Are you a software product or technical leader struggling to unlock your team’s true potential? Despite having talented members, do you feel teams aren’t delivering the expected outcomes?

With over 20 years of leadership experience, I’ve dedicated myself to creating high-performing teams (HPTs) by nurturing environments that unlock their potential. I’ve identified six deliberate leadership strategies to create environments where teams can excel. Before getting into these techniques, I want to provide a little background.

High-Performing Teams

You’ve likely been part of, or at least witnessed, an HPT at some point in your career, marveling at its ability to come together and deliver amazing results, outperforming similar teams and exceeding expectations. These teams seem to emerge magically when just the right mix of people come together—they gel and deliver. However, as a leader, relying on chance to build HPTs isn’t viable; you need proven techniques and be willing to put in the effort.

Intrinsic Motivation

Daniel Pink, in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” highlights that for tasks requiring creativity and cognitive skills, intrinsic motivators (coming from within) are far more effective than extrinsic motivators (external, carrot and stick). Fostering intrinsic motivation requires a management style focusing on three key elements: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

  • Autonomy gives employees more control over what they do, when they do it, how they do it, and how they work as part of their team. This requires more trust and empowerment and less command-and-control management.
  • Mastery encourages continuous improvement and learning. Employees are motivated by the desire to hone their craft. Leaders support mastery by providing opportunities for skill development and challenging work that stretches their capabilities.
  • Purpose ensures that employees understand and are connected to the organization's broader mission and know how their work fits into the bigger picture.

Intrinsic motivation and a servant leader style contrast sharply with the traditional command-and-control style, where motivation is often derived from external rewards and penalties. While extrinsic motivation might be effective for routine, mechanical tasks, it is counterproductive for a modern product team's more complex, creative functions.

The Six Strategies

It’s essential to understand that building HPTs takes time—typically six to twelve months to see significant, sustainable results. For teams to succeed, it’s critical that they possess all of the skills required to complete their work effectively and that members have time to figure out how they work together as a team. Avoid changing team composition unless you have no other options. Now, let’s get into the six techniques:

1) Setting Expectations

Setting clear expectations is critical to creating an environment where teams can succeed. Hearing frustrated executives telling managers to “hold people accountable” makes me cringe. Because, what’s typically lacking from this mandate are clear expectations for what people are being held accountable for. Explicitly setting expectations creates the ground rules and norms that are expected, and it then becomes possible to hold people accountable to those expectations.

Define and share expectations in writing. I use three documents: one for individual contributors, one for managers (that includes expectations for coaching, feedback, and mentoring of direct reports), and a third essential one that outlines what people should expect of me. These expectations cover professionalism, teamwork, culture, productivity, quality, and a commitment to learning new things and sharing what you learned. I also communicate that we’ll revisit and refine the expectations over time and that I want people to question the meaning, wording, or objective of any or all expectations.

You’re not done once you’ve shared the document; effectively establishing expectations requires frequent and ongoing communication. I’ve found that the team is starting to understand what I'm talking about just around the time I think I’ve talked too much about expectations. You must to be persistent and consistent in reinforcing expectations.

There are bonuses from clearly defined expectations: it makes providing coaching, feedback, one-on-ones, and performance reviews a ton easier. Having these established rules gives you a defined list to reference when providing feedback to your team and adds consistency and fairness to the process.

2) Clarifying Purpose

John Doerr, a prominent venture capitalist, famously said, “We want teams of missionaries, not mercenaries.” This philosophy underscores teams’ need to be deeply committed to the company’s mission and goals, not simply completing assigned tasks. As a leader, it’s your job to ensure that everyone clearly understands the value of the work they are doing and how it relates to company objectives. This clarity empowers your team and ensures their efforts align with the organizational goals.

As a leader, your team’s success hinges on your ability to clearly define the problems you’re asking teams to solve without jumping to solutions. This means you must also outline constraints the team needs to consider. For example, if you’re asking a team to architect hosting for a new app, you should also outline the company's commitment to AWS so that the team doesn’t come back with a solution that uses a different hosting provider. Once the problem is defined, it’s up to you to empower the team to explore solutions collectively. This is where autonomy and purpose come together to create that intrinsic motivation. The overwhelming evidence is that empowered cross-functional teams design and deliver better solutions than teams given a solution and told what to do.

