May 28, 2024
How often have you heard the term 'driving high-performance' in teams?
I hear it all the time.
Using the word drive is an interesting choice. It normalises comparing a team to a car. One that the leader - being in the driver's seat - has full control of. Continuing the analogy the team is therefore a machine. A collection of mechanical objects. One that heads in the direction it's steered, at the speed determined by the driver's foot. End of story.
"What do you wanna be when you grow up one day Olivia? I wanna be a piston!" Said no kid ever.
Teams are not machines. They are a group of humans working together. Complete with emotion, imagination and the ability to reason. Despite the advances in AI in recent years - humans are still, by comparison, quite spectacular.
Why? With the right information and motivation, a team of humans can still go far beyond what any machine can do. They can over-deliver and they can innovate.
So, let’s start by ditching the first piece of BS associated with high-performance. People are not like machines, nor should they try to be.
Many employees perceive leaders as a distant character. Even more so with CEOs. They assume CEOs are very busy, but rarely know what it is they are busy with. Rather than being a distant leader, I have decided to be an intimate one.
Using the word intimacy is deliberate. The meaning in this context is being close. After our restructure last year, the top request from our team was for more transparency.
As CEO, I am privy to every success and challenge we face across the entire business. I encounter many of both every week. I know the direction we are headed. I know what we need to achieve in the short, medium and long term to succeed. I know what obstacles we may encounter. I know our strengths, and our weaknesses. And I know how we intend to react to various scenarios. Obviously, I don't know it all. But I know more than most. My vantage point updates in real-time every day.
Having that view is a privilege.
So, one of my top priorities as a CEO is to share a simple version of that view to the entire team. I do it once a month at a company wide meeting. I put effort into presenting this in a thoughtful and digestible way.
I want everyone to feel like an insider.
It's not easy to maintain candour to this degree with an entire organisation. Conversely, it's not always easy for the team to hear when things haven't gone to plan. But I have remained committed to this approach and I know the team universally appreciate it.
How often have you heard the term 'It's not personal, it's business'?
I hear that one all the time too.
For an employee, business is extremely personal. A person's livelihood, security, and happiness relies on your company's success. Pretending that it's not is utter BS.
Another way I develop intimacy is regular one-on-ones with every team member at Joyous. I do this once every three months. This is an invaluable way to create a safe space for vulnerable conversations.
Each person is unique and each conversation is different. As a result I understand and appreciate every person for who they are. And I hope the same understanding of who I am will develop in return.
Mutual empathy is a gift - over time we have built a network of empathy across the entire team.
The idea that people should operate on a 'need-to-know' basis. Yup, you guessed it - more BS.
As a CEO, every thing you say matters. Every word counts. Your words have the power to clarify, inspire and motivate teams. Your words (or lack thereof) can also confuse, discourage and demoralise them.
When it comes to ensuring teams are able to achieve goals, why is as important as what. If not more important. A lot of leaders don't spend enough time on this. Telling people what to do is easy. Getting a team to internalise why it matters is hard.
If you can do this well, then your team will understand how their actions will make an impact. This dramatically increases the likelihood of high-performance.
If they don't understand why, things can go wrong.
One of my biggest learnings is that it's not enough to explain your why's once. You need to explain many times over - ideally from different angles. Why this choice? What other choices were considered? Who was involved? What information was used? What impact will this have? What impact will not doing this have? Why now? Who will this impact? How will this impact them? It's those sweet little why's that add up to one big Aha! for the team.
There's this wonderful haiku that I really love.
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
It's written by Bashō.
He loved Kyoto, the city in Japan so much, that he wrote this poem about it. And it perfectly sums up how I feel about Joyous.
At Joyous,
feeling the struggle,
I long for Joyous.
I feel a responsibility to impart my feeling of gratitude for being part of Joyous to others.
Even if Joyous were to fail (it won't). Even if I was presented another opportunity (I have been). There's no place else I'd rather be. I cherish this moment. As if it's already past and I have the benefit of hindsight. I cherish this team that I get to work with every day. As if I already miss them. Success for Joyous is inevitable. Because this is a high-performing team that I have the privilege of supporting.
I don't want to be the leading cause for a team to feel constant stress or pressure. A stressed team are less likely to be sustainably high-performing.
So, I try to impart that feeling of gratitude to others.
In today's world, particularly as a parent and a leader I've noticed something curious. We treat kids like adults, and adults like kids. It's the wierdest BS of all.
I was recently asked if working from an office was a reason for our teams high performance. The answer is yes for some, but not for the reason you think.
Forcing people to work from an office will not translate to a high-performing team. We do not have an office so that we can monitor and control people. We have an office so that people who appreciate being able to work from an office have a place to go when they feel like it.
For our fully remote team members, they can also work from an office if they want to and we will subsidise them. It's about mental well-being and spending quality time with people you actually like. It's not about command and control.
Here's a crazy idea...lets treat kids like kids and adults like adults. One way to treat an adults appropriately is to give them really good information and then trust them to do the right thing.
I've never seen that idea tested as intensely as we are doing now at Joyous. With the right people, this 100% works. I believe it's the number one reason we have such a high performing team.
I thought it would be ironic to ask a machine what humans view as high performance. So that's what I did. GPT 4o tells me it's "The ability of a group to exceed goals and expectations consistently". It further elaborates on seven key elements that make up high performance:
That's a pretty solid list. The focus of this blog was to delve more into the last element: Leadership and Management.
Here's why: It doesn't matter how good a team is at the first six elements. And besides any credit for the first six belongs to the team. If the leadership and management isn't clear and supportive the team may be performing extremely well despite being disadvantaged - at doing the wrong thing.
Ruby is a comedian-turned engineer, previously leading product at two global tech companies, she has been CEO at Joyous for 4 years. Her passion for making a positive impact on people’s lives is perfectly matched with the mission of Joyous to make life better for people at work.
She enjoys working across all parts of the organization and is passionate about product direction and data science.
She is the co-author of Joyfully, a book about shared leadership, modern organizational structures, and a new way of working. Her second book Pathways, is a guide to help woman and other under-represented people get a job in technology in six months or less.
She was the Winner of the Product Category for Women Leading Tech Australia 2022 and a finalist in the Inspiring Individual Category of the HiTech awards in 2023.
