CHAPTER 11

Leading Your High-Performing Team

Business leaders have responsibility for developing and sustaining teams as well as for ensuring that the individual and collective efforts of team members are directed toward creating value and executing strategy. Team leadership is more a role than a title or a position. The BA practice lead and the BA practitioners contribute to developing and maintaining cohesive teams that perform at their highest potential.

High-performing teams are essential for your organization to respond to the competitive pressures in ever-changing domestic and global markets. BAs live and breathe as key team leaders and members in many team configurations, including project teams, virtual teams, product development teams, and autonomous work teams.

In Chapter 4 we focused on building a capable BA workforce able to control and leverage complexity. We now turn to the need for the BA practice lead (and individual BAs as well) to become an exceptional team leader. Strong teams have strong leaders. Just like a professional coach, the BA practice lead’s job is all about building and sustaining a high-performing team—your BA team and the project teams your BAs support. Fielding a great BA team requires more than just BA capability. High performance depends on superior team leadership and enlightened, passionate team members.

HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS

Examples of high-performing teams are all around us: emergency responders, symphony orchestras, and professional sports teams. These teams demonstrate their prowess, creativity, accomplishments, insights, and enthusiasm daily and are a testament to the power of teams. Yet the business project environment, especially the IT project environment, has been slow to make the most of the power of teams. The BA practice team is uniquely positioned to unleash this great power and drastically improve project performance.

To understand how to take your team from a capable group of BAs to a remarkable and celebrated team of BAs, use high-performing teams as a model. When you think of great teams you have observed, which teams come to mind? High-performing teams are the product of leadership, urgency, focus, and discipline.

PARAMEDIC TEAMS

Paramedic teams mean the difference between surviving and succumbing to an overwhelming health emergency. Paramedics consistently provide medical care at an advanced life support level, usually in an emergency, at the location of an onset of illness or injury. Paramedics almost always work in teams of two to four specialists. Each fully understands his/her role and how it integrates into the whole approach to assess the degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses and to provide life-saving interventions. It is about expertise, the importance of the mission, clear roles, and team resolve.

FIREFIGHTING TEAMS

A New York City firefighter who had been with his squad for decades explained how he handled such a pressure-filled job by saying: “I would pay them to let me be a firefighter.” He was talking about the camaraderie, the team spirit, the brotherhood, and the importance of the mission.

SYMPHONY ORCHESTRAS

The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Inc. (BSO) presents more than 250 concerts annually. It is an ensemble that has richly fulfilled its vision of a great and permanent orchestra in Boston. BSO has been the scene of almost 200 American premieres over the last century. It’s about expertise, cultural and historical contributions, and first-rate group performances.

HEART TRANSPLANT/OPERATING ROOM TEAMS

Transplant patient survival depends on well-orchestrated care delivered by the transplant team. Many historic transplants have been achieved by a team of physicians, surgeons, and researchers. It’s about top-of-their-game performance; superior medicine; highly skilled, interdisciplinary teams; and progressive, innovative techniques and technology.

NAVY SEALS

And then there are the Navy Seals, perhaps the most famous of all great teams. Seal Team Six (ST6) is a multifunctional special operations unit with several roles that include high-risk specialized missions. Required entrance skills include combat experience, language skills, and the ability to blend in as civilians during an operation. Members are selected in part because of the diversity of skills of each team member. The ST6 training schedule is without comparison in its intensity. ST6 is renowned for its amazing accomplishments.

NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT/INNOVATION TEAMS

Business success stories based on the strategic use of teams for new product development are plentiful. Apple is at the top of nearly everyone’s list when it comes to innovation. For Apple it’s about innovation, creating things we don’t even know we want or need.

3M relies on teams to develop its new products. These teams are cross-functional, collaborative, autonomous, and self-organizing. The teams deal well with ambiguity, accept change, take initiative, and assume risks.

Toyota continues to boast the fastest product development times in the automotive industry, is a consistent leader in quality, has a wide variety of products designed by a lean engineering staff, and has consistently grown its U.S. market share.

HIGH-PERFORMANCE TEAM LEADERSHIP IN THE WORLD OF BUSINESS ANALYSIS

What makes some teams effective and others extraordinary—and how can we build and sustain high-performing teams in our BA world?

To build and lead an extraordinary practice team of BAs, we need to know what all great teams have in common. Pick your favorite team as a model for your BA practice. Pay close attention. Essentially all effective team leaders use certain key strategies. Work to get your team to embrace these principles, to live them. Discuss them, devise mechanisms to reinforce them, and model them during every interaction with your team. When these elements are compromised, team performance suffers; when they come together, it is magic.

