## Conclusion (tl;dr) As a manager in charge of a group of people, you are a potential source of mental and even physical harm to them. It depends foremost on you yourself if you are running a well-oiled team or one that struggles with every task. To ensure the team or organization you manage is engaged and proud of what they do, you have to lead by *consistent* example and hold *yourself* accountable. You will need to create a [culture of psychological safety, trust, and productive conflict](2024-08-26%20The%20key%20to%20leading%20an%20effective%20team.md) to have lasting contentment at work. However, if you and your team want to go beyond and achieve exceptional performance or fit into a [bureaucratic or pathological culture](https://psychsafety.co.uk/psychological-safety-81-westrums-cultural-typologies/) you will need to experiment using the scientific method, and track the effectiveness of your changes to ensure you are making the right adjustments. By tracking relevant metrics and making predictions, you can learn from the delta between predictions and actual outcomes of every step you take. Finally, by reflecting on those outcomes, you can figure out what improvements actually work for you and your team. ## Introduction This blog post is for managers who already have great [psychological safety](Psychological%20Safety.md) and are addressing Lencioni's famous [five dysfunctions](https://www.mindtools.com/a6ooqev/lencionis-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team), yet don’t quite know how to go beyond that, next. Of course, I hope that managers who have already gone beyond can find a useful nugget or two in this post, too. Or they even are willing to give me [feedback](Contact.md), especially if they disagree with what I wrote here, and can describe why this would not work for them. ## To improve beyond the known, you need to predict & reflect You don't need elaborate tracking and measuring to know if you are fundamentally creating or destroying psychological safety in your team. All you need to be is honest and accountable to yourself to understand the culture in your org. However, if you want to go beyond "just" overcoming the five dysfunctions Lencioni uncovered, and truly optimize your team for impact, you will need to do a bit more. Before going deeper, ask yourself if you intend to **improve** or **grow** yourself or your org. In Europe, only 1000 companies have over 36% compound annual growth with at least 10 employees at the start of the measurement period in the [annual FT1000 ranking](https://www.ft.com/content/684aa3b5-f983-4668-b353-74cf5f95355a). Of course, any company will *claim* they are striving for growth, but most companies don’t *act* consistently with that ambition. In fact, the average annual growth rate among the 5000 largest public companies [was only 2.8%](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-ten-rules-of-growth) in the ten years preceding COVID-19. Only 13% of companies in the McKinsey study had double-digit growth. Yet, even if a company followed “eight or more” of the rules the McKinsey study outlined, it still only experienced single-digit growth on average. My conjecture is that you need the right **leadership culture** to achieve exceptional growth, not just the right strategy and processes. Obviously, growth rates are highly industry-specific, too. For example, SaaS companies typically experience much higher growth rates than the average firm. And a double-digit growth rate does not automatically mean your org has a kind of [Westrum generative culture](https://itrevolution.com/articles/westrums-organizational-model-in-tech-orgs/) described in this post. Assuming you do want to improve and grow beyond the known norm, [you need to track metrics that tell you where you stand and if you are progressing](https://www.whatmatters.com) to achieve such challenging results. And you need to [run controlled experiments to figure out what behavior and process changes factually improve those metrics](https://public.websites.umich.edu/~jmondisa/TK/The_Improvement_Kata.html) in your specific org setting. That is especially true if you are trying to achieve outcomes you today don't know how to reach, by letting the metric be your objective guide. Therefore, you should be creating a causal or at least deductive logic chain between the desired outcomes, the relevant metrics tracking your desired outcomes, and your process and behavior changes. The delta between desired and actual outcomes allows you to learn what worked and what did not. You do that by first predicting where your metrics will be at some future date, and once you reach that date, by reflecting on the delta between outcome and prediction. Finally, you adjust your future behavior with the findings from your reflection. That approach is known as the [Plan-Do-Check-Act/Adjust (PDCA) Cycle](The%20PDCA%20Cycle.md), and as the Predict-Test-Data-Evaluate Cycle in the [Lean Toyota Kata](A%20Kata%20Starter.md). ## The metrics: engagement, impact, and autonomy To be able to predict, test, reflect, and learn from changes to your leadership style, you need metrics to observe how effective those changes are. Here are three example metrics that I consider great for tracking if changes to my current behavior are leading to improvements or not. 1. Engagement: The level of **engagement** during meetings. For example, you can track the percentage of participants that spoke up during every meeting. If you present to 49 people and only one persons asks a question, that is a 4% engagement rate (you and that other person). 2. Impact: The daily delta against your business-relevant target metric for tracking the delivery of client value. If you are practicing the [Totota Kata](A%20Kata%20Starter.md), this metric would be your current [Challenge](Understand%20the%20Challenge.md) or the Next [Target Condition](Target%20Conditions.md). If you are using [Doerr's Objectives and Key Results](How%20John%20Doerr%20explained%20OKRs.md), it would be your daily progress against the Key Results. In any case, pick a metric that can track business **impact**. 