What motivates ultra-high performing teams? Attuned CEO Casey Wahl recently joined a panel of experienced leaders to explore this topic. They brought a range of different perspectives but all agreed on one thing: creating an environment of Psychological Safety is key. Here’s why.
All the way back to my earliest days in management, I’ve wanted my teams to be ultra-high-performing. High-performing is great, but my ambitions drove me to seek something more.
Looking back at the various teams I’ve led over the past 20 years, however, I have to admit that none were ultra-high-performing. Indeed, if I was being really critical, I’d say that many weren’t even high-performing. All had the potential to be “ultra”, but I could never quite inspire them to reach that rarefied air.
I’m sure I’m not alone. Many ambitious leaders want their teams to be elite, even if reality falls short of their ambitions. In fact, I was recently invited to join a panel to explore this topic, and specifically the question of “What motivates ultra-high-performing teams?”
Not to blow my own trumpet, but I like to think that I know a thing or two about motivation. And despite my mea culpa, the current team I’m privileged to work with is high-performing and, dare I say, “ultra” at times. Over the past couple of years at Attuned, we’ve also been privileged to work with elite units of the US military, athletes striving to achieve at the Olympics, extremely skilled engineering teams, and other teams delivering exceptionally high levels of performance week in, week out, so there were some insights I was looking forward to sharing.
On the panel, which was hosted by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, we had Captain Paul Carelli, a highly decorated US Navy leader who commanded fighter squadrons among many other accomplishments; Mathian Osicki, senior director of talent management at Becton, Dickinson and Co.; Janet Ghosh, global director of HR at Stanley Black & Decker; and Nick Allen, of global design and architecture firm Gensler.
While these experienced leaders brought a range of different perspectives to the table, there was one thing they all agreed on. It was said in different ways, but the message was clear: in order to have an ultra-high performing team, you first needed to create an environment of Psychological Safety.
Psychological Safety is Key
Not prioritizing Psychological Safety is probably one of the most common errors that ambitious, high-performing individual contributors make when they transition into management (a case of what got you here won’t get you there). Certainly, I didn’t create that kind of environment effectively enough in my early teams. As a very-high-performing individual, I’m guessing I created an environment where it was difficult for more junior members of the team to speak up and raise concerns. And with my high Rationality needs, I’m pretty sure I shot down their embryonic ideas right out of the gate more than once. These behaviors from me, the leader, probably discouraged them from speaking up again, directly reducing the level of Psychological Safety within the team.
Another failure in my early team management years was my desire to offer unsolicited advice to members of my teams. I hadn’t yet learned the simple lesson that unsolicited advice too often comes across as criticism—which, again, reduced the feeling of Psychological Safety within my teams and further thwarted my ambitions for them to achieve their ultra-high potential.
Hard-won Wisdom
During the panel, Janet Ghosh summarized a systems thinking solution that my younger self would have benefited from hearing: to promote a type of behavior, you need to reward it, while also having penalties for undesirable behavior. This is deceptively simple, but tricky to execute. The hard part is making explicit what the “bad” behavior is then taking clear, unemotional action to “punish” it. Doing this can be awkward at first—you’ll get looks, possibly resentment, and a lot of murmurs—but once the path is created, each subsequent time will be easier and it will become part of the culture.
Captain Paul Carelli, in his wisdom, raised the fundamental truth that people are not homogeneous, and we all have to work on perfecting the way we communicate with different people. But how can you do that while trying to foster a courageous culture? The answer: separate mistakes into training mistakes and behavioral mistakes. Training mistakes are forgivable—it just means more training is needed—whereas behavioral mistakes need to be addressed in such a way that they won’t happen again.
Nick Allen then brought a wonderful and surprising story about his son’s 2nd-grade soccer team to the discussion. When he’s coaching the team, Nick says there are always three or four go-to performers. And when those stars are in the game, goals will be scored and the team wins. But what about the rest of the team?
Extrapolating this leads to two issues: burnout and a lack of inclusivity. Leaders in companies tend to do the same thing—they consistently rely on their go-to stars to deliver the highest performance. As this happens again and again, those stars get burned out and their performance levels dip. Also, even if those stars do deliver project after project, the likelihood is that you’ll get groupthink—a lack of diverse ideas, and a non-inclusive, non-inspiring environment for those outside the elite group. The underlined point was that leaders have to be courageous to bring in new members who aren’t their usual most-relied-upon performers.
What is the best way to break a micromanager of the habit? That was the question posed to Mathian Osicki, who pointed out that a lot of micromanagers were formerly the high performers in someone else’s team. They got to where they are now because they were high performers. They got there fast, and what they did works. And what’s more, they often had experiences of being let down. That micromanager probably did try to let someone on their team do something their own way, but that person didn’t deliver, creating a well of disappointment that made it harder to break the micromanagement cycle. So how do you break the micromanagement of a former ultra high-performer? You have to find “a little tiny crack”, an opening to have a real conversation with them, by knowing their motivations, what drives them, how they think, and then you might be able to get them to move into a more empowering management style. A clear case for the need for more EQ.
The X-factor
As I discovered during the panel, my experience in trying and failing to create ultra-high-performing teams wasn’t unique. My fellow panelists had all had similarly challenging experiences in trying to craft cultures where ultra-high performance could exist on a broad organizational scale.
And while it’s frustrating that it took me so long to learn the lessons, it does feel like some wisdom is finally settling in. Creating a team of extremely high performers, making it inclusive and equitable, avoiding groupthink, crafting behaviors to meet all the organization’s values, and all while keeping the team from burning out is an incredibly complex undertaking. Ambition can create the desire and the energy to fuel the development of a high-performing team, but EQ is the true X-factor a leader requires if they want to build an ultra-high performing team.
It took a while, but now, here at Attuned, I’m starting to achieve what I set out to do all those years ago. And if my team isn’t quite ultra-high-performing yet, then they sure are close—and, more importantly, I know exactly what they need to help take them all the way to the top.
Watch the webinar in full and on-demand here, or read From Day One’s recap here.
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August 29, 2021
By Casey Wahl 
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