BAs and BA leads need to understand the importance of these team characteristics and simulate them to build their team leadership prowess:

•  Vision/mission-focused. Great teams understand the strategic criticality of their efforts, the mission, and the value of their work. They have a common set of values and guiding principles. They are passionate about the mission, the work, and the results. Reinforce the mission of business analysis at every opportunity: creating value to customers and wealth to the bottom line.

•  Small but mighty. Keep your team of BAs small. If the team is too big, members lose their sense of camaraderie and purpose. People begin to look at your group as a cost rather than a strategic cluster of experts who add real value. Foster a team mindset. The solidarity of teams makes us part of something bigger than ourselves.

•  Full-time, co-located, shared leadership. An important tenet of high-performing teams is co-location. Each day begins with a short meeting to bring everyone up to speed on happenings, problems, and priorities. The team gathers to review the status of each major project. Establish a quick round-the-horn quality to the meetings. This addresses the most important issues quickly. If co-location is out of the question, hold these meetings using cutting-edge virtual collaboration tools.

•  Highly trained and highly practiced. All great teams continually hone their skills. And then they practice, practice, practice! As BA practice lead, send your BAs to conferences and training sessions on advanced techniques, industry innovations, and technical trends. Insist that they report back to the whole group on what they have learned. Plan lots of time for training, practice, feedback, improvement, and more practice.

•  Diverse, multi-skilled. A high-performing team needs a variety of skills, capabilities, talents, and dexterity to understand all the perspectives of complex situations. Constantly review the diversity of your team members—diversity of expertise, seniority levels, even age and gender. Diversity facilitates gathering a broad array of perspectives and ideas before decisions are made.

•  Experienced. There is simply no substitute for experience. Get the right mix of seasoned, up-and-coming, and relatively new BAs. Seasoned BAs bring solid expertise; new BAs bring energy, motivation, excitement, and ease with the latest technologies.

•  Personally accountable. Each member of your team needs to hold him/herself personally responsible and accountable for the success of the mission. The mission—to add value to your customers and wealth to your bottom line—needs to be in the forefront of every team member’s psyche.

•  Expertly coached. Behind all great teams is an inspiring, loyal coach who consistently removes barriers to the team’s success. As BA practice lead, take extraordinary care of your team. Your team members are your most important asset.

•  Creative. Creativity is as much a matter of mindset and technique as it is intelligence. Give your team permission to be creative and the skills and techniques to pull it off. Conduct sessions with your team members to help them understand creativity and foster innovation.

•  Holistic, systems thinkers. Great teams see the whole picture and understand how complex teams need to adapt as the environment changes or more is learned. At every opportunity, relate day-to-day activities to the strategy and core values of your organization and the mission of your BA practice. During daily meetings, ensure that the team considers the big picture before making decisions to solve problems.

•  Keep score. Be sure to keep score and constantly improve your methods, approaches, relationships, quality, training, communications, and therefore, results.

LEAD YOUR TEAM TO DISTINCTION

Virtually all work today is accomplished by teams of people. Sometimes there are even teams of teams comprising groups from around the globe. We as BA leaders need to develop our team leadership skills fast. The BA practice has only a short time to make a good first impression.

Team leadership is different from traditional management, and teams are different from operational work groups. When leading high-performing, creative teams, it is no longer about command and control; rather, it is about collaboration, consensus, empowerment, confidence, and inspiration. It’s not about operational efficiency; it’s about innovation and value. Complex project teams are challenged today because of people failing to come together with a common vision, an understanding of complexity and creativity, and the right expertise.

The team leader’s challenge is to leverage the synergy within the group so that the team process produces results that individuals working alone would not be capable of accomplishing. Explore leadership models that share the leadership role within the team. Develop a real understanding of each team member’s strengths and passions. Insist on mutual accountability within the team and create an environment that is transparent and fun and that promotes healthy and spirited discussion.

ADJUST YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE BASED ON TEAM NEEDS

Your personal motivation and interaction style will influence team performance. Steer and guide your team through the evolutionary phases of team development. Understand that teams go through stages and adjust your leadership style accordingly.

To develop and sustain high performance, it is helpful to understand the key stages of team development. Bruce Tuckman’s classic team development model has become an accepted standard for how teams develop (see Figure 11-1 and Table 11-1). Become well acquainted with this model to understand how team needs change based on the stages of team development.

FIGURE 11-1. Tuckman Team Development Model

TABLE 11-1. Team Characteristics in Tuckman Model Stages

Another quick view of team development, and the way team leaders adjust their leadership style is the Kolb model (see Table 11-2). It is particularly important for the BA lead to know when and how to assume a particular team leadership style as teams move in and out of development phases.

