Alright. We're gonna go ahead and get started. There's twenty people here. It looks like awesome. Thank you so much for being here.My name is Joyce Sebasma, and I am the founder and CEO of Scalejoy. And today, our topic is how to build and lead high performing teams, but let's make it 2024, and that's that's relevant for a few reasons. So today, I'm gonna start off by telling you a little bit about myself and my business, and then we'll dive in to the agenda. So first and foremost, a bit about me. My name is Joy, as you can see, and, my career, I've been a chief people officer, just a fancy way of saying head of HR for 2 global tech companies.

My company scalejoy is my second company that I founded. I founded a company called, P5 Collaborative Consulting as well. And I'm a two time mama, two daughters, four and seven years old. All of which has been empowered by my husband who is the stay at home parent. And I find that important and relevant to talk about in a women in tech conference, especially when you get asked the question of, how do you get all of this done? Well, you don't do it alone. And a bit about my company Scale Joy, 1st and foremost, I founded in 2020 with the hypothesis that scaling or growing companies really needed a different approach to leadership development. And I really found that customizing leadership development to each organization is the key differentiator.

My company started as a management training company, and it evolved into exec coaching, leadership team retreat planning, and facilitation, and now 3 different approaches to providing manager training services to organizations from do it yourself to empowered and white labeled.

And I've had the benefit of working with tons of great customers, some of which include Sonos, the farmer's dog, LinkedIn, Starburst Data Built rewards, to name a few. So super happy to be here. And the only reason I really thought it was important to say all of this is because I've been lucky to be a part of a lot of teams. I've had the opportunity to build a lot of teams, and now I get to coach and develop and support lots of teams. And Through that, I've found that there are some common things that we can do in order to build and lead high performing teams. So we're gonna talk first about how to build that team, and then we're gonna talk about how to lead that team once you've built it.

And this is gonna probably feel a little different compared to some of the other sessions. I am a facilitator and a trainer at heart. So as a result, there's going to be some things that are interactive, where I might ask you a question and you can go ahead and type your response in the chat if you feel so inclined. And, also, feel free to take screenshots. There are quite a few activities in my agenda that, we will not have time to do because it's a 20 minute talk, but I want you to be able to take those activities and do them on your own. If you are so inclined or share them with your team. So you have my permission to screenshot away. So let's start with philosophy. And I'm gonna start off by saying that this might be somewhat controversial. Okay? But sometimes we have to be a little bit controversial to make progress.

I think it was about October of last year when every CEO I work with started saying things like, I wanna be a performance culture. And it became this big kind of shift away from I wanna take care of my people. I want to support them to, like, we gotta get back to work. We've got to be a performance culture. And I started doing a lot of research around, well, what does that mean and what does that mean today? We've learned a lot through the pandemic. Employer employee contracts look different now. So what is it gonna take? So first is the philosophy I wanna share, which My belief is that everybody says they wanna have a high performance culture or a high performing team, but few actually have what it takes. To cultivate that. It's not necessarily the easier or more popular route. Second thing is there's never an end in building a high performance culture. It's continuous. You're never done.

The market keeps changing. The business evolves. The team changes. So you're never really done, which is why it takes a lot of effort. To do it and to cultivate it. I also think high performance is a spectrum relative to the mission of the company, the time frame you have to achieve that mission, and the leader. I use Elon Musk as an example a lot. I'm not here to say what we think about Elon Musk, but what I am here to say is Elon Musk clearly has big missions He is trying to do a lot of things that most people would not attempt to do. And, therefore, I would expect that his spectrum of high performance is probably on the higher end. Than say myself who's running a small boutique learning and development company.

My definition of pipe performance may need to be a little bit different than Elon's. I ultimately think that success leads to happiness at work, and I think we may need to refocus on success and the disciplines that will get us there. To then enable happiness of our people. K. Controversial point. Most books on the topics of high performing teams and companies were written by, let's call it, wealthy men pre pandemic. And I think we've learned a lot and there's not yet a lot written, and I'm here to offer just a different perspective. Than those books of the past. Thank you for the clap.

And ultimately, I think probably the hardest part of a high performing team and that desire to have one is that it starts at the tippy top, period the end. You cannot have a high performing team if your CEO and leadership team Do not believe it and embody it. Alright. So let's get into how we actually get there. Let's start by talking about how to build a high performing team. As a leader, my belief is that you should be constantly cultivating towards excellence in every seat. What does that mean? Cultivating towards excellence in every seat means a high performing team is rarely handed to you. You need to curate and cultivate to get them there. And there are tools to do that. So one of the pieces of the tools I would recommend is to actually define what excellence looks like on your team. What are the behaviors, the outcomes, what does excellence mean?

