Some months ago, I talked about high-performing teams – what “high-performing” means and how to help your team get there.
Since then, I’ve noticed three easy-to-spot commonalities among high-performing teams.
1. They have their cameras on.
2. They show up to meetings on time.
3. They have considerable overlap in their time zones or their working hours.
This speaks to the culture of an organization more than it does the teams themselves.
Here’s why:
1. Cameras on: the organization has built a culture of trust to allow people to feel safe having their cameras on most of the time.
2. On time: it’s not in the organizational culture to jam people’s calendars full of meetings, then to keep them in there past the allotted team. (see this excellent Agile Learning Labs article on how good it feels to be busy)
For both #1 and #2, there’s respect for people’s time. There’s focus. And there’s presence.
It’s easy to multi-task and not really pay attention to a meeting when your camera’s off. When it’s on and when you’re engaged in a meeting, you can get more done in the time you have by not having to repeat yourself or schedule additional time for things that could have been accomplished in the meeting had people been present.
3. Overlapping time zones: face-to-face communication – however that looks these days – is an Agile principle. This requires real-time collaboration within a team.
All too often, I see leaders set up a system that makes it incredibly painful if not downright impossible to collaborate within a team. And the leaders don’t have to feel that pain – the teams do. I was once on a team that had one single hour of working time overlap. As the Scrum Master, I was expected to make that work. I felt like a failure every day as I watched my team struggle.
I am not against a global, remote workforce. In fact, I prefer working remotely. And I believe there is a great loss of diverse thinking when we only stick to a small working radius.
I also believe it’s crucial to spend the majority of your working time together to share ideas, challenge each other, and problem solve in real time. That – and keeping your camera on and showing up on time – are what I have seen high-performing teams continue to do.
As a coach, those are teams I feel hopeful about.
Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash