Team success can be measured by many things, including growth, impact, or longevity. It’s important to know what drives you. What does success mean to you and your team, and what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve that success. I’ve experienced you don’t need to choose between impact and employee satisfaction. But you need to work to create a culture that can sustain both working in tandem. A team that can evolve with changing needs; maintain its effectiveness; and be resilient through adversity. This is the kind of successful team I discuss in this article.
What is a team?
team, noun : a number of persons associated together in work or activity - Merriam Webster Dictionary
In business, a team can consist of a manager and their direct reports. It can include everyone under a certain company function. Teams can be formed ad-hoc to carry out a specific project or task, made up of various contributors from across the company. Your entire company can be one team.
When I think of a team, I think of a group of individuals working together towards a common goal. We may all have our individual motivations, but we’re united by a single purpose. Not everyone has to like each other – or even enjoy working together. But on the best teams, everyone has each other’s back.
I’ve had the fortune to be a part of many different teams. Some lasted for years, others merely months. From the sport’s arena to the boardroom, academia to field programs. I’ve lead and followed, won and lost, and everything in between. I’ve hated teams but poured my soul into them. As I’ve loved them but lacked the motivation to give it my all.
What makes you successful?
No matter your size, whether you’re by yourself or on a team of 100, you have to know what makes you good at what you do. What behaviours drive your success. How you solve problems effectively. This is your work ethic, team culture, the values that govern what you do and how you do it. It can be the skills you’ve picked up along the way or how you’ve learned to apply them.
All teams change over time. As your team changes, how do you make sure to hold on to the things that made you successful? You may lose employees or have to downsize. Or grow and absorb other departments. Your personnel may stay the same but the market or customers evolve and shift over time.
Building a resilient, high performant team is not easy
You need to identify what your differentiators are, what makes your team special. As you evolve, it’s important to be intentional about what you want to keep the same and what you don’t mind letting evolve into something else.
We’ve previously discussed different types of values, their importance, and where they can bring disaster (see: Can company values do more than just pay lip service?). Consider these characteristics to help make a team resilient through the challenges of growth, evolution, and change:
- Self starter – someone with an entrepreneurial spirit, or mindset. They don’t need active management, but they can still benefit from managers.
- Empowerment – employees are empowered to think for themselves, make decisions, and carry out their work independently.
- Opportunity – keeping people engaged, excited, and motivated in a changing environment.
- Innovation – act of creating something new; be it an idea, a method, a product, or taking an unknown path.
Leading a team
Growth, evolution, and change, are all inevitable for successful teams. Whether it happens organically or is brought on in sweeping strategic moves. For a team to resiliently evolve and continue to be successful, leadership is extremely important. Would you bet on a ship’s voyage without an adequate captain? Probably not. But what if the crew and their directives were solid enough to counterbalance a bad leader at the helm?
Leadership can come from anywhere. You can be the newest, most junior person on a team, and influence the team’s success.
When I first joined Clir
I was one of the company’s lowest paid employees. The Customer Success team was just two of us, and by my fourth month, we had doubled to 4 people. I had the least number of years in renewable energy under my belt, but that didn’t stop me from leading. The four of us all had different experiences and perspectives to contribute. Each of my colleagues brought irreplaceable leadership to the team in their own ways. We fought daily with each other. We’d get up early to meet with our teammate in Europe. And then stay in the office well past sunset to finish deliverables for our clients in Hawaii. Our culture was one of hard work, intensity, and most importantly – collaborative problem solving.
My boss was my first manager who let me make my own decisions and then would stand behind them. He would act as a sounding board for us, and help us out where he had better expertise. I learned there can be a healthy balance of active and passive management from him. We disagreed a lot, but I think that’s what pushed us to be such a successful team. His excited attitude towards ideation and creativity made for an open, communicative culture. The four of us could throw things at the wall and see what stuck on a regular basis.
Leading from behind or out in front
Even though there was ‘the boss’ on top, we collaborated together as equals. No one got to make a decision by themselves. If our boss said we had to do something one way, but the rest of us disagreed, we found a comprimise. Sometimes I was forced to agree to disagree. Then fall in line with his requests, but usually we ended up finding a more effective way to a solution.
One example that sticks out for me, is when senior management introduced rocks and goals. There were ‘company level rocks’ at the top. These would get broken down and distributed amongst teams as smaller rocks and ‘pebbles’. The idea was to empower everyone at every level, to take ownership in tangibly moving the company forward. My boss took the executive rocks and distributed pebbles to us. I hated mine. It was insulting. I thought my boss had grossly misjudged or undermined my capabilities. Here I was pouring my heart and soul into my work, feeling capable of much more… and he gave me a task to act as his personal reminder-bot for the quarter.