I find with managers and leaders often times, You know it in your head, but you haven't always written it down, or you default to, you know, the company's definition of what excellent is. I would really recommend actually writing it down. What does excellent look like? And then share that with your people and get their perspective. Oftentimes we don't do this work, and it's impossible to meet expectations that are not defined for us. So one of the most important things you can do define it for yourself, define it for your team, and then give them the space to get there. I'm gonna share 4 tools that I call the cultivation toolbox, So how do we cultivate towards excellence in our in every seat? Well, we can hire people. We can exit people we can grow people and we can move people. And this is not rocket science.

If you are a leader, you probably already are doing all of these things. But I find thinking of it as a puzzle of, holistically as the team, Which parts are we moving? Which tool are we using from the toolbox to cultivate towards excellence at this moment in time? So hiring, bringing in a high performing individual to complement the existing team to ensure a high performing team. Oftentimes a great strategy. Sometimes this goes wrong when you're hiring to offset an underperformer. Okay? I've done that myself many times I instead of dealing with the real problem, I hired somebody else. And what I would say is you might need to do both. Okay?

Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is enable them to be a high performer somewhere else. And so that brings me to the second strategy in the toolbox, which is to exit. Sometimes you need to support someone's transition out of the organization so they can be high performing elsewhere. I truly believe in my core that everybody has the potential of being high performing, but it's relative to the organization and to the timing and to where they are in their own journey. The 3rd cultivation tool is to grow. Training and coaching individuals so that they can become high performers. I think this is ultimately as managers and as leaders, what we all really wanna be doing. Right? We wanna be training. We wanna be coaching.

But sometimes we don't have the bandwidth to do that to the level required to get people to that place of high performance. So it's a capacity thing sometimes. And the final tool in the cultivation toolbox is to move. So changing someone's role within the team or moving them even to another team to help cultivate the team towards excellence. So those 4 tools moving, exiting, growing, hiring, all we need to be using simultaneously to really cultivate towards excellence in every seat and start to build the foundation of a high performing team. I would love to ask each of you a question and feel free to chime in. There's a 152 people here, which is awesome. What are some constraints you face when cultivating your team to excellence in every seat.

And if you have any thoughts that come up, I'd love to see them in the chat. Any constraints you face. I know one I've always faced. Thank you, Elise's budget. Yes. Budget is always a constraint. And so making sure that we're thinking through, where does the budget? Where is the budget going to have the biggest ROI? Where is the position that's gonna be the most critical for the future success the team. And look at all the diversity and responsive responses here. There are so many constraints. Oftentimes I think about constraints as I think about sales. Okay. One of the things you learn when you're going through sales training is that every pushback from a potential client is an opportunity. So if I were you and you really wanna create a high performing team, you're naming your constraints.

You're naming your pushbacks, and I would say use that pushback and really analyze it find where the opportunity might be within saying them and to get them there. Right? And actually, before I get into that, we will definitely save some time for a Q and A at the end. There's a lot of amazing conversation in this chat. So we'll do our best to get through everything. So when we think about leading a high performing team, we all know, I'm sure many of you would say you've been high performers in your career. And sometimes you can be a high performer, but working for a not high performing leader. And usually, you don't stay very long in that role. So as leaders, it's our job to not only build that team, but also to sustain that team through great leadership. Gonna take this from two angles.

I'm gonna talk about some of the couple of tactics around team leadership and then a few on individual leadership. One, a great book that, I would recommend is called Amped up by Frank Slootman. And one of the things things Frank talks about is in order to have the highest level of performance, you need, an increased or narrowed focus you need increased standards and you need increased velocity. So, basically, you need to have higher standards and go faster, and that's only possible if you have a narrow scope or focus. I think there's a lot of opportunity for us as leaders to really narrow in and give clarity and focus to our teams of where are we going? How are we gonna get there? And then that gives them freedom within that frame to really achieve their full potential, but it requires clarity and focus from you.

It's called amp it up, Maja, amp it up by Frank Liebman. So communication of expectations is a common thread here. And here's a some a quick visual that I found from Matthew Bradford at the People Collective that kind of shows how we communicate those expectations at the individual team and company level. So feel free to take a quick picture if this is helpful. Kind of like a checklist, are we doing all these things to enable our teams to be high performing? Another book I wanna recommend, I'm sure many of you have read it, is the 5 Dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lindsay. In this book, they talk about 5 things that tend to get in the way of teams performing at the highest level.

Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. As a leader, I find myself continuously going back to this pyramid, and looking at where is my team blocked on this pyramid? And what is leading to that block? And how do we overcome that block? Even sometimes having, like, 1 of the 5 dysfunctions as the dysfunction of the quarter or the dysfunction of the month can be a great way to rally your entire created that I call the management continuum. When I think about managing a team, we know that we're not managing each individual exactly the same. Similar to parenting. We have to we have to adjust our style to get the best out of each individual person.

I use this spectrum to kind of think through how am I managing the different people in my team. So micromanager, thought partner, absent manager. I think of micromanager, it's obviously a word that none of us love, and we probably don't wanna be called that ever. But there is a micromanagement approach that sometimes is required. I see it required if somebody is learning and growing. Maybe they're brand new to the company or the team. Also, I see micromanager come up when maybe somebody's having a period of underperformance. And you just need to stay closer to them and to their work to turn it around. Let's go all the way to the other side of the spectrum, absent manager. Oftentimes absent management is when you feel total trust, in the person.

