Guide to Facilitating High-Performing Teams
SUMMARY
If anyone can assemble a group of developers, why do our clients choose to work with Headforwards?
In part, the answer to this question lies in our knowledge of the power of team. Engineering excellence and true expertise are invaluable ingredients in building great solutions, but without the right conditions, high performance will most likely still elude you.
Three of our team, combining delivering leadership and experienced expertise have explored the research and looked at the Headforwards methodology to craft this guide. It aims to give some insight into the approaches we use, and to help you think about some of the pillars that move you towards high performance.
Read the guide below, or click the link to download a PDF.
Contents
Creating the Conditions for High Performance
How High-Performing Teams Deliver Better Software
How We Build and Nurture a High-Performing Team
Bring Together Great Team Players
Create a Culture of Learning and Development
Align Teams with Organisational Goals
Support Teams with Effective Leadership
How We Measure Team Performance
Introduction
High performing teams are the holy grail in software engineering. High performing teams not only enhance organisational performance but also help improve innovation, creativity, and job satisfaction among team members, the combination of which delivers better solutions through better software.
For Headforwards, creating and facilitating high performing teams have always been central to the work we do. In the early days of operating as a business, we found ourselves asked to go head-to-head with clients’ in-house teams, working on the same proof of concept. Without fail we found that our teams’ solutions were deemed the best, delivered faster, and were ultimately implemented by our clients.
Since this time, we’ve consistently explored what it means to be a high performing team, and how to build one. This guide explores the fundamental aspects of creating and nurturing high-performing teams, providing practical insights into recruitment strategies, relationship building, leadership, and aligning team goals with organisational objectives.
Effective team facilitation goes beyond assembling skilled individuals; it requires a deliberate focus on attitude, trust, continuous learning, and clear leadership. Research indicates that hiring for attitude rather than just technical skills results in a more adaptable and motivated workforce. Building strong relationships within teams, fostering a culture of continuous development, and ensuring alignment with organisational goals are key to maintaining high performance. Additionally, supportive and visionary leadership that encourages autonomy and innovation can significantly enhance team dynamics and productivity. This guide delves into these strategies, offering actionable advice and evidence-based practices to help organisations develop resilient and high-performing teams, shaped by our own experience of doing it time over the last 14 years.
Anyone can assemble a group of developers, but that doesn’t give you a team.
Craig Girvan
Director and Co-Founder
Creating the Conditions for High Performance
A team can potentially be ‘more than the sum of its parts’, enhancing organisational performance. But this is not a given – a poorly functioning team may be counterproductive, so it is essential to gauge a team’s effectiveness and understand what influences it.
High performing teams are a combination of tangible and intangible elements. Research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) shows that team dynamics play an essential role in performance. Trust, psychological safety, and team cohesion are crucial in effective teamwork, especially in virtual or newly formed teams.
Organising team knowledge through developing shared thinking, information sharing, collective memory, and team reflection can improve performance. Well-planned interventions such as team building, debriefing sessions, and goal setting can also increase team effectiveness.
In addition, teams need clarity of direction. To be high performing, teams need to know what they’re driving towards and what a great outcome looks like. At Headforwards, we empower our teams to self-organise to deliver maximum value. When empowered, people enjoy their work; when they do, they deliver the most value. We empower each team to decide how and when they work. We support our people in learning, developing, and growing in the way they find most fulfilling. Supporting these approaches with effective leadership, a clear team objective, which also works to align teams with overarching organisational goals and measure success using metrics, all combines to unite Headforwards’ teams towards high performance.
How High-Performing Teams Deliver Better Software
Software development is a collaborative and creative task that relies on extensive and effective communication, coordination, and collaboration within and between teams. Effective teams that successfully contribute to and integrate each other’s work efficiently rely on high transparency and awareness of team member activities and task priorities.
DORA’s research suggests that software delivery performance is a strong indicator of organisational performance. The ability to consistently deliver high-quality software quickly, known as fast flow, is, in turn, linked to software delivery performance. One effective method for achieving fast flow is deploying small, self-organising, cross-functional teams focused on producing specific outcomes. To deliver software effectively, these teams should include all the necessary development, testing, deployment and product development skills.
Focusing on outcomes ensures the team’s efforts align with the customers’ needs and the business’s goals. It encourages the team to think beyond simply completing tasks and to consider how their work can create value. Defining the team’s goal regarding desired results (outcomes) rather than specific tasks (outputs) allows for multiple paths to success.