3. Autonomy: The number of decisions you made yourself per day that affect more than yourself and that you could not delegate (For this metric, lower is  better.) In particular, if you subscribe to the idea of operating with an [Agile Strategy](Agile%20Strategy.md), I effectively am  proposing you should aim to maximize both alignment and autonomy at the same time. In other words, you want to track empowerment in your org. Autonomy refers to the decision making freedom of your reports, as described in the bestseller book "Drive" by Daniel H. Pink. While engagement has been described by Pink as "the route to mastery", that is, as an enabler for our desire to improve. And of course, the business-relevant metric connected to a vision is nothing else than purpose in the world of "Drive". (While I did not deduce the metrics from the book Drive, while setting up this blog post, this direct correspondence dawned on me.) As per the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, your metrics should be measured at least twice as often as you hope to be able to take corrective action: For example, if you measure daily, you can go in the wrong direction, and not notice it, for at least two consecutive days. ### Engagement The more obvious characteristic of a high performing organization or team (let’s call either an “org”) is that everyone is highly engaged and actively contributing. Therefore, observing if everyone in your org is contributing during meetings and workshops is a great way to track engagement.  To [increase engagement](2024-06-22%20Rules%20of%20Engagement.md), you can apply a few practices: As a manager, your job is to define the problems and ask the right questions; Leave defining the solutions and answering your questions to your team. If your team is not making any suggestions or decisions on how to move forward, explore why and coach them (without solving the problem itself for them). For example, you can use the [Socratic method](https://eblingroup.com/blog/how-to-lead-with-socratic-questions/) to ask your team the same questions you ask yourself - and then marvel at how the team will start finding solutions that go beyond what you had in mind. Another behavior to master for driving engagement is hosting meetings - in a way that the audience will engage with what you present. Remember that after a few minutes of talking, people will either stop following or will have forgotten what you said in the beginning. Hence, holding more than a few minutes of monologue can be a drag on engagement. A great way to improve your presentations is to record yourself on video and review if you found it [exciting](A%20SUCCESsful%20Story.md) - or keep tweaking and recording until you do. Overall, design your presentations to kindle productive conflict or ask questions to spawn a discussion. If nobody speaks up, call on someone specifically to summarize what was said as an icebreaker. Remember: As a manager, solutionizing is not your job! And if nobody speaks up in your meetings it is most likely your fault. ### Impact Yet, that characteristic alone can lead an org in the wrong direction. To avoid chaotic results, everyone also must have a **business-relevant target** that is *aligned* across the org. A target is defined as unambiguous state (a “condition”) that allows for objective measurement. That target condition describes relevant business goals and is linked to both client value and the company vision. Because if the target is a metric for a condition derived and linked in this way, increasing the metric should be synonymous to improving client value. In combination with measuring engagement, it means the engagement is having business impact, too. While the vision will be something you build your org around, by seeking out people who identify with that vision. Note that leadership and management books like Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni), Drive (Pink), and Work Rules! (Bock) all also emphasize that you need to connect your team to a purpose. That is, you and everyone in your org needs to understand and be aligned with the vision in such a way that it is personally important to them and they feel personally invested in their work. In other words, you & your team needs to be proud of what you are doing, too. ### Autonomy Finally, decision making should happen as close to the bottom of your org structure as possible. That means that everyone affected by the decision or with relevant information for it has been actively involved in the process. It turns out that you cannot achieve maximal engagement if you don’t let your reports form part of the decision making process or otherwise ignore their inputs. Therefore, you want to track how *few* decisions you yourself had to make: The less you make, the more empowered your team is. It is a measure for the true amount of autonomy you are granting. To track that honestly, you will need to be highly accountable to yourself. ## Making iterative improvements With the metrics and possible ways of improving what they measure in mind, you are ready to start experimenting. First, track the metric for a bit to understand your current condition. Then, log somewhere where you want that metric to be and by when, and due to what behavioral or process changes. Now, keep tracking your metric while making those changes. Once you reach the target date for your prediction, you compare if it came true or if you were off, be it too high or too low. Reflect on that difference and establish why it exists - in written form, for future reference. Finally, with that in mind, you can now plan further changes to your behavior and set up another cycle of predictions and testing. ## Epilogue  This short essay should have given you an idea for even more effectively leading an already content, impact-full org that is proud of its work. You can have a great team just by fostering psychological safety, being accountable to yourself, and having a conscientious compassion for your team. Yet, to go further and truly master building a high-performance team, you need to run experiments using the scientific method against meaningful metrics to figure out what really works for your particular circumstances and what does not. This technique also is useful if you want to foster a generative culture in your team despite not having company-wide support for it.