If you're feeling burnt out by your team's lack of progress, you're not alone. We know from our own experience how frustrating it can be to feel stuck in one of two worlds:

  • Struggling to gain speed with slow decision making or productivity
  • Trying to stay focused when everything is a priority

From experience building and running teams at LinkedIn, Degreed, and Sprintwell, I've made plenty of mistakes on my road to finding patterns that work.

What's blocking you from high performance?

Slow decision making, burnout, and competing priorities are the symptoms. What really blocks teams from high performance is either:

  • Lack of alignment
  • Lack of speed

Lack of alignment comes from people issues (this is the most common), an incoherent strategy, or a strategy that has not been committed to and written down. Lack of speed comes from poor habits and systems, lack of skills, lack of empowerment, and lack of motivation or engagement.

But when teams get this right (alignment + speed), their progress is fast, meaningful, and focused. We call this team velocity, and it's essential to high performance.

Why team velocity is more important than speed

Business team velocity is about the real progress your team makes.

Velocity = Speed + Focused Direction

(Shout out to Shane Parrish for the idea of this way to visualize speed vs velocity.)

It's about delivering value and impact, not just output. You can go fast around a track but make zero progress. You can ship plenty of features for your product, but not deliver anything of value.

Yet teams need to have speed and focused direction. And while struggling to move quickly is certainly a serious issue for many teams, we've found that lacking focused direction is where most teams struggle.

Aligning your team on a focused direction

As Shane Parrish articulates so well about individuals, direction has a lot to do with what you say "no" to. A good strategy is as much about what a team won't do as what they will do.

Always saying "yes" is the path to mediocrity.

"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying 'no' to 1,000 things."

Steve Jobs, widely reported (though these exact words aren't in the WWDC 1997 talk they get pinned to, where the line is the shorter "Focusing is about saying no. And you've got to say no, no, no.")

Yet even once you've crafted a focused strategy, it's easy to assume your whole team is aligned when they aren't.

When I worked at LinkedIn, the CEO (Jeff Weiner) had a practice that worked magic for keeping teams aligned. Every two weeks we had a company all-hands meeting. I usually attended in-person, but everyone around the world could join by video. Without fail, he would cover the same points each week:

  • People
  • Product
  • Monetization

He was religiously consistent about touching on these priorities. Because I was involved in upskilling leaders on the people development team, I heard Jeff train dozens of times about management lessons he'd learned. One of my favorites was that by the time you are sick of saying something, your followers are just beginning to understand.

"As organizations mature, the job of any senior executive is about coaching and strategy."

Jeff Weiner

Getting aligned and staying aligned are the main jobs of a leader.

In the same way, being married doesn't automatically mean you always love each other, so being aligned with your team at one point doesn't guarantee perpetual alignment. Lasting love isn't a result of happenstance. Likewise, strategic alignment doesn't just happen. You have to invest time and energy in re-clarifying and re-communicating often.

One thing that helps is making room for real dialogue instead of monologue. Monologue happens when decisions are made by those at the top with little or no input from those on the front lines. The forcing function of Amazon's 6-pager approach to meetings is one fix (Bezos describes the practice himself in his 2017 shareholder letter).

Speed still matters

With all that said, speed still matters.

Hiten Shah missed a billion-dollar opportunity because, after initial success with KISSmetrics, they moved too slowly.

"You can't just capture the market once and expect to keep it. You have to do it over and over again and faster than everyone else if you want to keep distance from competitors coming up behind you and disrupting you. That's how you get ahead of the market."

Hiten Shah

But we humans aren't naturally very time aware. You've probably heard it takes an average of 23 minutes to get back to a task after a distraction — that number comes from Gloria Mark's interviews, not from the UC Irvine study it usually gets credited to, which actually found people finished interrupted tasks faster and paid for it in stress. Setting a timer and having a facilitator help.

Time-boxing is one way we encourage speed: break work into smaller chunks and time-box getting those chunks done. When I need to go fast on personal projects, I use the Pomodoro technique. To help keep a group aligned on time, we use a time-timer in sprints.

A facilitator helps a group move quickly. One way to think about the role is that they are the driver: not calling all the shots, but hands on the wheel. Group driving usually ends in a mess, and it happens often when roles are not well defined.

How to increase your team's velocity

A quick way to check the alignment in your team is to go to 5 different front-line employees and ask them to articulate their understanding of the current strategy.

  • "Why are we doing this project?"
  • "Why does this team exist?"
  • "What are we trying to accomplish?"

If the answers are different (which they all too often are), you need to create and evangelize your strategy better.

Also know that agile is about mindset + mechanics. Most botched agile implementations fail because teams adopt the mechanics of scrum without understanding the mindset of agile, so read both the agile manifesto and the survey results Agile Alliance gathered about failed implementations. Agile is going to be more of a change for leaders than it is for their teams.

You'll know you have velocity when your team can clearly answer questions such as:

  • Which priorities drive the most value for the business?
  • What results are we measuring to positively reinforce our goals?
  • How can I make the biggest impact today?

Teams with velocity don't just create more impact, they are fun to work on. High-velocity teams happen when each employee is closer to flow).