TABLE 11-2. Kolb Team Development Model

PROMOTE TEAM SUCCESS THROUGH YOUR INFLUENCE AND LEADERSHIP

Demonstrate a commitment to your people as well as to tasks and results. This is the first priority for team leaders. Get to know your team members and what makes them excited to come to work. Use tailored motivation and interaction styles to influence each team member’s performance. Constantly conduct team health checks. Ask the team members to develop a checklist of team health areas to use as a self-assessment tool. Demonstrate to your team:

•  Your priority to support and serve the team as well as to lead it

•  Your enthusiasm, energy, inspiration, and expertise

•  Your willingness to shoulder responsibility rather than pass the buck

•  Your ability to make the team come together to achieve more than a group of individuals ever could.

JUMPSTART YOUR TEAM TO BUILD MOMENTUM

To create the infrastructure for high performance, the BA practice lead (and the BA lead on a project) needs to start the team off right. What are the mechanics of starting up and laying the foundation for a high performance team? The first and most important consideration is your team members.

GET THE RIGHT PEOPLE

The first step to high performance is getting the right people on your team. Conventional wisdom tells us that an organization needs to set an inspiring vision and well-developed strategy, and then to get people aligned behind the direction. Indeed, a common vision is essential for a team to gel and to elevate its behavior to high performance. The BA practice lead should consider several dynamics when recruiting, building, and taking care of a high-performance team:

•  Get the people with the right BA capabilities (discussed in Chapter 4), accompanied by business/technology expertise and leadership prowess to lead 21st century complex initiatives

•  Get the people who share your vision, passion, core values, accountability, and self-discipline

•  Move the wrong people off your team

•  Steer, guide, nurture, and lead your team to distinction.

Use complexity thinking to make decisions about building, leading, and developing your team. Again, as projects become more complex, more sophisticated leadership abilities are required. Do not compromise when getting the right people on your team because demand for BAs is outpacing your available BA resources. The goal is to end up with a team of BAs that are talented, passionate individuals who are a perfect fit for your organization based on its core values. The wrong people cannot be motivated to do the right thing; the right people cannot be stopped. The best hedge in an uncertain, complex world is making the right decision about who you have on your team. To build and sustain an enduring BA team, it must have a culture of people who are trusted, disciplined, fun, and who love to work hard.

GET A MIX OF EXPERTS AND NEW BLOOD

A healthy and enduring team has a mix of expert and seasoned members, sprinkled with less experienced but highly motivated individuals. Expertise is different from capability. Expertise is about knowhow, experience, and holistic thinking accompanied by the ability to view one’s skill and knowledge in the larger context. Experts are not afraid of failure; they know failure is part of the innovation process. Experts respect the contributions of others, and welcome questions and challenges to their views. Experts love to mentor and coach young, new, energetic team members.

ESTABLISH A POSITIVE, CREATIVE, YET DISCIPLINED INFRASTRUCTURE

From day one, set the tone for the BA practice. Leadership is much more challenging today. BAs are faced with how radically things have changed and continue to change. Operating in a puzzling new atmosphere devoid of certainty, where the speed of change is unparalleled and the dynamics of interdependent issues are more complex than ever, many leaders are left feeling baffled.

This new world requires agility, the ability to adapt, and skills and instincts to react with speed and flexibility. Traditional leadership models are less reliable in this new world. Innovation and new ideas are vital, yet results are unpredictable. How can your team stay focused on immediate needs, yet continue to articulate a vision for transforming how your organization uses business analysis? How can you set a new team in motion that can make a difference—fast?

SET AND REINFORCE THE TONE

Combine business smarts with fun and a few flashes of inspiration. A creative team needs both direction and freedom—with a little excitement thrown in along the way. Provide direction for your team, but then get out of their way so team members are empowered to experiment, prototype, and test new ideas.

Pay special attention to the elements of all great teams. Discuss them with your team every chance you have. Collaborate with your team members to develop mechanisms to institutionalize the elements. Pick one to highlight for team development every time you have the whole team together. And have the whole team together often. Leverage the experts on your team. Have them design and lead development sessions based on one of the aspects of great teams.

CAPITALIZE ON EARLY WINS

Every change expert advises new teams to take advantage of low-hanging fruit, to produce quick, easy wins. Engage your team to identify potential quick wins. Then, make sure everyone is aware of the difference you and your team are making. Use every opportunity to promote yourself and your team.

SUSTAIN HIGH PERFORMANCE TO MAKE LASTING CHANGE

How do you take your team of BAs from a good group to an impressive, remarkable, and celebrated team?

