Team Performance: 9 Questions to guide you

by Mark Loftus | May 15, 2020 | Featured, Our thinking

The high-performing, high-learning team

Where do high-performing, high-learning teams come from?

If you believe the status quo, it’s a simple question of starting with the right people, doing a bit of social ‘team building’, and then hours clocked working together… and hey presto, a High-Performing Team.

That’s what we find most team leaders do: put together or join a team, book a team-build, maybe run through a psychometric if you’re a fan of data, and then get down to business. Even if you’re holding regular retrospectives, you’ve probably found these focusing on the tasks the team performs, rather than the effectiveness of the team itself.

A simple structure for team development

In reality, team performance is a continuing journey of development. But development without structure means teams meander, struggling to turn good intentions into tangible performance improvements.

Jyre asks teams 9 straightforward questions and then provides structured pathways that help teams focus their development effort on the areas that will make most difference.

This 9 Questions model builds directly out of the 9 Character types from the Jyre framework, ensuring that individual and team development are guided by the same coherent framework.

The 9 Questions

So, we have nine straightforward questions to ask you and your team:

are we disciplined in working to improve our effectiveness and performance?
do we know where we are going and believe we are doing something meaningful?
do we know how to achieve our goals?
do we get the best from each other?
do we push through obstacles and setbacks?
do we know who to influence and how?
do we spot and capture opportunities along the way?
have we brought our purpose to life and feel motivated?
do we create and innovate?

If you have clear and positive answers to all 9 questions, and if the rest of your team and stakeholders agree with you — congratulations! You’re already a guaranteed high-performance, high-learning team. Of course, there’s plenty you can do to keep honing your edge as a team, finding ways of keeping yourselves sharp and finding routes to break-through performance.

What’s more likely, however, is that one or more areas represent gaps and that’s where the Jyre team pathways come into their own. They offer structured, self-supported development that systematically helps teams turn gaps into strengths.

Next, let’s put the different questions together.

Team disciplines

We focus teams first on the central question in the model: on team disciplines. These are disciplines that form the core of team performance and development.

The core of high performance:

Why disciplines? Quite simply, if you watch any sports team, music group, theatre group or any other performance group you will see one clear difference to most business teams. It’s that they rehearse, practice and train together so that, come their performance, they are as united and as effortless in playing together as possible.

By contrast, most teams in business and organisational life focus the vast majority of their time on performing the task at hand and very little on the disciplines of development: working at getting better at working together.

New teams

If you’re a new team, or new to team leadership, the chances are you won’t know the definitive answer to the 9 Questions yet, so we would usually recommend you focus your energies initially on the ‘foundational four’ questions:

The Foundational Four:

Exploring these questions will help you rapidly create a team that is clear what its purpose is, feels motivated to achieve its goals, has a good enough idea how to reach these goals, and has set a foundation of inclusion and valuing of each team member’s contribution.

The performing team

If you’re a team that’s been together for a while, there’s a good chance you’re already clear about your goals and what you need to do to get there. You may also be clear about each team members’ role and contribution, how the team can get the best from each other. In other words, the ‘foundational four’ questions are clear to you.

But you may feel that there’s a performance break-through your team needs to achieve, in which case the ‘central three’ questions could be just what you need.

The Performing Team:

The established team

If your team is well established and has been performing strongly for a while, it may be time to shake the team up a bit and see if it can find new opportunities, new innovations, new energy to take itself to the next level.

Re-energising the Team

Exploring these four questions will guide you as a team to find fresh energy and inspiration.

Team Effectiveness Review

A structured way to start is through the Jyre Team Effectiveness Review: it’s a quick way of getting your team’s views on the 9 Questions and serves as a diagnostic as to where your team should focus its development.

Beautiful, Critical Data

by Mark de Cates | Jan 15, 2020 | Featured, Our thinking

Beautiful data, critical to understanding people and teams

We live in a truly fascinating and complex world. People, in particular, never cease to surprise us – both in good and bad ways! At Jyre we embrace the complexity and diversity of people, and we’re naturally curious about what data can tell us about them. We can’t help but look at a network diagram of our viewpoints ‘universe’, below, without wondering what causes the patterns and trends that we can see clearly emerging before our eyes. (Click on the image to explore it in full 3D)

3D network visualisation of the Jyre Viewpoints Network. Click the image to explore in full 3D.

