Direction, Focus, Execution – the Magic Ingredients of Great Teams

Key Factors for Great Teams

The key ingredients to make a happy individual are Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy. What are the key ingredients for groups of people?

Working with teams in a diverse range of contexts, countries, and industries I’ve distilled it down to three factors. Direction, Focus, and Execution. Happy, productive teams always have all three. Teams that are struggling with delivery are missing one or more ingredients. Let’s look at them in detail.

Direction

For people to work together effectively, they must agree on where they are going. Teams with clear direction know where they are, where they need to get to, and they collaborate on finding the best route. With a visible destination, shared by the whole team, you can be confident that any progress will be directionally correct.

When a team is unclear on the destination or -worse- has differing opinions about the direction, you will have dysfunction. People will not be able to link their work to a clear purpose. There will be conflict about what does and does not matter. The team will not be able to plan well. Without clear direction the team will be unable to decide what is necessary, and effort and time will be wasted.

Critically, without clear direction, individuals will lack a sense of purpose, and that will make them miserable and unproductive. Misery is infectious.

As leaders, our role is to ensure that all your people and teams have a single clear direction at all times. The direction may be handed to you as part of your organisations mission. It might be something you need to work out for yourself. It might emerge from work your teams have delivered. The origin in unimportant. What matters is that you have a direction and everyone understands it.

Go to one of your teams now. Talk to few people. Ask them “What’s the destination? Where are we going with this project?”

You want to hear consistent answers that align to your understanding. If everyone is saying roughly the same thing and it aligns with what you expect, you’re done. The team has direction. If you hear disparate answers, or vague responses, or get a sense that that team does not have clear direction, then you need to fix this as a matter of urgency. Until the team has that single destination, they are almost certainly wasting energy and time.

Get the team together. Tell them what the direction is. “We’re going to plant this flag on that hill. By doing that, we achieve the following things.” Get the team to demonstrate that they understand where they are going. Have them paint a picture of the destination. Then, in a week or so, go back and ask again. Until the team have a genuine sense of direction, you are generating waste.

Focus

Having clear direction is not enough. We need to be certain that all out effort, energy, time, and resources are pointed at the target. I have often seen teams who can all tell me what the direction is, but when I ask them what they are doing and how it takes us to the destination struggle to align the activity to the target. These teams lack focus.

Ask the team what they are doing right now. Ask them how it’s taking us to the destination. Every single activity should be driving us to the goal. If you find people doing things that are not aligned to the goal, investigate why. Do they not understand the destination? Is the team not testing all their plans against the destination? Is it stuff they’ve always done. Find the cause and fix it.

Any work that is not aligned to the goal in waste, and as leaders we need to stop it.

Execution

It’s not enough to point at the direction. You have to be moving. If your team can articulate the direction, and all their plans and commitments are aligned to the direction, and nothing is getting done, then you have an execution problem. Fortunately, this one is also easy to fix. Are the team breaking the work down well? Are they making realistic commitments every iteration? What are they actually doing? Do they have a culture of ‘Done?’ If these things aren’t where they need to be, the team needs to fix it. The first step is to make the problem visible. Once the team agrees that the problem is in execution, they will usually be able to identify the blockers to delivery. As leaders, our role is to help the team remove those blockers.

Summary

High-performing teams have clear direction, laser-like focus, and relentless execution. We should always be confident that our teams have all three elements. When a team is struggling, it is almost always because one of those elements is missing. As leaders, or role is to set the direction, ensure focus, and to enable execution. If we do that our teams will succeed.

Charles Randles is a highly experienced Enterprise Delivery Professional. He has led, mentored and coached on programs up to the billion-dollar scale around the world. He believes in building a Culture of Trust that empowers people to be their best. You can contact him on 0430 0135 20 or at charles@charlesrandles.com.