ITV’s Tom Clark spoke at DOXLON in February, proposing the hypothesis that high performance is a side-effect of creating happy teams. Andy Flemming, contributor to Deliberately Developmental Organization, also recently spoke about how to reap business and strategic benefits by creating a culture with an intentional focus on transparency, and the learning, growth and happiness of individuals.
Tom Clark, head of the common platform team at UK broadcaster ITV, spoke at DOXLON in February about how he builds on Dan Pink’s principles of autonomy, mastery and purpose to create happy and motivated teams at ITV, one of the UK’s largest media companies. His talk proposed and set out to prove the hypothesis that high performance comes as a side-effect of creating happy teams. Andy Flemming, CEO of Way to Go Inc and a contributor to the 2016 book An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, was recently interviewed on the Agile Uprising Podcast about his observations of how organisations can reap business and strategic benefits from creating a culture with an intentional focus on the learning, growth and happiness of individuals.
Clark described how he builds happy and high performing teams, by building on top of Dan Pink’s strategies for bringing out excellence within individuals through an intentional focus on the intrinsic motivators of autonomy, mastery and purpose. Clark presented his own equation for hiring and creating high performing teams:
Environment + People (Smart + Kind) + Leadership (Autonomy + Mastery + Purpose) = High Performance = Happy People
Clark described „environment“ as being about „hygiene factors,“ such as availability of suitable quiet areas for focused work, pain-free corporate technology, events such as hack days, and health factors. He said that finding people who are both smart and kind is a major part of his hiring approach. Clark defined „kind“ as the ability to fit into a team, warning organisations to avoid hiring „brilliant jerks.“ He also explained „smart“ as the ability to adapt to change, rather than expect a „laundry list of tick-boxes.“ Clark told of how a focus on individuals with an ability to learn gives them an advantage to move in line with rapidly changing best-fit technologies: „We all work in technology; technology moves very quickly. If you’re smart you can keep up. It means that when we hire people, if you know Puppet or Chef, it doesn’t matter which you know because we can teach you. Don’t just go for this laundry list of tick boxes.“
An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization introduced the concept of DDOs by examining companies „organized around the simple but radical conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people’s strongest motive, which is to grow.“ DDOs advocate for organisations to intentionally focus on learning, growth, inclusion and development. Speaking on the Agile Uprising, Flemming explained the benefits of creating an intentional culture of growing individuals and the accompanying business benefits: When you have a culture where people are stretching and growing, then you have a culture that’s better able to handle adaptive challenges, that are the kind of challenges organisations are facing more and more; the more complex ambiguous problems, that people with a growth mindset can handle.
Flemming said that DDOs promote a learning focus which is organisation wide and not focused on any specific group within the organisation. He said that the 20th century promoted a practice of investing in the learning of „a small percentage of your workforce who you believed to be the high potentials,“ providing them with targeted learnings whilst most others only grew through coincidental learnings. In contrast he explained that to remain competitive in the 21st century, organisations should deliberately aim to develop everyone at every level, including the „c-suite, frontline folks and everyone in between.“ He said: The „Deliberate“ part of DDO says, why don’t we go beyond happy accidents for people? Why don’t we create an organisational environment where people experience higher levels of challenge and support every day.
Flemming spoke of how through interviewing people in workshops, he’d found that coincidental events such as falling into roles or complex situations often turn out to be pivotal points during individual careers. He said: For most of us, those experiences are things which just kind of happened and we fell into it. If you unpack this a little bit, you notice there are common factors which enable growth experiences. They have to do with higher levels of challenge; stepping out of your comfort zone. And also higher levels of support; that you at least had one person, or maybe a group of people, who believed in you, supported you, encouraged you or held your hand at some point.
Elaborating on autonomy, mastery and purpose, Clark explained how ITV seeks to deliberately grow its teams by providing them with autonomy to make decisions, support in their journey to mastery and inspiring a sense of purpose. Explaining autonomy, Clark said: You’ve hired all these smart and kind people, let them do smart and kind things. Don’t micro-manage them. Earn trust by giving trust. Say ‚what would you do?‘ Don’t give them a set of directions. Give them a map, compass and a destination. They will get there themselves, and feel better for it. Also if they come into some roadworks, or some snow, which you couldn’t have predicted, they’ll get around it.
Clark explained mastery as the ability to become „brilliant at something through training and practice.“ He said that individuals want to be challenged and tested by their work, but that there is a Goldilocks level to aim for, where the work is neither mundane or so hard that they „burn themselves out trying to figure it out.“ He said these challenges should be „just hard enough; something that stretches them. Stuff that makes them think.“ Explaining the benefits Clark said that „maybe they learn a new skill or make a new contact.“ He described the mutual benefit to the organisation and the individuals, saying: Ultimately, at the end of the day, you get your work done and they develop as an individual.
Flemming explained that an important part of creating a transparent DDO culture involves being able to „tolerate making risks and weakness public, so that colleagues can really support each other.“ He advocated „creating a workplace safe enough and demanding enough, that everyone comes out of hiding.“
Describing high performing teams, Clark also stated that safety and learning is a core attribute.