I let him know how I felt, and the conflict didn’t go well initially. We yelled at each other in the office, which was a big open room at the time. My teammates agreed with me that the ‘rocks’ we got were just part of our jobs and nothing motivating. But they weren’t as enraged as I was. The next day, my boss’ boss called me. He sympathized with me and my motivation for wanting a more meaningful rock, but also urged me to be compassionate to my boss. This was the first time he was getting these directives too, and he needed our support. I sucked up my pride. I accepted the task, but pushed for the rest of the team to be involved in the rocks going forward.
The power of teamwork
Together, we came up with better team goals: devise a proper customer onboarding framework; start measuring customer satisfaction; and figure out how to use data to drive customer success. Before this, we were account managers being reactive customer support. Once we set this new vision, we became project managers providing proactive customer success.
This was one of my first forays into practicing the management methodology, solutions don’t have to be a choice between impact and employee satisfaction.
The resiliency of leadership
Leaders come in all shapes and sizes. You can lead in one situation and be nowhere close to leading in the next. Successful teams need their leaders to be resilient. I recently read an article (that I can’t find right now) that paraphrased ‘startup founders need to wake up every morning 100% confident they are on the right track…even if they receive new information that changes their mind that afternoon. They need to wake up the next morning, again 100% confident they are on the right track. Despite it being a different track from yesterday.’
This resonated with me because it’s the same for any organizational leader. Maybe not in what you and your team is doing. But you have to be 100% confident every day that how your team is doing it is the way to go. That your culture, your values, that drive your team’s behaviour is how you are going to be and remain successful.
The vision doesn’t have to be yours as a leader. It just has to be there, from someone, to drive you all forward. When teammates aren’t certain of the path ahead, leaders step up to keep everyone motivated to keep going. Being a leader means being out in front, showing others the way.
Building a team
Building a team doesn’t necessarily mean growth, hiring or acquiring personnel and resources. It can mean adding systems, improving efficiency, patching up gaps when employees leave or are let go.
Over time, your team will change through experience gained and lost. Changing company policies and processes, customers wanting more or less, the market growing or shrinking, will all impact the growth of your team.
Building customer success through teamwork
At the start of 2022, my Customer Success team had grown from 2 to 30 staff, and then down to 27. What had started with three engineers and a finance guy, trying to figure out how to make a scalable software service in 2018, had become a multi-faceted complex team. We introduced a customer onboarding program and customer journey that had expert consultants from Gainsight and Salesforce marvelling at. The team balanced extensive hard data with contextual, site-specific information you could only get from relationship building. They developed methods and tools to drive a value delivery program leveraging expertise from analysts, project managers, and business development.
I would like to say that I came up with these great ideas, but the truth is I didn’t. Half the time I wasn’t even aware they were worked on until the customer results were shown. I often connected seemingly disparate projects. I’d demonstrate how they fit in with the big picture. Or change the wording so that it would resonate with senior management. But I give full credit to my amazing teammates and colleagues for coming up with the majority of the innovation over the years.
What I will take credit for, is facilitating an environment where people were empowered. Where they were provided the systems and support to discover impactful solutions, methods, and processes and then carry them out.
Recruitment, hiring, and training
The recruitment, hiring, and training of employees pipeline always focused on bringing in the best person for the job. Once part of the team, we knew their combination of skills, expertise, and perspective was unique and valuable. We listened to their new ideas, as well as helped them get up to speed with what we were doing.
I fought to start new teams and roles. Then to fill those positions with existing staff, or sometimes bringing in folks from outside the organization. We introduced program management and incorporated it into the company. It started as a way to streamline what we could with customer delivery. What could be turned into a process, automated or semi-automated with a tool. Then it grew much beyond that. As program management’s success expanded into the rest of the company, the team was then absorbed into operations. Eventually becoming the backbone of the business.
Turning weakness into strength
The in-house analytics team consisted of some of the top self starters. But as the company grew, they struggled with being pulled in every-which direction. Their leadership and my team collaborated to get the analysts working side by side with the project managers. Eventually we were integrated together under one Customer Success umbrella organization. We found that when our goals were aligned, and effective paths of communication were open, we were much more successful in delivering value to our customers. That team went from being one of the biggest pain points on the executive list, to part of the highest performing team in the company.
Being intentional about team culture
When hard work, intensity, and collaborative problem solving were held on to, we saw the most effective results. The team was brought together by their passion for environmental sustainability. Their behaviour echoed the company values of innovation, impact, inclusion, and communication. These values were incorporated in all performance reviews, as well as personal and team goal setting. Therefore often top of mind.
Naturally, there are times when you need to question if your values still make sense. Do they still drive the outcomes they used to, and are they still held strongly by your team. This is where you can go back to that definition of what success means to you. What drives you, and what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve that success.
Building a resilient team allows evolution and improvement, while keeping true to your original core values.
Lessons learned for next time
I call the year I ran a wave energy startup my ‘free MBA’. But we should always be learning and refining our skills in management. In following articles I’ll share more lessons I learned growing from an individual contributor to executive team member. Including overcoming challenges such as: dealing with the chaos; embracing and fighting company culture; lacking and earning respect; scalability; and more.