{"id":3146,"date":"2019-10-16T06:26:25","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T13:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fasterthan20.com\/?p=3146"},"modified":"2019-10-16T00:11:08","modified_gmt":"2019-10-16T07:11:08","slug":"habits-of-high-performance-groups","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fasterthan20.com\/2019\/10\/habits-of-high-performance-groups\/","title":{"rendered":"Habits of High-Performance Groups"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I am passionately committed to helping as many people as possible get better at collaboration. Within this larger mission, I am most interested in helping groups collaborate on our most complex and challenging problems. Over the past 17 years, I\u2019ve gotten to work on some crazy hard stuff, from reproductive health in Africa and Southeast Asia to water in California. I\u2019ve learned a ton from doing this work, I continue to be passionate about it, and I\u2019ve developed a lot of sophisticated skills as a result.<\/p>\n

However, for the past year, I\u2019ve been focusing most of my energy on encouraging people to practice setting better goals and aligning around success. My Goals + Success Spectrum<\/a> is already my most popular and widely used toolkit, and yet, through programs like my Good Goal-Setting workshops<\/a>, I\u2019ve been doubling down on helping people get better at using it and \u2014 more importantly \u2014 making it a regular habit.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been getting a lot of funny looks about this, especially from folks who know about my passion around systems and complexity. If I care so much about addressing our most wicked and challenging problems, why am I making such a big deal about something as \u201cbasic\u201d and \u201ceasy\u201d as setting better goals and aligning around success?<\/p>\n

Because most of us don\u2019t do it regularly. (This included me for much of my career, as I explain below. It also includes many of my colleagues, who are otherwise outstanding practitioners.)<\/p>\n

Because many who are doing it regularly are just going through the motions. We rarely revisit and refine our stated goals, much less hold ourselves accountable to them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Because much of the group dysfunction I see can often be traced to not setting clear goals and aligning around success regularly or well.<\/p>\n

Because doing this regularly and well not only corrects these dysfunctions, it leads to higher performance<\/a> and better outcomes while also saving<\/em> groups time.<\/p>\n

And finally, because doing this regularly and well does not require consultants or any other form of \u201cexpert\u201d (i.e. costly) help. It \u201csimply\u201d requires repetition<\/a> and intentionality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Investing in the \u201cBasics\u201d and Eating Humble Pie<\/h2>\n

In 2012, I co-led a process called the Delta Dialogues<\/a>, where we tried to get a diverse set of stakeholders around California water issues \u2014 including water companies, farmers and fishermen, environmentalists, government officials, and other local community members \u2014 to trust each other more. Many of our participants had been at each other\u2019s throats \u2014 literally, in some cases \u2014for almost 30 years. About half of our participants were suing each other.<\/p>\n

It was a seemingly impossible task for an intractable problem \u2014 how to fairly distribute a critical resource, one that is literally required for life \u2014 when there isn\u2019t enough of it to go around. I thought that it would require virtuoso performances of our most sophisticated facilitation techniques in order to be successful. We had a very senior, skilled team, and I was excited to see what it would look like for us to perform at our best.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, we did not deliver virtuoso performances of our most sophisticated facilitation techniques. We worked really hard, but we were not totally in sync, and our performances often fell flat. However, something strange started to happen. Despite our worst efforts, our process worked. Our participants gelled and even started working together.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of our process, after one of our best meetings, our client, Campbell Ingram<\/a>, the executive officer of the Delta Conservancy<\/a>, paid us one of the best professional compliments I have ever received. He first thanked us for a job well done, to which I responded, \u201cIt\u2019s easy with this group. It\u2019s a great, great group of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is<\/em> a great group,\u201d he acknowledged, \u201cbut that\u2019s not it. I\u2019ve seen this exact same set of people at other meetings screaming their heads off at each other. There\u2019s something that you\u2019re doing that\u2019s changing their dynamic.\u201d<\/p>\n

