Measuring and Enabling Team Effectiveness with Simon Noone
- Sydney Lego
- Aug 8, 2024
- 6 min read
September 12th, 2023
Q: You've had a real focus on team effectiveness, but yeah, my question is, are you looking beyond that and do you have an aspiration to look at more sort of value stream and more sort of ecosystem effectiveness?
A: Yeah, it's a really good question and we deliberately focused on naming around team effectiveness, because for the teams to be effective, the organisation needs to become effective.
So what we wanted to do was rather than it be a top-down, these are the things that we're going to do to improve because that's what a lot of organisations do. We'll do, you know, this is the transformation agenda that we're going to come up with, and we will then do that. We felt that there was power and it's, it's yet to play out, but we felt that there was power in enabling the teams to have more of a voice to say, no, these are the things that are slowing us down, and giving them the platform to create more transparency, whether or not everyone always listens and inspects off the back of it, but the framing was there for that to happen, and it might lead to.
You know, value streams to think about might lead to how we improve the technical capabilities of the organisation because that slows us down.
Q: So did you have to make changes as to how teams were incentivized?
A: Yes. In the sense, I mentioned this organisation had performance management. Which was culturally interwoven in their DNA. So it was something that was in that organisation's DNA. But what I observed was the conversations in there seemed to be suboptimal. It seems to be that people were using quite subjective opinions.
Hey, this has happened. It was really good. Yeah, but what do you mean by good? How do you measure good? And maybe somebody whose lead has got a bit more weight in the room has a little bit more influence on where that person ends up in a nine-box or whatever it might be. So by changing the language a little bit, we gave people a nice thing.
You're writing your end-of-year appraisal. How have you added value this year? Well, we identified that you know, lead time, time to value was x days, And we ran some experiments through the year. And what we were able to do was we were able to improve our system. Automating tests upskilling the team or cross-skilling by reducing whatever it may be.
And what we were able to do was enable greater value through, through the book, reduce time to value, improve engagement, get the, uh, get the sponsors a bit happier because they've met their goals, and all of a sudden it was like, wow, you've done a good job. Like I can, I can see exactly what's going on there.
So yeah, in, in that sense was, was what we did from a, from a Or what we tried to encourage.
Q: So was there much resistance?
A: Okay. Yeah, yes, there is always resistance to this thing. I used to love having a lot more hair, a good few years ago, and I don't know if you noticed, it's a bit grey around the sides though. So, yes. There's resistance to this type of thing, and the way to, or the, the tactic that I use for this, and to be honest with you, it's the, it's the most effective way that I've found to work is, work out who your allies are, sorry, the dog's going into one second.
Yeah, so we're coming to your allies in the organisation and partnering with them. So I partnered with the head of product. I partnered with the head of engineering, and I was able to use their influence to influence. The peers, which then didn't remove the resistance, but what it did do was it lessened some of that resistance to change the other part that helped was hopefully it came through.
It was a relatively simple proposal and it was aligned to things that people already understood to a degree, things like the Tuckman model, we could have created something new for the teams. But we recognize that trying to create something simple was important in getting over some of that resistance, you know, things like relearning new concepts and all of that kind of stuff.
Q: My question would be around how much have you seen in terms of sharing teams who were going through this journey with other teams? And what was the form of sharing if it was happening?
A: So yes, the internal community of practice amplifies learning. So we encouraged people to experiment, we encouraged people to make those experiments visible, and then we encouraged people to play back some of the things that they were, they were seeing.
So yeah, the internal community of practice was an awesome, you know, thing for that. And the other thing, some of the leaders that nodded and agreed and said, yes, I'll help lead this through. The community of practice was another vehicle to help keep it as something that mattered and was important.
Some of the leaders were amazing and stepped up and helped to lead the change through. And that was fantastic. That's what's needed. But in the absence of some of that community, as a practice can play, it can play a really important role. And the other tip, a bit of a ninja move with a community as a practice, have a look at who your sponsors are for your community of practice as well.
If you can get it. the right folks sponsoring that, that can create a little bit of a movement in there as well.
Q: How did you go about increasing the engagement on the team, and how did you measure it?
A: So the simple explanation for this one is the measurement we used in an internal survey. So it was an all-associate survey and it was based on several different questions and then it came up with an index score.
So what we wanted to do was because that was the. The data point that allowed us access to all of the associates in the organisation, we wanted to leverage that.
So that was how we measured it in terms of how we went about increasing the engagement. It was more about how the teams go about increasing the engagement. Because what we wanted the teams to do was say, Hey, this is where our engagement scores are. Why is that? Let's reflect on it. Why, why are the engagement scores where they are?
And if we wanted to move more towards the aspirational target of performing, what would that look like in terms of some of the better ways of working possibly? So we wanted to put the power in the hands of the folks in the teams to own their continuous improvement, but not forgo the role of leaders.
Because as I was talking, when Anne asked that question, some of this was systemic. So if the teams wanted more autonomy, how did we do that? Did we remove dependencies and things like that? That's maybe a structural thing that leaders need to help with. However, the idea was that through self-assessment and teams having the opportunity to make these things visible, more transparency enabled better inspection.
Q: How to measure metrics like enablement and engagement and enablement?
A: Similar, similar points. So we had an internal survey for that, whether or not your organisations have that and whether or not it's the best measure, it might be that there are other ways to measure that and that's fine.
Again, this is just an example, not a blueprint. So what I'd say is have a little look around, how could you do it within your context? There are lots of things out there as well. You can search online. I know there are things like team health-type measures as well that can, and I know some teams adopt the pull checks and things like that.
