Building a High Performance Team

By Sidsel Lindsø - CEO of ExploCrowd

Don’t you enjoy observing sports teams, when they are in the zone of ‘flow’?

You can see that they know each other so well, so they don’t even have to communicate verbally - they just make it happen. Especially the art of a team changing tires on Formula 1 cars fascinates me, because I know how much work and tireless training lies behind it, but I also see the satisfaction in their faces when they succeed. And that is a satisfaction that will last for a long time.

Watch how they have created perfection in the Ferrari Team in this short video:

We in the ExploCrowd Team have had many of those experiences over the years, not only within the team but also together with clients. It is reflected in our client feedback on projects we have completed, and as we mentioned in the first blog post on telling the story of how our leadership philosophy lies the basis for how we work, this does not happen by coincidence.

Here, we dive into how we consiously work with creating a high performance culture.

To build a High Performance Team everyone needs to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, our individual preferences in terms of work and what type of work that motivates us. That requires tools to have the discussion, and it requires the psychological safety that Google has defined as the main reason for why their teams with the highest performance did so well. 

Training like a sports team is our strategy, and in our early years we completed a number of comprehensive regional integrated studies. In principle, we trained like a sports team, learned about each other’s preferences and strengths, tested ways of working and how technology could give us new opportunities. And we did it again and again and refined our ways of working every time.

Imagine a team sailing a Volvo Ocean Race yacht across the seas. With high speed and strong forces in play you know that at one point a rope will snap, something will break and the consequences will be dramatic. When it happens, the team moves as one organism because they know what to do, based on knowing each other’s strengths, and the problem is solved as efficiently as possible, to minimise the decrease in boat speed.

That’s basically how we work, and it is extremely satisfying to lean back and observe the team move as one organism, as we have in all client projects, lately.

Remove the time stealers is another very important aspect of building a high performance team, because it is how we spend time.

We have tested our individual and team performance when each team member had three, two and one different projects at the same time. Let’s just put it mildly: three different tasks caused a lot of frustration with the team members, because they saw their performance reduced significantly. To them, it felt like they were at a full stop, compared to when they only focused on one thing alone and moved fast forward. The main reason is that according to their experience, it takes more than half an hour to switch from one task to another and dive in deep into that. When that is the case, then think about how much time that is lost during a day? That is why we prioritise that people should focus only on one task at a time, when we have the opportunity, because this is actually one of the main secrets behind our high performance. 

Direction with the constant option to tack for the better wind is important too. Needless to say, everyone in a team needs to go in the same direction, understand the playing field and the game plan in order to move somewhere.

However, with full transparency throughout an organisation, when there is efficient sharing of relevant information and everyone has full insight at all levels, the communication necessary is minimal.

This enables us to move fast when opportunities arise, as we explained about here.

Continuous improvement of performance

Some members of our team are quite passionate about avoiding what we call ‘stupid work’ or ‘repeat work’, which I see as one of our strengths. The reason is that the passion often leads to testing new solutions: “Hi Sidsel, I’ll just test if I can do this in a smarter way”. We have found that in more than 80% of the cases where something new was tested, it led to new opportunities and/or speed - which to us is higher performance.

Including partners and clients in a High Performance culture, is that realistic? Of course! We do it on a daily basis. It is usually our team that run the client projects, so experts and partner companies are almost always included and jump on the running train most naturally. We need to get to know each other first, but when people have worked together on comprehensive scientific studies for a while, then we all know each other well. This means strengths and weaknesses, the preferred way of working and knowing if we can count on each other.

The result of implementing a High Performance Culture

It is not necessarily something that we recognise internally on a daily basis, except for those occasions when I am bursting with pride, but it is especially in the interface with the clients that it becomes clear what it means to have built a culture like this.

“I am very pleased with how smooth this work went and the good flow of communication between us. You did exactly what I needed: somebody who makes my life easier and takes full responsibility for a product without a need for constant supervision. 

I can assure you that while such a working attitude may seem normal to you, it is not very common.”

Geologist from international major Exploration & Production Company