Going 17x Faster by Building a Team of Teams

What does it actually take to go 17x faster as a business?

Spoiler: it’s not more people, more pressure, or another “quick fix” process.

In this episode of #GetAmplified Sam grills Vic on what really happens when you shift from a collection of teams to a true team of teams. The kind where silos disappear, priorities are crystal clear, and everyone’s pulling in the same direction (without needing another 3-hour alignment meeting).

We talk about:

•  Why most teams feel busy but still move too slowly 
•  What changes when you align around a shared goal (properly, not just on a slide) 
•  How trust, clarity, and simplicity unlock serious speed 
•  And what “17x faster” actually looks like in the real world 

We talk through the six critical questions needed for leadership teams to align on. Vic shares how to create a common language for culture throughout the organisation and introduces the TeamX Champion Train the Trainer program.

We also touch on the importance of  hiring team players as the organisation scales.

There are so many practical elements in this podcast we hope it helps!

You can find the 6 critical questions here  

Build Team of Teams - Amplified Group

Video for the Ideal Team Player 

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn! 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Transcript

Sam 0:10

Welcome to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group, the podcast for tech industry leaders and aspiring leaders who want to help their companies execute faster. As always, we're virtual. I'm at home in sunny bucks looking out on the garden, which is glorious today. Vicky's in Deepest Darkness Oxfordshire or somewhere. Vicky, do you want to lead us in and tell us who we've got on the podcast today?

Vic 0:31

Oh well, I'm going to give you some really bad news, I'm afraid, Sam. It's just me and you.

Sam 0:36

That was me waiting. I thought it was somebody who was good who was coming on, but they were running late. I'm stuck with you today, am I?

Vic 0:42

You are, I'm afraid, yes.

Sam 0:44

So, what's our topic in that case?

Vic 0:47

Yeah, so the reason that we're doing this is because on the podcast that we recorded with Lewis G about hypergrowth three times over when he talked about going through hypergrowth in Citrix, VMware, and ServiceNow. We touched briefly on our solution around Team of Teams. And actually, since that, we've had quite a few people asking to know a bit more information about our team of teams. Um, so so that's what we're talking about today.

Sam 1:21

Okay, sounds good. So having said it is just the two of us, it's actually not. Um, my daughter has a new puppy, Zelda. She is tiny and very, very feisty, the puppy, not the daughter. Um, so if there's any noise in the background, I apologize on Zelda's behalf. It's probably not a bad thing, it's just it's just just the two of us. Uh, she's currently attacking my flip-flop.

Vic 1:45

Right. And oh, very good.

Sam 1:47

Okay, well, let's hope the flip-flop as a podcast series that seems to be populated more or less entirely by dog lovers. Yeah, I think we'll get by.

Vic 1:56

Yeah, that's good. Cool, very good.

Sam 1:59

So let's get stuck into this team of teams thing. What on earth do you mean by that?

Vic 2:04

Yeah, so team of teams, this is I I can't take any credit for the the concept of it. It actually comes from General Stanley McChrystal, and he led the troops in Afghanistan in 2003. And at the time, Al-Qaeda was absolutely running rings around them. And despite the Navy SEALs being completely optimised and the intelligence agencies being completely optimised, they still weren't really able to be the efficient team of teams and unit that they needed to be. And in just doing that optimization, and I'll describe that those as silos, they increased the number of raids they could do from in a month from 10 to 18. But what happened when they built the team of teams? And he went through some very deliberate actions to do that, and I can share that. When he built the team of teams, they were able to increase the number of raids to more than 300 a month, which means that they were going 17 times faster than they were with the siloed organization that they had. And so if you think about what we do at the Amplified Group, and we're about helping tech organizations execute faster, this solution helps organizations execute faster. And the really interesting thing here is he did that without adding significant headcount. So it was with the existing headcount, it was just about building efficiency. So it's about breaking down the silos that we know form as organisations scale and how you do that deliberately.

Sam 3:56

So this has become a real focus for the Actify group.

