What are your views on what it takes to create winning teams?
A couple of weeks ago, I held a session with a group of investors where we discussed the topic of winning teams. Some of the building blocks we looked at included: culture and values, experience, relationships and skills and capabilities. What are some of the key characteristics that you are trying to foster in your organizations to foster winning teams for value creation?
Best Answers
-
I think one has to start with alignment. Are the goals of the individuals, the team and the organization aligned. It takes a lot of work to get to this three way alignment, work we often skip over, and once achieved it needs to be maintained.
The other part of this turns on skills. This ia three part question:
- Do the people on the team have the skills needed?
- Do the people on the team have the connecting skills that let them work together effectively?
- Are the other parts of the environment in place to let these skills be expressed (one can think of the skills as a kind of performance gene and the expression of those skills in the work context as a phenotype)
1 -
I truly believe that culture and values are what contributes the most to building a winning team. If you are able to determine your team's purpose (WHY) and find people who share your same beliefs and purpose, it becomes easier to align everyone on the WHAT you do and HOW you do it. The purpose becomes the reason for being, thus driving decision making, processes, KPIs, etc.
It is true that you need people with the right skillset and capabilities, but if they are not motivated by a purpose and only focusing on what they need to do and how to do it, the team will not differentiate itself from a team working with a clear purpose.
If you want to know more about this topic, I suggest the book "Start with Why" by Simon Sinek. Our Support team has defined our why statement and ensuring that the people we hire are aligned with our purpose on top of having the required skillset. This has helped in aligning objectives.
I hope this helps.
5
Answers
-
@Patrick Martin Would you be able to share the 'Why' statement for your support team? Thanks
0 -
@Steven Forth sure thing! Here it is:
To transform every situation into an enriching experience, one interaction at a time, so that Coveo employees, partners and customers strive towards their desired outcomes.
We wanted something that covers more than just the customer service per se. We wanted to have a statement that would apply to all interactions, whether they be with your colleagues, managers, tools and systems, projects, etc. That's why we included employees and partners in the second part of the statement. It also ensures that everything we do is centralized on these impacts, whether it be directly assisting our customers, or creating a knowledge article, or redesigning our self-service portal. Every situation must be an enriching experience, that is our belief. We use this in our opening paragraph of our job description:
"Are you someone who believes that a positive experience can make a huge difference in people’s appreciation of specific companies, services or products? As customers ourselves, are we not delighted each time we have a pleasant experience interacting with a customer service department? Can you remember the best experience you had when in need of assistance? Did it influence how you felt about the company? Chances are, it did.
At Coveo, our Technical Support team is on a mission to transform every situation into an enriching experience, one interaction at a time, so that Coveo employees, partners and customers can strive towards their desired outcomes. If this resonates with you, please read on. "
This approach helps us attract people who believe what we believe and be great culture fits for the company. It makes alignment much easier as everything we do is inspired by our WHY.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you would like to know more.
2 -
Thanks @Patrick Martin That is inspirational. Have you also found a way to align this with how you measure individual and team performance?
0 -
Thanks @Steven Forth ! We hold our team members accountable to CSAT measures as part of their MBOs. Our transactional survey questions are aligned to measure the behaviors we believe contribute to delivering enriching experiences. We also do case reviews in which our criteria for these quality reviews are aligned with our statement. As part of our Knowledge Management process, we also have article reviews and you guessed it, our AQI criteria is also aligned.
For improvement projects, we involve team members and gather their feedback along the way so that we ensure that what we are putting in place contributes positively to their experience. We hold quarterly workshops with team members to gather feedback on a specific topic (coming from our engagement survey results).
We are in a continuous improvement mindset so always trying to improve our service delivery, customer and employee experience.
1 -
Thank you @Steven Forth . We agree on this of course as we have worked together on skills.
@Patrick Martin , Thank you for sharing the observation on culture and values. This was one of the first items that surfaced on the discussions. It also ties very closely to Steven's observations around alignment. I completely agree that motivation by a common and shared purpose is critical to impact value. Love the way that you were able to also tie this into measuring behaviours. Are you able to share some of the behavior that you have defined? I can already see how a great deal of this insight can be mapped to your customer journeys.
0 -
Hi @Karen Chiang, sorry for the delayed response here. As we were reviewing this, we identified the behaviors that we believed contributed to enriching experiences and this is what we came up with:
- Knowledgeable agents
- Accessibility
- Responsiveness
- Accuracy of solution offered
- High quality interactions
- Courtesy
I hope this helps. Let me know if you would like further information.
0 -
@Patrick Martin Can you say bit more about 'high-quality interactions'? This seems to me to be more of an outcome. What skills and behaviors deliver this outcome?
0 -
Hi @Steven Forth ,
You are right, it can be seen as an outcome. There can be several behavior traits and skills that contribute to "high-quality interactions":
- Communication skills
- Customer focus
- Product knowledge
- Understanding of customer's business outcomes
We have a well defined case quality guide that is used to review and measure case quality. It focuses on 2 main aspects of the job:
- Process compliance (are the right fields well filled and case well documented)
- Quality of interactions
- Accuracy of solution
These 3 sections are weighted accordingly to drive the expected behaviors and outcomes. I hope this helps clarify and answer your questions. Let me know if you would like further information.
2 -
In my view and simplifying what has been said previously there are essentially two key factors:
- Leadership - make sure you have the right people leading and managing your staff. Provides the vision and defines the purpose.
- Framework - the formalisation of tools & processes that drives excellence and ensure success is repeatable.
1
