How to Create a Culture of Performance in Teams

Is your performance review process hindering your team’s optimal performance?

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In assessing performance, companies often share OKRs equally among team members and then review individual performance at the end of the year based on these shared OKRs.
But this approach seems to offer no incentive for teamwork or higher performance.So, how should tech leaders review team performance without hurting teamwork?

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My guest, Fabio Lessa, is here to help us identify the best strategies for creating a performance-oriented culture within tech teams. Fabio leads Duolingo’s platform engineering team and has over 15 years of experience building engineering teams at startups and large companies, such as Spotify and SoundCloud.

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In this episode, Fabio shares Duolingo’s recent experience with the “tiger teams” approach to boosting performance. Forming a tiger team involves freeing specialists from regular responsibilities to focus on a particular task. 

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Fabio observed that tiger teams outperform average teams because all team members pay undivided attention to the task. In fact, one such tiger team exceeded performance expectations by completing a 3-month task in just 2 weeks!

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The key? Tech leaders must create a distraction-free environment and break down complex tasks. Tech leaders must also set clear goals and communicate how the project’s scope contributes to the company’s goals.

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"The main way to impact performance is at the environment level, not at the individual." ~ Fabio Lessa

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In This Episode:

• Team leadership lessons from the Tiger Teams approach
• Causes of poor team management and how to fix them
• How to create a culture of performance in teams
• Why team predictability and continuous improvement are critical
• Team characteristics that support a culture of performance

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