Beyond curiosity, there are also pressing, urgent questions that our work asks of us. Challenges that we face around performance, diversity, and growth. And often, the answers lie in our people. But figuring out the right answers as business leaders can sometimes feel like divining for water. It’s so tempting to look for clear-cut answers. But genuine data on real people is rarely clear-cut: it’s rich, nuanced, beautiful, and subtle. Trends and correlations tend to be modest. Rather than shouting at you, the data whispers. But by listening carefully, with an open mind, it can give you a significant edge. Not clear-cut answers, but a 20%, 60%, or 70% edge.

Diversity of teams

We work with a lot of teams, and naturally we get to see a great deal of diversity and richness. We see ‘teams’ which might perform better as separate cohesive sub-teams; teams oozing diversity but lacking a shared foundation; teams with a clear set of shared values but lacking resilience and diversity in an environment where it’s clearly needed. Data, whether it be a team solo or viewpoints report, a visualisation or bespoke analysis, prompts the conversation and leads to action where it’s needed.

Showing a team their ‘similarity’ network, like the one below, is truly fascinating. It’s a chance for a team to have a conversation about their specific diversity – a conversation grounded in fact. What does the structure of the team feel like? I look like an outlier; what does that mean to our team in practice? We’re thinking about hiring X; how would that look, and what would it mean for us as a team? Network diagrams like this are great for showing clusters, cohesion, diversity and outliers. Like the greatest teachers and coaches, well-presented data won’t give us easy answers, but it can prompt us to ask the powerful questions that need asking.

Network Similarity Diagram for the Jyre Team (as of 2019)

This is the ‘similarity’ network for our core team at Jyre, simply showing members who are more similar in character as closer together, and those more different as further apart. You might say that the team is grounded at one end by our key founder, Mark Loftus. But there are so-called ‘outliers’ – like Lisa and Dan, who work quite differently, with different and complementary sets of strengths. This team functions well because of that diversity. Interestingly, we have noticed that dissimilar pairs tend to work remarkably well within a team (a subject for another time)!

Organisational insight

Stepping up a level from teams to the organisation, we get a different perspective. Teams become points of reference, individuals become anonymous but crucial ‘data nodes’, and we can look at our people in a number of fresh ways. As business leaders, we can start to ask questions about the relationships between teams and, crucially, about the effectiveness of our organisation as a whole. What are our key strengths? Our gaps? The violin plot below gives an example of how we might understand our organisation’s critical ability to maintain direction, compared to another division or organisation.

Spot the difference – a violin plot comparing ‘Sets Direction’ across two organisations

The power of data

Exploring data, especially in a visual way and with an open mind, can truly open us up to insights and lead to effective action. We know that it grounds us in reality, and if we stay honest, it can give us the ‘brutal facts’ (to coin James Stockdale’s phrase) that free us to actually make the best decisions. That might mean adjusting the way you hire, re-imagining your performance review process, having fresh conversations as a team, or deciding to take your own personal growth in a new direction. At least with the right data, the power is in your hands.

Hidden secrets of the Innovator

by Alex Blanes | Sep 2, 2019 | Featured

Hidden secrets of the Innovator
Mark Loftus

Innovators: entrepreneurs taking risks, investors with confidence in their own judgement, colleagues who find the new angle. What makes them tick?

You may assume they are filled with self-confidence, but not every innovator is (or at least has not yet been recognised as) the next Jobs, Gates or Musk. They could well be quiet and unassuming, and not display their potentially explosive talent. You may sense from them underlying unease or tension, a symptom of the dark side that leads them to discovery and invention.

Whoever they are, they are in demand with the world’s business leaders. Leadership teams are learning to identify and attract them, and ensure that they arrive once they’ve been lured in.

Novelists, musicians and artists all create, but innovation goes further. It means experimentation, time-wasting, risk-taking, being prepared to search for something that may not exist… or even be possible.

Ironically, based on the reports of 15,000 Jyre users surveyed, innovators are likely to be low in self-belief. They often doubt their own work, and are constantly evaluating and dismissing their own ideas before they’re properly formed.

Their colleagues can inadvertently add to the problem by being over-critical, or fretting about potential risks and downsides too early in the piece.

Managing Innovators requires care and nurture. Some will need encouragement, to be told when to push on, and when to quit. But identifying the innovators in a company is not always straightforward. Data shows that many people whose pattern of strengths indicating a strong fit to the innovator will be invisible because of that lack of self-confidence.

What’s more, fresh ideas are fragile things: subjected to too much scrutiny too early, they will shrivel and die (unfortunately reinforcing self-doubt in the process).

To nurture the spirit of innovation, think more like a midwife than a surgeon: be encouraging and supportive, and guide when you can in what is often a messy and disruptive process.

If you are the innovator, try to find a creative mentor who is willing to support you. The most satisfying part of innovation is doing it with like-minded people, working co-operatively.