My immediate reaction to what he said was to brush it aside. Of course<\/em> we were able to create that kind of space for our participants. Doing that was fundamental to our work, and they were all \u201cbasic\u201d things. For example, we listened deeply to our participants throughout the whole process and invited them to design with us. We co-designed a set of working agreements<\/a> before the process started, which was itself an intense and productive conversation. We asked that people bring their whole selves into the conversation, and we modeled that by asking them very basic, very human<\/a> questions, such as, \u201cWhat\u2019s your favorite place in the Delta?\u201d and \u201cHow are you feeling today?\u201d We rotated locations so that people could experience each other\u2019s places of work and community, which built greater shared understanding and empathy. We paired people up so that folks could build deeper relationships with each other between meetings.<\/p>\n

These were all the \u201cbasic\u201d things that we did with any group with which we worked. I didn\u2019t think it was special. I thought it was what we layered on top of these fundamentals that made us good at what we did.<\/p>\n

But in reflecting on Campbell\u2019s compliment, I realized that I was wrong. Most groups do not do these basic things. For us, they were habits, and as a result, we overlooked them. They also weren\u2019t necessarily hard to do, which made us undervalue them even more. Anyone could open a meeting by asking everyone how they were feeling. Only a practitioner with years of experience could skillfully map a complex conversation in real-time.<\/p>\n

I (and others) overvalued our more \u201csophisticated\u201d skills, because they were showier and more unique. However, it didn\u2019t matter that we were applying them poorly. They helped, and they would have helped even more if we were doing them well, but they weren\u2019t critical. Doing the \u201cbasics\u201d mattered far more. Fortunately, we were doing the basics, and doing them well.<\/p>\n

Not doing them would have sunk the project. I know this, because we neglected a basic practice with one critical meeting<\/a> in the middle of our process, and we ended up doing a terrible job facilitating it despite all of our supposed skill. The long, silent car ride back home after that meeting was miserable. I mostly stared out the window, reliving the day\u2019s events over and over again in my head. Finally, we began to discuss what had happened. Rebecca Petzel<\/a>, who was playing a supporting role, listened to us nitpick for a while, then finally spoke up. \u201cThe problem,\u201d she said, \u201cwas that we lost sight of our goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her words both clarified and stung. She was absolutely right. We knew that this meeting was going to be our most complex. We were all trying to balance many different needs, but while we had talked about possible moves and tradeoffs, we hadn\u2019t aligned<\/a><\/em> around a set of collective priorities. We each had made moves that we thought would lead to the best outcome. We just hadn\u2019t agreed in advance on what the best outcomes were, and we ended up working at cross-purposes.<\/p>\n

I was proud of Rebecca for having this insight, despite her being the most junior member of our team, and I also felt ashamed. I often made a big deal of how important aligning around success was, but I had neglected to model it for this meeting, and we had failed as a result.<\/p>\n

Habits Are Hard<\/h2>\n

After the Delta Dialogues, I made a list of all the things I \u201cknew\u201d were important to collaborating effectively, then compared them to what I actually practiced on a regular basis. The gap wasn\u2019t huge, but it wasn\u2019t trivial either. I then asked myself why I ended up skipping these things. The answer generally had something to do with feeling urgency. I decided to try being more disciplined about these \u201cbasic\u201d practices even in the face of urgency and to see what happened.<\/p>\n

I was surprised by how dramatically the quality and consistency of my work improved. I was even more surprised by how slowing down<\/a> somehow made the urgency go away. The more I practiced, the more engrained these habits became, which made them feel even more efficient and productive over time.<\/p>\n

In 2013, I left the consulting firm I had co-founded to embark on my current journey. Helping groups build good collaborative habits through practice<\/a> has become the cornerstone of my work. Anyone can easily develop the skills required to do the \u201cbasics\u201d with groups. They just need to be willing to practice.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve identified four keystone habits that high-performance groups<\/a> seem to share:<\/p>\n