Maybe they're in a role that you've never done yourself before. You're just managing them. If that's the case, I would argue that we all wanna get to this middle state of thought partner. Okay. Thought partner is I have enough clarity. I have enough focus. I have my the trust of my boss. But I also have some empowerment so that we can be in that thought partner stage. The reason I share this is I've had high performers who I talked about this, like, hey, where am I following on this continuum with you? I thought we were in thought partner and they would say, you know what? You're kind of absent for me. I wish that you were more present. I want more of your time. Or maybe they said, you know what? I I actually feel like you're hovering a little.

Bit too much, and I'd like a little bit more space. So it can be a great way to understand first, collectively, how to lead the team differently but also as a way to check-in with individuals and make sure that what you're attempting to do in terms of motivating and empowering them is actually resonating. An activity that you can do after today is plotting your individual people, on this on this spectrum. So where would they fall in this continuum? And then asking yourself the question, what's leading to that placement? And what are your overall, observations in this? Are we okay with it? Do we need to make some changes? So feel free to screenshot this if you like this activity and you can do it as a follow-up after today. Now let's talk about individuals. Alright? How do we lead high performing individuals? And just time check, we've got about 5 minutes left. So individual performance is really interesting. Right?

It's as as customizable as you can possibly get and so we're trying to hold all these things in concert. We're trying to hold in concert, like, high performance at the company level, high performance at the team level, and then at the individual level. I think the first thing I would say is set the bar high. There's this really interesting behavioral phenomenon called the pygmalion effect, which says that the level of expectations placed on a subject actually impacts their level of performance. High expectations rotations lead to lower performance. So I would just encourage you all to set the bar high Adam Grant recently, was interviewing Jennifer Garner or vice versa. And, they talk about these, like, 19 words that you can say in the sentence. To really, like, demonstrate setting the bar high.

And it's really all about a balance of empowerment and trust but also high expectations. So I think it was something like, I'm gonna ask you to do this, which might feel like a stretch. It might feel hard. But I'm giving you this stretch because I believe that you're capable of it. So pygmalion effect, Ivelis is saying in the chat, I do this with my team. It works. So don't be afraid to have a high bar. You just need to be able to communicate it and give them the encouragement empowerment to get there. And remember that we're cultivating towards excellence in every seat. It's not an overnight thing. There may be chapters of time where you have a lot of more non excellent than excellent, and that's just how it goes sometimes.

But I find asking myself these auditing questions of is the person capable of achieving excellence in the time frame we have. An example of this, Netflix, when Netflix moved from at home DVD delivery to their streaming platform, They had this whole amazingly high performing engineering team who overnight their skill set was going to be basically irrelevant for where their business was moving. While they would have loved to invest and grow, use that cultivation tool to get them there, they didn't have the time frame. And so they had to go and hire different engineers. So just keeping that, in the back of your mind, that It's about capability of excellence, but it's also capability of excellence within the time frame we have. But if we do, How do we help motivate them to operate at the highest level and sustain that level of input and output?

That to me is the most dependent thing on the person, but I think there's some ways that we can get behind it. There is a reality that some level of stress can lead to high performance. Okay. And this is very relative to the person, to their own capacity, to the situation. Yerke's Dodson law talks about the relationship between performance and stress and that they are positively correlated but only to a certain point. So there's low stress, there's optimal, and there's high stress. What we wanna do is try to find that optimal stress level or goldilocks level. Not too hot, not too cold, just right. When you're in this state, people will be well positioned to work on important tasks. Sometimes I picture my team, like, in a chemistry lab, and I'm, like, turning up the heat on this one beaker, and I'm turning it down over here.

So trying to figure out the right level of stress, and that's so dependent. And it takes a lot of empathy and vulnerability to understand that with each of your people. But this is how we identify high performers. And then the last thing I wanna talk about is, okay, let's say you've got these high performers. How do you continue to lead them? And I've got these 4 categories of what I call kind of the recipe to sustain high performers. Sustain is the first one. Which is all about how do I what do I need to give you to sustain this level of greatness? 2nd one is what do you need to restore to get back to greatness?

Listen, there's some high performers out there that no matter how much you give them, they still want to be stretched. We should celebrate those people. That's a great thing. But we may need to understand from them what do you need from us in order to continue to feel like you're challenged and growing? And lastly, expand. Some people have are are so high performing that they've just proven that all they really need next is more. So, being able to expand their responsibilities or their scope. So all of this to be said, performance is not for the fan of heart. It requires individual team and company, level work. And I wanna just share one last thing before we go because I know we're out of time. Here's my contact information. Feel free to literally text me, email me, go ahead and follow me on LinkedIn, joycebasma, or go to scalejoy dotnet. And thank you so much for being here.

I really enjoyed it. I