Global CEO at Havas Creative and author of bestseller No Bullsh*t Leadership.
I recently took up golf. For somebody who has played tennis since they were 9, the idea of simply hitting a ball that just lay there waiting to be struck was an enticing prospect. It transpired, however, that the sullen, alluring, static ball was the very essence of the game’s fiendishness. There is, of course, a gadget for that. These days every coach worth their salt uses a TrackMan (other equally expensive brands are available). Possessing Doppler radar technology, it tracks more than 40 different aspects of your swing and ball contact — all of which may confirm what you already knew — that you shanked it into a shrub.
A key data point it provides is how close you were to hitting your optimum shot, measured against the machine’s baseline assessment of your ability. Relative to your current skill level, did you overoptimize or underoptimize? How close were you to your personal best?
Teams work in the same way. They have a collective maximum potential: the sum of their abilities. But how often do those individuals reach their existing personal best, never mind overoptimize? I have regular conversations with leaders of teams big and small, and an inevitable gripe will be about a team member — sometimes a passing frustration, sometimes something of far greater significance. Don’t judge. It’s human nature to share our frustrations — people are complicated. That’s why leadership is inherently difficult.
A common complaint is about a person’s specific skills. “They just need to learn to be better at this.” But that’s nearly always addressing the wrong issue. Indeed, it is one of the reasons I believe that the traditional performance review achieves very little — or at least is misused and misunderstood. The issue is not whether the skills of your team can be developed — of course they can. The strategic issue for you as the leader is whether you have managed to optimize the performance of your team in its current state. In many cases where I see teams underperform, the issue is diagnosed as a skills deficit; in reality, the team’s optimum state is easily good enough to achieve all that is asked of them. So why don’t they reach it?
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Imagine your team as those 80s Top Trumps cards. A bit crass? Of course. But we do it all the time — we evaluate people against a set of semi-scientific measures. Look at your team right now. Score them — just a simple measure — out of five perhaps? Try to strip out your emotions, your own baggage. Consider them at their very best, perhaps the hopes you had on the day you hired them, or when they absolutely nailed a client presentation. Consider this their individual optimum.
What’s Your Team’s Optimum?
For a team of five, sketch it out on the back of an envelope:
William: 3.5
Meghan: 4
Harry: 3
Fergie: 4.5
Kate: 4
Total: 19/25 (76%)
So, your team’s optimum score is 76%. That’s an A or a B grade. That’s pretty good, right? If they perform at that level, they’re going to win way more than they lose.
Of course, they could do better. You could switch out Harry. You could coach and cajole William. You could train them to raise their baseline performance. All of which is sensible and professional. I know you’re also saying to yourself, “But this isn’t real.” Fergie might be a 4.5 at her best, but most of the time she’s a 2. She drives me mad. She’s always moaning about being promoted and complaining behind our backs.
But you’ve beaten me to it. Just like the golf ball that I hit sweetly out of the middle of the club, but hooked yards to the left, your team is way underoptimized.
The difference between your team’s optimum and the reality is the extent to which, like my golf swing, your team is underoptimized. A team that performs at 76% — however unscientifically measured — is probably good enough. They’re good enough to win most pitches, crack most problems and perform alongside the best.
Few leaders find themselves blessed with a team full of stellar talent. Yet great leaders lead teams that consistently outperform. Their people seem more satisfied and more productive, and they get promoted. This is because great leaders don’t obsess about the nuance of the skills of the individuals. They do matter; it’s just that from a team performance point of view, they matter way, way less than the leader’s ability to get the team to optimize its performance.
How To Optimize Your Team
Over many years of leading people, I have come to the belief that we need to ask ourselves three questions to optimize our teams:
1. Is a person operating in an environment that allows them to perform at their best?
2. Are they clear on what they are expected to do to succeed?
And only after answering these questions should we ask a third:
3. Are they good enough and/or the right person for the role?
Questions one and two should dominate all considerations of evaluating individual performance.
It is for this reason that the same person can move from team A to team B and their performance, happiness, satisfaction, etc., can dramatically change. We’ve all seen it, maybe even experienced it. It’s not the individual who has changed, but the context.
So, before you go and buy a new set of clubs, get your contact and your swing right. It’s the only guaranteed way to get your score down. And before you hire a headhunter, spend a bit of time optimizing the performance of the team you already have. Because without a relentless focus on this, no amount of reviews or new hires is going to get you where you want to go.
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Author: Chris Hirst, Forbes Councils Member