Thank you.
Hi, there.
So, today, I'm going to talk about how to engage teams to achieve high performance.
And, to do that, I will explain this in five steps.
Probably you all know these steps.
The most important part is not how each one of these works by itself, it's how they work
together.
And this comes a little bit from my experience, as both manager at a company and as a sports
coach.
I've been doing that for ten years.
I've been training people and training other sports coaches, and I follow more or less
the same kind of steps that I'm going to explain right here.
So the first one is to set a goal.
Goal, OKRs, KPIs - different names.
You all know about this.
The important part is how people get attached to goals, how they get motivated by having
great goals.
If you look into the sports psychology and you start researching a bit on their studies,
you will notice that high performance is highly connected with highly intense goals.
That's the same that happens with our teams every day and our companies.
The most important part of goals is to define goals that are bold, but there is a thin line
between bold and reckless, as there is a thin line between comfort, discomfort, and panic.
Probably you've noticed that if you go to the gym, there's a guy just saying, "Come
on, you can do ten more."
That's putting you in the discomfort zone so that you don't go to the panic zone where
you just stop your training.
You need to define goals that are clear.
To do that the easiest way, at least for me, is to have something connected either with
numbers or why or no answers.
Whenever we say something like this is done or this is not done.
And we need to make sure that our goals have impact.
Because impact is connected with purpose.
It's like people feel that they will do something that will be meaning ful.
We have one, two, three or four goals - it doesn't matter, as long as they are simple
enough to memorise, easy enough to understand and easy enough to share.
Let me give you a personal story.
Last year, I was there, and I was an attendee, I was at this conference and it's amazing.
I really needed to be on the stage.
I put myself to have a personal goal to be here.
That's done.
That was too comfortable for me.
The second thing I decided to do is I will do it as a flash talk.
I've never done a flash talk before.
Okay.
Sound like something nice to do, and here I am.
So basically, that's what we need to do as leaders is to define goals that will be membership
rabble for you or for your team.
Second step, it's just to work with constraints.
So, these are the things we cannot do.
Okay?
It's part of life.
And we need to make sure that us and the teams embrace constraints.
That's a big, big, big attitude towards success.
Embracing constraints.
We also need to impose constraints, and I know that I am pose sounds quite strong, but
let me explain to you what I mean by this.
Whenever we don't defined the constraint, real life will come and define for us.
It's better we define it by ourselves because we're in control.
More than this, constraints have a really big, big impact because they will help boost
creativity.
They help us to think differently.
They help us to think look upon things as if we are looking for new opportunities.
And they're mandatory, so we can't skip from them.
Again, let me give you an example of constraints you probably face on your daily job.
Lack of skill set.
So I was running a team a long time ago, and I had no UX to run the project.
But I had to do a pretty UI.
How can I do that?
I'm not a designer, and neither were my team who are a bunch of software engineers.
I had a girl, her name was Sara, and she was really fond of UX and UI.
I just grabbed her and launched at her this challenge.
Come on, Sara, you can do this, you can help us.
The funny part is that, by the end of the project, she was one of the persons that was
bootstrapping our product-design team.
She was grabbing lots of people we had at the cop, different designers from different
parts of the company, and bootstrapping what we nowadays call a product-design team.
She totally changed her way of working.
She moved from software engineering to product design.
So constraints actually help us with creativity.
Third, principle or - principles or decision models.
These are different from constraints because they're options, not restrictions.
They should help us align the team.
They should HP to work with the team and define how we are going to operate, and this should
evolve as the team, the company, the product, the company is evolving.
You should adapt and change.
These principles should help us to gain focus and to be really fast at taking decisions.
I will go with an example that most of you already know, that is type one and type two
decisions from Amazon.
This is a poor principle for Amazon.
You either do things really fast and break stuff and adapt, or you stop, call Bezos,
almost, and you do things when he says to move forward.
This depends on a single test: am I going to do something that will have impact on the
brand or the business?
If yes, and if it is a big impact, then you should probably called Bezos.
If not, be totally free and move along, because that's what we want to do is really to get
the teams to be autonomous, so we want to define how we are going to work together.
Fourth, and this is the challenging one for me, as a software engineer, I was not expecting
to be a sales person.
So I will say it one more time: we need to sell everything.
We need to sell the sense of urgency, we need to sell the goal, we need to sell to our teams,
we need to sell to our peers.
We need to sell to everyone.
And that's hard.
Because we need to sound enthusiastic.
We need to promote what we are selling, and we need to promote what the team is doing.
Even when there are small things that they are doing, and we really need to be consistent.
Again, as in sports, consistency is the deal-breaker.
It's not by doing it one times or two times, it's by being consistent at doing things.
When I started as a software engineer, I system remember having a conversation with my manager
where I said to him, we've improved performance but we missed fires per cent of our users.
Today, if I had the conversation, it will be, "We improved 70 per cent of performance
for 95 per cent of our user base."
Both sentences say exactly the same.
But they sound different, right?
So, that's what we really need to do as software engineers is to change the way we think to
go into the leadership role, to be much more people that are here to motivate others.
Five: it's not only about how selling, it's about how to sell.
And that's done, in my opinion, through storytelling.
And this is really important, because the human brain is really, really, really deeply
connected to stories.
If you notice how we evolved, we used stories to pass information from one generation to
the next one, and to the next one.
So our brain is really used to grab a story and to keep it and to keep improving it.
So whenever we grab a story, we can actually create some empathy.
And we should try to do that.
We should try to create the empathy with the teams and with everyone else.
We should not talk about the end goal - that's not what the story is all about.
It's about the past.
It's go about going from the comfort zone, going to the screen where I can see the speaker
notes, or this comfort zone where I can't see anything but the people in front of me.
It's important to move from one step to the other, and always say the truth.
Again, there is a thin line between saying the truth and lying.
And we should boost little bit reality to make it engaging but we should not lie.
At least we cannot say something this is going to be a piece of cake.
If I set a bold goal, it's going to be hard for someone to believe me.
At least, I will not believe my manager if he told me that.
So, we need to engage people through stories.
So I've been talking for quite a while, and I don't know if you believe my story.
To tell the truth, I will never know if you believe my story.
I really believe that engaging people and achieving high performance is run through
leaders that create memorable goals.
That boosts creativity, through constraints.
That just fosters autonomy by defining principles how the team will operate, that we sell motivation
by constantly selling what the team is achieving and what we are aiming for, and that engaging
the team by telling a story.
Actually, I told you at the beginning that, for me, the most important part is how these
steps work together.
And that's true.
If you look at this, and we combine everything, the big challenge is when we grab this, and
we are describing how the story is going to be, what is the end of a successful story?
What was the past for a successful story?
Actually, when you describe that to the team, you're describing their story.
Thank you.