Focus on outcomes over outputs, 2023
Effective teamwork is about more than just reducing communication overhead and achieving coordination and collaboration. It’s about creating an environment where colleagues trust each other and feel psychologically safe to speak up or take risks.
Regular reflection (retrospectives) enables teams to refine their processes in sympathy with the evolution of the team, product, and broader organisation. Finally, regular planning sessions at both a high and low level allow the team to build what’s needed. Ultimately software engineering is about delivering value, so high performing teams need an awareness of business context so they’re building the right thing, not just more.
Any business comprised of teams which exhibit these tendencies can better assure their clients of reliable, quality outcomes, and can better assure itself of continued stability, growth and success.
How We Build and Nurture a High-Performing Team
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
And trust them to get the job done.
Principals behind the Agile Manifesto, 2001
This section delves into the essential components and practical steps necessary to build teams that not only perform well but also thrive in a collaborative environment for the long term. By understanding and implementing these principles, organisations can ensure that their teams are equipped to deliver long-lasting outstanding results. From hiring for attitude to fostering trust and psychological safety, the following guidelines will help create and maintain a high-performing team that is motivated, resilient, and aligned with the overarching goals of the organisation.
Bring Together Great Team Players
Of new hires who don’t last, nearly 90% lose their jobs due to something involving their attitude or personality (e.g., lack of coachability, poor emotional intelligence, low motivation or a bad temperament). Only 11% of new-hire failures lose their jobs due to technical incompetence.
Leadership IQ, 2020
It’s not going to be a surprise to anyone, that poor attitude affects performance, a scenario that is certainly not unique to software teams.
Research conducted by LeadershipIQ.com indicates that employees with positive attitudes tend to succeed regardless of their prior experience, while those with negative attitudes often fail despite their skills and expertise.
Hiring for attitude ensures a more rewarding and positive work environment in a job market where employees highly value company culture.
Headforwards emphasises candidates’ perceived approach to work and attitude during the hiring process. By prioritising employee attitude, we can create a work environment where employees are more likely to collaborate, resolve conflicts, and inspire one another.
Attracting people with the right attitude improves morale and productivity and makes us versatile enough to take on new technologies quickly. All these factors combine to create longer-lasting, higher-performing teams. This approach can then be reinforced over time, not least in Headforwards’s “Career Progression Framework” and “Ways of Working”, our guide to assist in establishing new teams, to further build a lasting work culture which sustains teams throughout.
Build Strong Relationships
In their report, High-performing Teams: an Evidence Review, the CIPD found that high-performing teams thrive on good relationships and trust. The primary factors in building these are other team members’ perceived reliability, integrity, and competence. In addition, creating emotional bonds of friendship, caring, and closeness among team members is crucial for cultivating trust among colleagues and significantly impacting performance.
Colleagues must trust each other and feel psychologically safe to speak up or take risks.
CIPD, 2024
The CIPD report states that the best way to build closeness within teams is to foster social cohesion by engaging in team-building activities and creating an inclusive environment where all members feel accepted and valued. It’s important not to confuse team cohesion with a team of people who all think the same. Teams need diversity, in the broadest sense, to develop better solutions. Very different people can still be part of a high performing team, but trust, respect and inclusivity will all be present.
How we do this:
- Even if teams will be working remotely, we tend to programme a good amount of time early on for the team to get together face to face. Familiarity is important, and people get to know each other and build a relationship more quickly human to human than screen to screen. We don’t just do this with our own teams. When we start working with new clients we also accelerate the performance of our teams by ensuring face to face onboarding time between our people and our client team.
- The Headforwards Way is an innocuous-looking document that holds a surprising amount of power. The Headforwards Way outlines the six principles that describe how we work and what we believe as an organisation. New people get a copy of it and are talked through it by one of our founders. It might not seem like much but it immediately communicates and rapidly enables our teams to understand how we collaborate, work and deliver. It’s the cultural ingredient that explains why we’re able to leverage our engineering expertise so effectively.
- Social activities are well programmed at Headforwards. Our headliner is our annual Headstock festival, an all day and evening event that brings together our people and their families from across the country. BBQ, bands and camping in the Cornish sun provide the opportunity for people to informally spend time together away from the office and invest in the team relationships.
- At Headforwards, professional relationship building plays its own role how teams are developed. We cultivate strong relationships by sharing in successes, teaching each other skills and recognising everyone brings something of value to the table.
- The final ingredient is time itself, time which eventually proves to any new hire that the values Headforwards espouses are not just words on a screen but inform our working lives on a daily basis, for the long term, which builds a sense of familiarity and safety that leads to employee investment in our clients and the business itself.
