My experience of high-performing teams – “What People Who Worked At Google Know That You Probably Don’t”

I read this great article from Hunter yesterday and wanted to revisit one of the two main points he makes in it about high performing teams.

“2. Know what high performance teams feel like”

I’ve been a part of teams I’d class as high performing, as well as others I’d class as not. Reading the post made me reflect on what separated those different experiences. There is definitely a palpable sense you get when you join a team that’s really pushing itself. You get this sense that the people you’re around are all smarter than you. Not only that, but that everyone is busy DOing, too. In a work sense, they reply to your messages, quickly. Generally, they use more open tools (like Yammer, Twitter, Blogs etc) and so you can also see their communication cadence with others, on top of yours. You get this sense that to make the grade in this new environment, you’ll need to really work hard to ‘return serve’ to a lot of the incoming stimulus that enters your world. That you’ll need to not just do what you know, faster – but learn what you don’t know faster than you may have before.

When I joined Yammer a few years ago, it was certainly this experience that I felt. I remember my first few days at our old HQ in San Francisco at 410 Townsend Street. The Customer Success team I had joined was small, but growing quickly. I walked in the first day I was there and everyone came over the greet me and say hello. We chatted casually for a bit, introduced ourselves, then it was back to it. I was then showed where all the work happened. We had our own group on Yammer, which is where everyone posted about the work they were making progress on with their clients. That group sat within the Yammer network itself, which moved at a tremendous pace. It was awesome, in the truest sense of that word.

After I had the ‘tour’ and was left to my own devices, I stared at the screen in the customer success group. It was daunting. What could I possibly say that would be useful for these people? Luckily, I was distracted by someone asking for more of a chat so got stuck into that instead. In the end, it took me about 3 days to start posting on our Yammer network. I felt lost for words, but resigned myself to just getting started and getting some momentum on my side. Momentum is a funny concept like that. I believe it’s why high performing teams focus so much on being responsive to each other. Because if you loose that momentum, that mojo, as a group it’s very hard to get back.

It’s just one example, but that’s how a high performance team felt to me. Many people have left the Yammer Customer Success team in the years since and gone into bigger roles within Yammer or Microsoft itself, or have flown our nest for director-level roles elsewhere. But the high-performance culture amongst both that group of people and the teams they’ve left behind has mostly been maintained.