Five Levels of High Functioning Teams
As Proletariat continues to grow, I have found success using this methodology to build effective teams. By analyzing the level of each team within the company it has allowed me to better support the leads and team members. Teams can look at their current level and focus on the important changes needed to move up.
This framework is also useful to become a high functioning member within a team.
Level 1 - React and Subsist
Everyone has worked on a team like this. A Level 1 Team is barely able to keep up, is struggling to execute, and has frequent communication problems. Many teams get stuck at Level 1 forever, unable to get ahead. The biggest blocker to improving is often a lack of resources, a lack of clear goals, poor process execution, or poor communication.
If you answer Yes to any of these questions you’re probably working on a Level 1 Team:
Does your team frequently miss deadlines without knowing why?
Do you often not know what other members of your team are working on?
Do you feel like you don’t know why you’re doing a task?
Is it often unclear where tasks come from or how you’re being assigned work?
Does your team change priorities often without clear reasoning?
Do team members often do overlapping work or does work often fall through the cracks?
Graduating out of Level 1 involves these steps:
Organize and track all current internal initiatives, ongoing work, and external tasks. It can be useful to audit where each team member is spending their time for a week or more to capture this.
Identify current team priorities and prioritize all current work accordingly.
Define clear roles and responsibilities for the team to cover all known work.
Create a process to capture incoming work and assign that work out to the proper team members.
Track the time required to complete tasks and build a process to properly scope and complete current work.
Not all of these are required to move out of Level 1. I consider any team that can plan, prioritize, track, and complete tasks as being ready to move on. Until the team is resourced and organized properly it is simply reacting and subsisting.
Disclaimer: if your team sometimes becomes reactionary due to shifts in strategy or other events, that is expected. If the team cannot pull itself out quickly, it is worth reevaluating the above steps.
Level 2 - Plan and Execute
Once a team able to keep up with current work the focus should shift to planning ahead, increasing predictability, and becoming more resilient. Level 2 Teams are able to proactively plan, predictably execute on a set schedule, and mitigate common challenges. For most teams this means creating protocols to manage surprise work, or other randomizing factors, while preserving parts of the team to continue to progress on ongoing projects.
Successful Level 2 Teams follow these steps:
Identify future goals.
Create a process to predict incoming work based on past work or future goals.
Build a support system to deal with common contingencies and single points of failure.
Utilize a retrospective process to objectively analyze issues and improve future decision making.
There is a trap that lies between Level 2 and Level 3 that can be easy to fall into. Level 2 is often about improving team efficiency and it can be exhilarating when successful. To paraphrase a good lesson from High Output Management: you can make the most efficient egg cooking factory in the world, but that won’t matter if your customer orders toast. There needs to be a shift from focusing on doing work the right way to ensuring the right work is being done.
I could (and maybe should) devote an entire blog post to efficiency vs. effectiveness.
Level 3 - Measure Impact
Building a team to Level 2 is no small task. Now that the team is able to efficiently get work done, it is time to prove that the team is doing the right work. Level 3 Teams are able to plan effectively, execute predictably, understand what makes them successful, and measure their impact. This means using goals to determine KPIs and creating ways to track and report those KPIs back to the team.
Successful Level 3 Teams follow these steps:
Determine the metrics used to measure success for the team.
Prove that current and future goals are aligned with success metrics.
Build a system to track success metrics and distribute that information to the team.
These steps alone should improve decision making for the entire team. In my experience if people are able to understand the metrics that drive their success it can allow more autonomy and satisfaction in the work.
Level 4 - Improve Effectiveness
Once a team has proved their doing the right work and can measure their impact, it is now time to improve those results. Level 4 Teams plan effectively, execute predictably, measure their impact, and have created processes to improve their effectiveness. This takes customer insight, competitive analysis, and general product magic. For Proletariat this often involves building a more concrete scientific method into the product pipeline.
Successful Level 4 Teams follow these steps:
Generate theories on how best to improve success metrics based historical metrics, competitive analysis or customer insight
Use those theories to create a pipeline of future work.
Produce expected outcomes for future work based historical metrics, competitive analysis or customer insight.
Develop an ROI based prioritization system that looks at the cost required to do future work along with the expected outcome.
Build and release the work.
Analyze the results and compare them to the expected outcomes and planned cost.
Create learnings and apply that to current theories.
Being part of a team that is able to do all these things is one of the most satisfying feelings I have ever had in my career. There is a sense of mastery and control that binds people together and the added side benefit that the team is almost certainly successfully hitting goals. Even if the team is not able to reach their goals the consistent improvement can be a magnifying factor in team health and motivation.
Level 5 - Amplify Others
If a team can manage to improve their own impact, the next step is improving the impact of other teams within the company. Level 5 Teams plan effectively, execute predictably, measure their impact, improve their effectiveness and amplify others. This takes an awareness of the goals of other teams and a deep understanding of the business. It means the team can put their work in context of the wider goals of the company and amplify the work of others. The best way I can describe this is that a Level 5 Team is able to make the lives of other teams easier.
Ideas to help achieve a Level 5 Team:
Learn how all teams contribute to company success and be included on the metrics information from other teams.
Understand all the factors of how your team interacts with other teams.
Create metrics for cross team interactions and share those with other teams.
Factor other team’s success metrics into goal setting.
There are many strategies for achieving these results and I have not found a single set of steps that works repeatedly. One idea that I have found useful is cultivating peer relationships across teams within the company. A powerful component of any relationship is knowing what makes the other person successful. Educating the entire team about this can greatly improve how they perceive their work and the interactions they have with other teams.
It is important to not lose focus and over emphasize helping other teams at the expense of your own team. This can be seductive and sometimes comes with strong incentives, but I have rarely seen a case where compromising one team’s success for another is healthy long term.
Conclusions
There are many ways to create high functioning teams. As a leader it is important to find/steal/cultivate a variety of tools to use to make teams better. I have found this approach is helpful for many types of teams, from product development to publishing and marketing. Much of this requires a foundation with a good degree of certainty that is difficult in early product phases. I have found this sort of structure can be overwhelming for prototyping tasks or instances where teams need extreme flexibility. Consider where your team, product, and company are before committing the time and effort needed to build this sort of team.