Lastly, it’s worth reiterating that by hiring for attitude as well as aptitude, Headforwards has created an atmosphere of great relationships and trust within teams. This doesn’t mean “personality hires”, but it also doesn’t mean believing that someone has to have all the exact experience and technologies you might be seeking – instead hiring individuals that are product-minded, engineers-at-heart, that enjoy solving problems, hold opinions but hold them loosely and support each other. These attributes and attitudes are what you need for a high performing team.
Create a Culture of Learning and Development
Research by DORA shows that organisations that value learning also perform better in terms of overall team culture and the frequency and quality of releases. DORA’s report suggests that effective learning cultures treat learning as a strategic investment, providing formal education budgets, informal learning opportunities, and safe spaces for innovation and failure. Regular knowledge-sharing events, conference participation, and certifications are also encouraged. Measuring learning culture through employee surveys ensures continuous improvement and alignment with organisational goals, enhancing performance and innovation.
At Headforwards, we go beyond the usual training, mentoring, and certifications by offering unique opportunities for our team members to shine through our HeadTalks initiative. These presentations, run by our staff, attract large and engaged audiences, providing a platform for sharing insights and showcasing expertise. Additionally, Headforwards is deeply committed to fostering learning and collaboration outside the broader tech community, leading at prominent events like Agile on The Beach and partnering with organisations such as Tech Cornwall (formerly Software Cornwall).
Headforwards has even gone the extra step of launching its own Digital Academy which helps individuals and businesses acquire technical skills and a mindset for leveraging technology, supports digital transformation and career switches into software development. It aims to go further than ever by providing prospective employees with a direct route into the roles they’re looking for and that we hope to fill.
This vibrant culture of continuous learning and community engagement significantly enhances the performance of our teams, in part by raising the bar for everyone. By encouraging our developers to present and share knowledge, we cultivate a sense of ownership and pride in their work. Our involvement in broader community events keeps our teams at the cutting edge of industry trends and practices, creating a collaborative environment that promotes innovative problem-solving and continuous improvement. The result is a motivated workforce well-equipped to tackle complex challenges and deliver outstanding results for our clients.
Align Teams with Organisational Goals
Alignment plus autonomy is a potent combination. The strong link between software delivery performance and organisational outcomes can empower teams to reflect on their practices and improve over time.
DORA Guides
Software developers need business and commercial context in order to build something of value. Software developers should be skilled in solving problems, but making sure you give them the right problem to solve.
Establishing a shared understanding of organisational goals as part of project initiation (and new team member onboarding) creates a solid foundation. Making organisational performance (such as OKRs or KPIs) visible helps teams see the impact of their efforts.
The team regularly reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.
Principals behind the Agile Manifesto, 2001
Many software delivery teams use some variation of an Agile framework (usually Scrum or Kanban), which provides opportunities to reflect on progress in achieving organisational goals, brainstorm areas of improvement, and iterate. In practice, reflection might take the form of regular meetings with clients and stakeholders (every couple of weeks) to demonstrate what has been built/delivered and solicit feedback, and team retrospectives, where the team reviews how it was built and may come up with ideas to improve the process. Teams use regular planning sessions (daily and every couple of weeks) to set themselves short-term goals and review progress. Depending on the context, high-level planning sessions help keep teams aligned with broader organisational goals – quarterly planning or maybe more targeted delivery, engineering, and operations planning.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams.
Principals behind the Agile Manifesto, 2001
Self-organising, cross-functional teams are empowered to make the technical decisions necessary to get the work done. In the highest-performing teams and organisations, teams can make informed decisions about their tools and technologies.
At Headforwards, we subscribe to the Dan Pink philosophy that the key to our motivation is:
- Autonomy – in control of what we do and how we do it
- Mastery – improving our skills and selves
- Purpose – working towards something worthwhile
We aim to ensure that teams understand their value (purpose) and are empowered to do the job as they see fit (autonomy).
Support Teams with Effective Leadership
Both CIPD’s report and DORA’s assert that effective leaders should inspire and guide their teams with a clear vision and goals. They must facilitate open and transparent communication, ensuring team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns. This approach builds trust and psychological safety, essential for creativity and innovation. Additionally, leaders should be mindful of promoting a culture of continuous learning and development, encouraging team members to expand their skills and adapt to new challenges.
Strong leaders empower their team by giving workers autonomy and encouraging decision-making at all levels. They recognise and leverage the diverse backgrounds and skills within the team to drive better problem-solving and innovation. Leaders ensure everyone achieves the same goals by aligning the team’s efforts with common objectives and values. Recognition for achievements further motivates the team, creating a supportive work environment.