Vic 4:00

Yeah, it really has because as you move through our customer journey, and actually, I've just come off a call with an organization this morning who is looking at and engaging us for the first time. And it's about what is that journey? Well, it starts with the individuals and understanding ourselves and how our team dynamics work. It then moves to, well, actually, how do we work as an entire team? And then once we've got our teams working effectively, how do we make sure that we are working effectively as an entire organization? And we've experienced it. Um, and I know so many of our listeners have experienced it. Is you sit in your team and you think, why is that team over there doing that? And why aren't we all working towards a common goal? And actually, um, McCrystal talks about two fundamental things that you need to have, which is trust and purpose. And he talks about a shared consciousness across the organization. And if you've got that, then you can have people empowered to make decisions down on the front line.

Sam 5:05

That makes sense. So where'd you start? How do you how do you help organizations to to get there? Sounds like an awful lot of hard work, which you know, only anything worth it is hard work, right?

Vic 5:18

Well, it's it's it takes effort, but actually, one of our principles, as you know, is about keeping things simple. So we've got four steps to go through to to help organizations achieve this. So the the first step is about alignment at the leadership level, and actually, this is an exercise that we've been doing with leadership teams for quite some time now, and it's it's not an exercise that comes from us, it actually comes from Lencioni. And it starts with with what he describes as the six critical leadership questions, and those questions are why do we exist? So, what's our purpose? What are our values? So, how do we behave? And that's not values like what we would describe as baseline values like integrity and honesty. That's about what are the values that really make us different to our competitors. The next question is what do we actually do? So if if the first question is why, the third question is is what do we actually do? The fourth question is what's the strategy? How how will we get there? And and the way that Lencioni describes strategy, I love it's just a set of conscious decisions as a leadership team. And then the next question is, what is the most important thing for us to do right now? And this is a question that gets organisations' attention because it's we see too often there's too many competing priorities, and actually nothing gets achieved because there's too many things to be trying to put into one. So, what is the number one priority that we as an organization need to get done? And then once we've achieved that, we'll move on to the next one. And then the last question is who does what? By taking your organizational hats off and deciding on how you all work towards that key objective. And those six questions, although they sound super simple, the magic is in the exercise itself because what you do is you get each person to answer them individually, and then you put the answers up against each other, and then you can see where the alignment is and where the gaps are, and that's where you need to start. Because if you're going to build a team of teams, you need to ensure that you've got a hundred percent alignment at the leadership level, because as it comes down the organization, even if there's a degree of separation, if you imagine you know a school protractor, as it fans out, so it's the diverging curves, the further away you get from the genesis, the the further apart they are. Exactly. And that's why organizations tend to go slow. So we need to make sure that we've got 100% alignment at the leadership level. So that's that's step one.

Sam 8:15

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. So when you've been through that, what do you do next?

Vic 8:21

Yeah, so the next thing to do is about ensuring you've got a common language throughout the organisation. And again, we come back to Lencioni and one of our key focuses at the Amplified Group, which is the five behaviours of a team. And the five behaviours, just to remind you, are you need to make sure that you've got vulnerability-based trust, so that's a safe place where people can say what they really think, that you've got conflict, and what we really mean by that is really robust debate so that everybody has weighed in and said what they think, and then if they do weigh in, they're much more likely to then do the next level, which is commit to the decision. And once you've committed to the decision and you've got clarity around that decision, then you can hold people accountable, and ultimately it's about team results. So, what we do is we take the management team through that process, and then the extended management team go through that process as well. But what is slightly different here now is we scale that by making them, once they've gone through that program themselves, giving them the tools to then take it back to their team. So we turn them into a train the trainer, because one of our objectives is that this becomes muscle memory for the organizations that we work with, and that it's not just we need to get the amplified group in again, we need to make them self-sufficient.

Sam 9:54

So if we take that's it, if they're having to call you in all the time because the organization keeps breaking, you've not really done a job properly, have you?

Vic 10:02

We haven't, no, no, no, no, not at all. And if you think what drives us is job satisfaction, knowing we've done our job well. So we will take a management team through the five behaviors as a team, but then we will give them the support and guidance to then go and take their own teams through it.

Sam 10:20

Yeah.

