The missing link between people and results

Change in the workplace has become relentless. Between AI adoption, mounting productivity demands and near-continual restructuring, many organisations now operate in a state of permanent transformation. Harvard Business Review (HBR) has examined the phenomenon, calling the amount and pace of organisational change “staggering” and that “we have now entered an era in which it is continuous rather than episodic.”

 

Almost without exception, change is positioned as something that will improve practically anything from processes and outcomes to performance or accountability; you name it. Whether it’s a proactive move to get ahead of the game or an emergency response to risk, “driving change” is right up there with other contemporary leadership objectives.

 

But, as HBR also points out, it is rather difficult, with 70% of all change initiatives ending in failure. The challenge is summed up very nicely: “You can have the right tech stack, the right org chart, and the right strategy, but ultimately your employees will determine whether your organisation resists change or embraces it.”

 

 

A people problem

Organisations have responded to this ubiquitous challenge by trying to better understand the people responsible for delivering change. Employee engagement, employee experience, wellbeing and culture are all routinely measured, giving leaders unprecedented visibility into how people feel about their work.

 

Leaders also have far more insight into individual performance than ever before, and whether the emphasis is on objectives, development, productivity or a wide range of other metrics, it is possible to assess employee performance in minute detail. Bring AI into the picture, and there’s even more pressure to implement change, and to do so at unprecedented speed.

 

This people-centric approach is entirely understandable. If employees ultimately determine whether change succeeds or fails, it makes perfect sense to try to understand what drives their behaviour and performance. Yet change initiatives continue to underperform, even when leaders have extensive data on their people and culture.

 

My organisation’s own research of more than 400 global tech leaders shines a light on this disconnect. Fewer than a quarter said their organisation has clear, aligned priorities, suggesting that many still lack a shared understanding of what matters most and what should be delivered first.

 

The implication is that organisations probably don’t have a data problem. What they may instead have is a visibility problem, with one critical aspect of organisational performance remaining largely unmeasured: team performance. It’s what I’ve come to call the ‘missing middle’: the space that sits between organisational culture on one side and individual performance on the other, where teams do the work of turning strategy into results.

 

 

What makes a successful team?

A team can consist of highly capable individuals and still fail to execute effectively (think France in the World Cup, for example). But organisations frequently make the same mistake, assuming that improving individual performance will naturally improve team performance. These issues are related but not the same; the difference lies in how people work together rather than how they perform independently.

 

This dynamic also helps explain why teams working within the same organisation, under the same strategy and culture, often achieve very different outcomes. It is also why silos form so easily, with teams drifting out of alignment with one another despite working towards the same overarching goals. But those issues are largely invisible when organisations only measure individuals and culture. Instead, measuring team performance provides insight into how effectively strategy is translated into day-to-day execution. Our own benchmarking of 321 teams, spanning nearly 3,500 responses, underlines the scale of the issue: fewer than half met the 83% execution threshold that defines a high-performing team.

 

The key question here, of course, is how? There are four characteristics that consistently distinguish high-performing teams: purpose, trust, clarity and simplicity.

 

Firstly, purpose gives teams a shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve and how their work contributes to wider organisational objectives. Trust enables people to speak openly when something isn’t working, rather than allowing problems to remain hidden until they affect delivery.

 

Next is clarity, which ensures everyone understands what matters most and where they should focus their efforts. And finally, simplicity removes unnecessary friction in how teams operate, allowing more time and energy to be directed towards delivery. The point is, each characteristic strengthens team performance individually, but they reinforce one another when developed together.

 

Typically, teams that perform well across all four characteristics are better able to translate strategy into consistent execution and to do so at speed. When dealing with any form of change, the ability to stay aligned and focused can make the difference between successful execution and another failed initiative.

 

The encouraging news is that team performance is not intangible. It can be measured, benchmarked and improved in much the same way as individual performance. And the returns are tangible: where these four conditions have been measured and deliberately strengthened, we’ve seen pipeline grow 11x within a single cycle without increased spend, and productivity rise by 83% without additional headcount. For organisations facing yet another wave of change, closing that gap - the missing link between people and results - may well determine whether employees resist the next initiative or embrace it.

 

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Vicky Reddington is the founder of Amplified Group

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and izusek