Delivery leadership emphasises achieving project outcomes within scope, time, and budget constraints. This type of leadership focuses on efficiency, reliability, and execution through meticulous project planning, resource allocation, risk management, and progress monitoring. By ensuring that projects are completed on time and within budget, delivery leaders positively impact the business by enhancing operational efficiency, reducing costs, and ensuring customer satisfaction, thus contributing to the development of high-performing teams that are capable of consistently delivering successful projects.
Technical leadership centres on leveraging technical expertise to solve complex problems and drive innovation. Technical leaders mentor their team members in technical skills, push for continuous improvement, and stay updated with technological changes in the industry. This leadership style impacts a business positively by promoting technical excellence and innovation. Technical leaders help build high-performing teams by encouraging a work culture of learning and innovation, which will lead to the development of cutting-edge solutions to meet requirements. Where Delivery Leads ensure a team is building the right thing, Technical Leads ensure the thing is built right.
People leadership operates alongside and focuses on developing, motivating, and ensuring the well-being of team members. Emphasising emotional intelligence, effective communication, and relationship building, people leaders coach their teams, manage conflicts, and create a positive team culture. This leadership style positively affects the business by improving team cohesion, increasing employee satisfaction, and reducing turnover rates. By prioritising the growth and well-being of team members, people leaders cultivate a supportive environment that enhances overall team performance and productivity.
The CIPD report highlights how delivery, technical, and people leadership types support each other to build a well-rounded leadership approach. Delivery leaders ensure that projects are on track, which provides a structured environment where technical leaders can focus on innovation without being bogged down by other concerns. Technical leaders, in turn, drive the development of advanced solutions that keep the business competitive. People leaders support both delivery and technical leaders by maintaining high team morale. This interconnected support system ensures that all aspects of team performance are addressed, leading to sustained high performance of teams. These three aspects are required, and they could be provided by the same individual, or different individuals.
Headforwards applies these leadership traits by emphasising team collaboration, continuous improvement, and what the CIPD report identifies as transformational leadership practices. The focus on coaching, fostering innovation, and maintaining a purposeful vision at Headforwards aligns with the leadership principles outlined by both the CIPD and DORA.
Headforwards encourages its leaders to inspire and support their teams, leading to better results and less burnout. Businesses can adopt similar strategies by prioritising employee development, encouraging innovation, and ensuring clear, purposeful leadership, thereby creating an environment where high performance can thrive. You can set very clear boundaries and direction as clarity and directive leadership can still be compatible with an empowered, facilitative leadership style.
How We Measure Team Performance
Performance vs Productivity
Our teams need to know that their work is making a difference. Our customers need to know that we can meaningfully serve their needs. And our organisations need to know that we are sustaining real growth.
Outcome and Output: What’s the Difference and why does it matter?
While output metrics (velocity or deployment frequency) and activity metrics (lines of code or number of commits) are generally readily available, they are proxies for measuring the outcomes organisations are interested in – i.e., the tangible business impact expressed in income saved, generated, or protected.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
(Goodhart)
Even when used as proxy measures, output metrics only show part of the picture. As discussed earlier, factors such as team dynamics are essential for high-performing teams but not as readily measured (although they can often be observed or uncovered). Another reason that we cannot take output metrics at face value in the context of measuring a high-performing team is the fact that the output of a team may be heavily impacted by environmental factors (e.g., ease of delivery, suitability of tooling, dysfunction at an organisational level) and a team may well be performing exceptionally given the circumstances. Finally, we must be mindful that whatever we measure will likely influence behaviour (Goodhart’s Law), which can be a force for good but equally drive dysfunction.
Busting Productivity Myths
Productivity cannot be reduced to a single dimension (or metric!)
The SPACE of Developer Productivity, 2021
According to research presented in the paper, The SPACE of Developer Productivity (2021), some common myths and misconceptions persist relating to measuring productivity:
- Productivity is only about individual performance.
- One productivity metric can tell us everything.
- Productivity measures are only valid for managers.
- Productivity is only about engineering systems and developer tools.
The paper gives evidence to bust these myths. It presents an approach that measures productivity across several dimensions and at the individual, team, and system levels.
The SPACE of Developer Productivity
The SPACE framework considers productivity across five dimensions: Satisfaction & well-being, Performance, Activity, Communication & collaboration, and Efficiency & flow. It offers an approach for thinking about productivity on a broader scale and selecting appropriate metrics.
