The Magic of a High Performing Team

Early in my career, I was lucky enough to be part of a high performing team. It came about by happenstance, a fortunate intersection of different people, together at the right time, trying to accomplish an audacious goal. For those who are curious, it was the Saab 9-3 Infotainment system.

Picture of the SAAB Navigation system from a USA test trip April 2003

In retrospect, it was a crazy architecture and system design. Some questioned it at the time, many questioned it in after hand. It was definitely one of automotive’s most complex CD players: at least three MOST bus nodes (developed by three different suppliers) were required to listen to a CD (at the time, the primary source of audio entertainment in the car).

Earning my SAAB jacket at my going-away party (December 2003)

What was magic for me was both the core team of people who effectively lived in a small conference room in Trollhättan, and the extended teams around the world who came together to make this unnecessary complex system functional and even fairly reliable. We had a goal that consumed our lives at the time: to launch the system with a comparable quality to state of the art at the time. It was a difficult task.

It was also some of the most fun I have ever had in my life. Being part of a high performing team is one of the best experiences we can have. We trust our own contributions and feel safe bringing our opinions and thoughts forward. We also deeply respect those around us, recognizing that while they might have different opinions and perspectives, we know we are all working towards a common goal.

I spent many years chasing that experience. Not to say that the teams that I worked with through the years weren’t great people or doing interesting and good things. It just didn’t have the magic that the team in the conference room in Trollhättan had.

When I learned about Susan Wheelan’s Integrated Model of Group Development, I learned that it wasn’t magic that we had in Trollhättan.

It was an intersection of several critical items that take make high performing teams:

1. A common and aligned goal

2. A team of different people with different strengths and weaknesses, but each playing in their best role

3. Strong task conflict (how do we do things, what is good enough, what is a priority), but not personal conflict (high mutual trust and respect)

   
   

Once I learned this, I wanted to create these teams as much as possible.

Together with Wheelan’s model of team development and several other tools to help teams reach task conflict rather than personal conflict (Belbin Team Roles, The Culture Map, various trust frameworks), I want these teams in my own life and work, as well as to help others to Be a Better Team!

The world, and our work, is better because we are different.

When we disagree, we have a chance to do something better. To build a better product, to achieve greater innovation, to reduce cost and increase value, and even to save lives.

I have tremendous appreciation for a high performing team that I am working with: Our Adventures of ‘ittle Bear team.

As many teams, we have core team members who work regularly together on every project. We also have many extended teams, such as a translation team or an outreach team (our Ambassadors). We also have supporters who donate to specific campaigns or general book donations to schools, libraries, and non-profits around the world.

We started with a small ambition: to write books to teach children about our wonderful world of differences, and give them tools (superpowers of curiosity, courage, and compassion) to navigate them.

Our ambition has grown, a lot, primarily because the amazing people who have joined our team and what we are able to achieve with different strengths and different ideas.

Our translators help us reach more kids, in more languages and cultures. Some of our volunteers are paid, others volunteer because they want to bring our books to their language. I’m so grateful for our passionate translation team as we have released several languages now that I can’t understand at all.

Our Ambassadors are all volunteers, who in their own unique way, contribute tremendously to our efforts. We definitely would not have reached the number of people we have without their volunteering their time to share our books, read to classrooms, and bring our work to the world. Many of them have connections, ideas, or are simply better sales people than I will ever be.

Our supporters provide us financial resources to help us do more than we can accomplish on our own limited budgets. Books are not high profit, so we would not be able to accomplish all the translations and donations without the tremendous support that we have from our our supporters.

We are where we are today, because of the unique contributions from so many people!

This morning I am feeling super thankful and grateful for the high performing team we have for The Adventures of ‘ittle Bear.

First of all, our amazing graphic designer, Jennifer Royall Anderson, is juggling four releases this week, yet still maintains her amazing eye for detail. For anyone who knows me well, you know that I am not a detailed person. Thankfully, we have team members who are.

In our final review to release the Swedish edition of Adventures in Sweden, she caught that the moose ears had somehow shifted. Although both my husband and I looked at it multiple times, we never noticed. Can you see it?

Proof images where one is correct and the other has minor issues

If you still can't see it, keep reading and you'll find a guide at the bottom!

I also want to say a huge thank you to Charlotta Sandh whose detailed review of our Swedish translation helped us catch many errors, mainly in my own copy/paste of the translation. I’m also really grateful that Molly has come in and had several key contributions to the Swedish translation.

I used to try to be and do everything well myself. I was a stressed mess, because humans are intrinsically fallible. Perfection in an individual isn’t achievable, and unfortunately too many of us burn ourselves out trying to achieve it instead of pairing with others whose strengths are our weaknesses.

By forming the right teams of people around me, I can focus on what I’m good at and know that I have others to bring their strengths in where I am weak. Instead of feeling threatened by them, I am glad for them. We draw energy from one another, and we each do our own part to make better books, better products, and a better world.

It took me a while to get to that point, but now that I see the power in teams, I want to be part of them in all aspects of my life: at work, at home, and in my legacy project of ‘ittle Bear. Interested in being a part of our team? Let’s talk!

Teams can do so much more together than any one of us could do on our own - especially when the team has different people with different strengths!

Would you like to talk more about how to build your own high performing team? Reach out and maybe I can help you create some magic in your team!

And if, like me, you didn't catch the error, here is some help:

Zoomed images where the left image has the ears correctly on the female moose. The right image has them shifted off position.