Be the empowering coach who understands how to seed that intrinsic motivation and true confidence where your team is empowered to make their own decisions and feel like they have input into the trajectory of their career and personal endeavors. 

While hiring strong talent is a critical piece of building a high performing team, remember that talent will only get you so far. To take advantage of the talent on your team is to unlock their full selves by establishing psychological safety and letting them thrive.