Productivity and satisfaction are correlated, and satisfaction could be a leading indicator of productivity.
The SPACE of Developer Productivity, 2021
Satisfaction is how fulfilled developers feel with their work, team, tools, or culture; Well-Being is how healthy and happy they are and how their work impacts them. At Headforwards, we use regular company surveys to produce a Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS), which indicates satisfaction at an organisational level. We can leverage regular retrospectives to gauge satisfaction and well-being at a team level and regular one-to-ones at an individual level.
Performance is the outcome of a system or process. The performance of software developers is complex to quantify because it can be challenging to tie individual contributions directly to product outcomes. We can use code health metrics (e.g., issues, duplications, code coverage) at a team/product level and business metrics (e.g., sales, conversion, uptime) at a system level.
Activity is a count of actions or outputs completed while performing work. Developer activity can provide valuable but limited insights about developer productivity, engineering systems, and team efficiency if measured correctly. Here, we can use individual activity metrics (e.g. number of commits or features delivered), bearing in mind Goodhart, and team/system level metrics (e.g. DORA flow and stability metrics). At Headforwards, our teams generally start using a variation of Scrum or Kanban – these can be a good source of team-level activity in the form of flow or velocity metrics.
Communication and collaboration capture how people and teams communicate and work together. Software development is a collaborative and creative task that relies on extensive and effective communication, coordination, and collaboration within and between teams. Communication and cooperation can be more challenging to measure, but onboarding time can give a good indication. However, it is often possible to observe issues with communication and collaboration during regular team retrospectives and may come up as a topic of discussion during individual one-to-ones. 360 performance reviews can be another way to capture individual communication/collaboration.
It is almost impossible to comprehensively measure and quantify all the facets of developer activity across engineering systems and environments.
The SPACE of Developer Productivity, 2021
Many developers echo the concept of productivity when describing “getting into the flow” when doing their work.
The SPACE of Developer Productivity, 2021
Efficiency and flow capture the ability to complete work or make progress on it with minimal interruptions or delays, whether individually or through a system. Efficiency and flow are another area that is difficult to measure — the time it takes for work to progress through the system and the number of handoffs can be an indication. Efficiency and flow are other areas where we may observe clues in team retrospectives or individual one-to-ones.
A Word of Caution
Directly measuring developer productivity and team performance is almost impossible. We rely on proxy metrics to predict when things are running smoothly or not. What works as a good metric for one team or organisation may be different from another. When there are signs that things are not going well, it’s essential to investigate further to find the root cause. The team will communicate if they feel unproductive through retrospectives or one-on-one meetings, provided they are in an environment of trust and psychological safety.
Context is King
To avoid misleading conclusions, we follow these guiding principles:
- No metric should be reported without context. Data should always be interpreted considering broader team dynamics and organisational goals.
- Qualitative and quantitative data should be combined. Surveys and feedback should complement technical metrics to provide a complete picture.
- Be clear on why you’re gathering data. Metrics should serve a specific purpose – whether identifying bottlenecks, improving developer experience, or demonstrating business impact.
- Ensure transparency and alignment. Teams should understand and support the purpose behind data collection. Reporting should serve the team, not be used against them.
- If a metric is no longer relevant, stop tracking it. Metrics should evolve with team needs and business goals.
By fostering an environment of trust, psychological safety, and continuous reflection, we empower teams to focus on meaningful improvements rather than vanity metrics. The goal isn’t just to measure productivity – it’s to create an environment where teams can both deliver and truly thrive.
Final Thoughts
There’s often a misconception about high performing and highly successful teams in software or operating in other contexts – and that is that they are built through raw talent alone, or they must operate in military-like fashion, taking orders from a superior. Whilst productivity as a concept is often chased through increasingly formalised strcutres, rules and controls, the reality of what facilitates high performance is something more human, more relational in nature. Trust, safety and a shared understanding, backed by a clear purpose, a why, are foundational. These are not just something to promote in recruitment or About sections on website, but have been proven through countless studies to be strategic enablers of business performance.
At Headforwards, we’ve learned that empowering teams to run and own their own improvement cycles, being empirical and agile in how they do it, backed by clear outcomes, creates the conditions for individuals to do their best work. High performance is not a product of managers getting closer or “managing harder”, but through designing environments where people feel safe, supported and connected. The reality is that business is tough, so through various progressive management methods, metrics and coaching, you can track your collective and individual maturity in achieving these results and adjust.
Contributors: Andy Weir, Ian Noble and Jon Dodkins