It’s also important to create the space and psychological safety for teams to challenge you when clarity is lacking. You can assess how well you’ve provided clarity by asking anyone what they’re working on. They should easily be able to tell you how their work contributes to organizational objectives.

3) Creating Psychological Safety

Innovation thrives in an environment where teams can take risks without fear of repercussions. Establishing a culture of psychological safety—a space where team members can freely express ideas and concerns—is a fundamental leadership task. This safety creates an environment where teams can innovate and solve problems creatively. Building psychological safety requires establishing trust and providing the freedom to fail. 

One of the best ways to establish trust is to lead by example. Acknowledge when you’ve made a mistake, are uncertain, or need input from others. In doing this, you’re signaling to the team that it’s okay not to know the answer and that the team is collectively stronger than any individual. The team will follow your lead, creating a more open and trusting environment.

Teams with the freedom to fail are much more likely to try something new or take on a more challenging project than teams without this freedom. Part of psychological safety is the knowledge that you can push the envelope, step up to a challenge, and not be afraid of being knocked down, reprimanded, or criticized if it doesn’t work out. We learn more from failure than from success.

As a leader, it’s also your responsibility to establish guard rails that limit the blast radius of any failure. If someone wants to try something new, ask them to start small with a prototype or proof of concept and prove it out before committing more resources or making too big a bet on its success.

4) Committing to Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement encompasses people, teams, processes, and products. Continuous improvement is about constantly learning and adapting. Encourage individual learning goals, look to retrospectives to identify improvement opportunities, embrace iterative development, and use user feedback to evolve your product.

Don’t accept the status quo; look for growth opportunities and challenge your team to grow. Successful HPTs evolve quickly, learn constantly, and share what they’ve learned with others. Evolution is part of the process; something that worked six months ago may no longer work today. To avoid chaos, take a deliberate, sustainable, and methodical approach to continuous improvement, helping to ensure that everyone can keep up and adapt to the changing landscape.

5) Committing to Quality

Have you heard someone say, “We don’t have time to write tests. It’ll slow us down?” I’m here to tell you that’s a fallacy; any short-term gains will be quickly lost as the support and maintenance work ramps up. It’s a recipe for failure in the long term. Committing to quality and taking the time to “build things right” ensures that teams can continuously deliver sustainably. Short-cutting the process does not pay off. Commit to quality, spend the extra time now, and reap the reward, probably sooner than you’d guess. I’ve seen refocusing on quality pay off in productivity gains in less than six weeks due to reduced distractions caused by things breaking.

Committing to quality involves establishing high standards for your teams, creating processes supporting them, and measuring performance against them. As part of this, it's critical to set a "definition of done" that includes quality measures and acceptance criteria. When something fails or goes wrong, as it will, evaluate why and make changes to your standards or practices to prevent recurrence.

Quality is not the sole responsibility of the QA team. Everyone has a role in quality, from scoping through deployment to production. It’s far less expensive to catch an issue during requirements definition than after the code has been deployed. This is why it’s important to ensure that everyone understands their role in quality and to have a QA engineer on the team who is engaged in the process from beginning to end.

6) Measuring for Change

Continuing from committing to quality is measuring for change. Your metrics should reflect, inform, and help drive improvement. Avoid using metrics as targets, making changes to drive improvements, or focusing on driving the numbers. Don’t game the system by changing how you do things or making heroic efforts simply to improve the indicators.

Define a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure the health of your team’s environment and process. Start with a small set of 4 or 5, and have at least one be an anonymous team survey. Use these KPIs to establish a baseline and for ongoing progress assessment. For product and software development, look at the DORA Metrics and the SPACE Framework for some guidance and take the time to understand how to use them effectively.

Take Your Time and Enjoy the Process

In closing, approach these techniques methodically, one at a time. I’d suggest you start with number one and work your way down the list, but feel free to hop around based on your situation. By necessity, the transformation will be a gradual process, and your current culture will influence it. 

Be patient and persistent. Leading modern product teams can be both challenging and rewarding. You shouldn’t expect to get any credit when teams succeed. It’s like the adage: "When a team wins, it's the players who get the credit; when the team loses, it's the coach who gets the blame." Focusing more time on the six techniques above will help you turn daily frustrations into opportunities for improved creativity and productivity. Embrace the journey, be open to change, and remember to have fun and learn from each experience.