Team Satisfaction: a guide to managing a happy virtual team

Guest post by Jeremy Campbell, CEO of Black Isle Group  who writes about Team Satisfaction.

The new world of work calls for us to think again on how we manage and inspire our teams.  Too many businesses are stuck in the past doing the same old things – which didn’t work in the office – and applying them in the virtual world.

At Black Isle Group, we set ourselves a challenge – could we increase the performance of a virtual team by a factor of ten, in ten weeks, if we went about this in an entirely different way?

Team Satisfaction: a guide to managing a happy virtual team

Bravely, IT transformation business VCG stepped up to be our guinea pigs. The goal was to see if we could add £3million to their business pipeline in ten weeks.  We did it in four. So, if you’re paying attention now, we’ll explain how we did it for them and how it could work for you.

Let’s start with the story of the London Olympics in 2012.  Jade Jones was a teenage Welsh taekwondo athlete who dreamt of a gold medal.  Sarah Broadhead was one of her coaches. 

In the 24 months before the Games, Sarah and Jade compiled a list of the key actions they would take every single day.  It covered what Jade would need to do around sleep, diet, stretching, strength, technique, and many other things to move towards her dream of Olympic gold.  

A dozen specific actions each week translated into more than 50 small steps each month, more than 500 every year and more than 1,000 actions by the time the Games began. Sarah told us that by focusing on the everyday actions they removed the anxiety of the daunting goal of gold.

At the end of each week, athlete and coach would review their progress and agree their next set of small steps for the following week.  On this journey they were constantly being distracted by things which could push them off course or break the new habits they were embedding.  But the everyday actions brought them back on task.

Jade struck Gold in London and then against all odds repeated the feat in Rio in 2016.  She became an enduring and inspiring image of remarkable success.

So, would it work if we took that methodology and applied it to addressing business performance?  We devised a six-step methodology which brought together some of the Olympic thinking and blended it with our own experience of getting teams to buy into big goals to deliver growth.

STEP ONE – First, be very clear on the goal and make sure that everyone involved is very clear on the goal. Then organize a ten-week sprint.  Get everyone together and motivate and inspire them to smash that goal.

STEP TWO – Then sit down with each member of the team and be very specific about what they need to do to contribute to smashing the goal.  Encourage them to act small and often.  Encourage them to focus, not be distracted, and stick to the task.

STEP THREE – Then we wanted to measure our progress and make sure that everyone could see that as we went along.  To do this we devised an app called Nudge.  It did two things.  It Nudged people every day on their phones or PCs to carry out their key individual actions.  It also gave the team access to high quality tracking and insights about how they were getting on.

STEP FOUR – Next, we encouraged everyone to aim for progress and not perfection.  It was consistency we were trying to achieve not 100% infallibility.

STEP FIVE – Then we sought to make everyone accountable and to ensure they maintained momentum. Everyone got a peer coach.  We coached the leaders. At the end of the week everyone on the team had a coaching session to discuss their progress, their challenges, and their approach to the following week’s effort.

STEP SIX – Finally, we made sure that each week we celebrated the small successes, and we called out the achievements of members of the team, especially where they had helped colleagues and worked in a collaborative way.

In the words of the VCG leadership, “We knocked it out of the park. Not only did we smash the numbers, but we also saw the team work together in a way which would not have been imaginable before we set out.”

The use of the methodology of everyday actions has continued to evolve since then.  The supporting Nudge technology has also seen significant investment and development.  When we look at the reasons why teams do not buy in to a shared vision for growth, we see much more clearly why this works.  We fail through lack of clarity, failing to focus, no accountability, and being distracted. Everyday actions tackle each of these.

At the heart of this new approach is an adage of Olympic coaches, “Successful people consistently do, what others only occasionally do.”

That too is the secret of maximising performance in business.

Jeremy Campbell is the CEO of performance improvement and technology business Black Isle Group; an expert on behavioural science; and an executive coach.

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