TAKE EXCEPTIONAL CARE OF YOUR TEAM

Assuming you have the right people on your team in terms of capabilities, and the team members believe in your core values and are passionate about your mission, the BA practice lead’s job is to support them, develop them, and inspire them. Hold periodic offsite sessions to advance skills, reinforce your mission, reinforce the core values and elements of great teams, and build camaraderie. Recognize and celebrate the unique value of the individuals on your team.

Realize that high performance is intense. It is exhausting. Like a sprint, it is very difficult to sustain over long periods of time. Allow your team to rest and recover from episodes requiring intensity.

INSTILL CONFIDENCE IN YOUR BAS TO UNLEASH THEIR POWER AND INFLUENCE

The barriers to building BA influence skills can be both individual (self-inflicted) and organizational (caused by culture and management actions or inactions). Strategies to institutionalize the influence of your BAs include the following:

•  Make business architecture artifacts relate to project requirements so everyone can see the big picture.

•  Clarify the BA role so everyone knows it’s about value and innovation; begin to call BAs consultants instead of analysts.

•  Provide BAs with a framework for determining the importance of individual requirements based on value.

•  Teach BAs to tailor their engagement style to the values and needs of their project sponsors and team members.

•  Ensure that BAs engage early and often with both the business and technical teams.

•  Encourage BAs to expand their toolkit to increase understanding of the business domain.

•  Push BAs to become better challengers in conversations with business sponsors.¹

DELIVER VALUE EARLY AND OFTEN

Be sure you build an infrastructure that can deliver real value often. Your projects need to do this—and so does your BA practice. Deliver value, measure the real value you have delivered, and communicate about it continually. Keep your eye on the business case to make sure you are on target to deliver the value that was predicted earlier, cheaper, better.

MAINTAIN INSPIRATION AND A CULTURE OF DISCIPLINE

It is a commonly held misconception that the imposition of standards and discipline discourages creativity. A project team is like a start-up company. To truly innovate, the team needs to value creativity, imagination, empowerment, and risk-taking. However, to maintain a sense of control over a large team, we often impose structure, insist on planning, and institutionalize coordination systems of meetings and reports.

The goal is to learn how to use rigor and discipline to enable creativity. Great teams (think emergency responders and surgical teams) almost always have rigid standards; they practice the execution of those standards over and over again until they become second nature. The team members work hard to examine each performance and improve the standards based upon experience.

LEVERAGE THE ADVANTAGES OF VIRTUAL TEAMS

While co-location is the ideal, a mobile, hyperconnected workforce has become the norm in the 21st century. Technology has made it easy to connect instantly with anyone all around the globe. Ensure that each virtual team embraces shared, co-located leadership. Exploit the benefits of global teams:

•  Global teams afford us access to a broad array of talented team members with diverse skills and cultural prowess.

•  Today’s employees, especially the younger generation, want flexibility and are motivated by a culture that rewards accomplishments as opposed to time clocked in the office.

•  Your attention will no longer be focused on structure, activities, and long workdays. Rather, you will focus on and look for results. This will free you and your team to become more strategic, building relationships and support for the team’s efforts.

Of course, leaders of dispersed teams face unique challenges. Take action to minimize the added complexity of working with distributed teams. Learn new ways to manage. Remember that your influence can be more effective than your authority. Work to optimize your influence skills.

Integrating deliverables from different teams across cultures becomes difficult in a virtual team. Form integration teams to manage these risks and complexities. Recognize that distant team members may feel isolated and disconnected, so involve them as often as possible. Establish state-of-the-art knowledge-sharing approaches to keep all team members engaged.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BUSINESS ANALYST?

For BAs, continually learn about great teams and effective team leadership. Strive to collaborate with your other project leaders (PM, architect, lead developer, business visionary) to take your current project team from a good, capable group to a great, high-performing team.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE BA MANAGER/ PRACTICE LEAD?

For the BA practice lead, spend most of your time, effort, and passion on building a credible, respected team of BAs. Strive to make BAs a vital part of every critical change initiative in your organization. If you have a passionate, disciplined team of BAs, your job will be a delight!

Build a team that can stimulate creativity and innovation, adapt to market forces, and tap into other organizational resources to drive breakthrough results. Approach team building at the strategic level, targeting your BA resources to the most important projects. Learn about the structure, management, and dynamics of high-performing teams.

We conclude by considering the business analyst of the not-so-distant future, who will embrace organizational values, empower teams to succeed, bring customers into the change process, and drive innovation through global partnerships.

NOTES

1   Mark Tonsetic, “Do Your Business Analysts Lack Influence Power?” CEB IT Quarterly, Q1 2014, pp. 10–13.