Today we had quite a heated debate around the topic of 'High Performance'. Our boss challenged us to describe how our team would look if it was high performing. The main reason things got quite so heated was he only wanted to talk in specific terms about our team, which provides the front end between an internal service provider and 'The Business'. The team itself sees its function as part of a greater whole - the service itself and not just the Business interface The High Performing Team analogies we used to describe our vision interestingly came from two widely different worlds - the world of sport and the world of technology...
From the sports world we talked about how a team Olympic Gold medal is won - how each athlete must understand the objective, and their part in attaining that objective. But also how the wider support team contribute to that goal - How the physiologist and the physiotherapist, and the coach and the team manager and the team administrator and the guy who drives the team bus must understand that their effort individually and jointly creates the circumstances to win.
Equally from the world of tech came the example of Apple - Apple deliver a superb product, based around user experience, and fronted by an exceptional leader who sets the vision, and every member of the organization understands what that product needs to do- what the end user experience should be. Apple do not deliver a box of components and expect the Genius to assemble it there and then in front of you.
We realised what we are missing is the bigger team aspect, it will never matter how flawless the delivery of our team is, at the moment we are delivering an essentially flawed product - a box of components - because the different strands in our organization do not hold a consistent view of what the product is, or their part in delivering it - each delivering to the best of their ability, but without a specific end result in mind. And so with that in mind we resolved to regroup and start to hash out what High Performance looks like for our whole organization and not just our single team.
Our challenge will be in finding our Steve Jobs.