Vic 10:21

So they take it back to their teams and they start talking the common language as well. And then once they've done that.

Sam 10:29

So you seed it and the organization then propagates it.

Vic 10:32

Yes. But what we're looking for is when they take it back to their team, we have coined the term the team X champion, so team experience champion. And we want these people that have gone through this course and have taken it back to their team, we want to be able to give them a certification to say, okay, now you're a team X champion. And we do that by measuring how effectively they're working with their team.

Sam 11:01

Yeah.

Vic 11:02

And then once we've done that, and once they've become a Team X champion, then the magic starts to happen. Because one of the values of us working with an organization as an external facilitator is we go into a meeting, we're not part of that meeting, but we can watch the dynamics of that meeting.

Sam 11:18

Yeah.

Vic 11:19

So what we're looking to do is take that team X champion and say, right, okay, now you understand the common language, you know what a good team looks like, you know how a good team works. Now, what I want you to be able to go and do is be a support to a peer organization. So you can go and observe. So say you're uh the SE lead, go and sit and watch a marketing team meeting. But we're going to give you the criteria for what you're looking for to go and support that meeting. So you're just an externalized. Now that does two things. One, it helps build a relationship across PIA, because you're starting to open up the door and see what that organization is all about and understand the workings of that organization.

Sam 12:10

Breaking down those silos, as it were.

Vic 12:12

Well, exactly. And and just to reiterate what where we came up with this, the way that McChrystal broke down the silos was he would pick a Navy SEAL, the best Navy SEAL, and he would go and put him or her into another organization, into the intelligence organization, and they would stay there for three months. Now that's not practical in a scale-up organization where you're resource constrained to start with. We can't afford to do that. But we can afford to take somebody and for them to go and watch another peer's meeting for an hour, a month.

Sam 12:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And be that kind of neutral observer and hoover it all up.

Vic 12:53

Yes, and do that, but do it in a supporting way. Yeah. Because you've got to have that trust and those relationships built to start with. And by the way, and so the way that that will work is you will be a buddy.

unknown 13:04

Yeah.

Vic 13:04

So you'll buddy up and do it, and you'll do it for three months, and then you'll move on to someone else. So you're starting to get the windows into the different pieces of the organization as well and build those relationships. Does that make sense?

Sam 13:18

Yeah, I think so. I think so. It's um, I mean, you know, as always, I liken it to my experience at SoftCap, um, which was something of a different organization in that the overall message and the strategy was pretty simple, and people were pulling all together in one direction. But there was an awful lot of that sort of cross-fertilizing, as it were, you know, people being invited in to talk about what they were doing in their area, uh, people being consulted maybe more than you you would in a normal organization rather than just going and doing it. And you know, while we didn't formally have this sort of program in place, clearly that was it was an embedded part of a culture that you would share sideways and as well as just within your particular stovepipe. But I definitely think that was an advantage.

Vic 14:11

Yeah, absolutely. But many organizations don't yeah, sure. And it's sure it's how do you do it deliberately and with a common language across the entire organization, and and that's so we we we used to see that all the time.

Sam 14:28

You'd go in and you talk to the IT team about how to how to change and modernize and how to move forward. And I remember one conversation Are you talking about in a customer? In a customer, yeah, in an end customer um going in to help. It was a public sector organization, I think it was a council, and the infrastructure team had decided that they wanted to modernize. And my first question to them was, Well, what do the application teams want from you? What do the development teams want? Yeah, and they said, Oh, we haven't talked about it. It's a different, yeah, and it and it was like it was a totally separate bit of the IT organization, and never the twain shall meet. Yes, and you you know, you know you're never going to be in a position to help them move forward until they've had that conversation because otherwise they're just gonna buy some more technology, which is cool, but it's not gonna get the organization to where it wants where it wants it to be.

Vic 15:21

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. So so you were in a great position at Softcat, and we've talked about that, and it's been lovely to see um this second wave of of Colin's podcast um just this week.

Sam 15:37

Is he gonna be DPJ?

Vic 15:41

That's the challenge. Yeah.

Sam 15:44

Um much as I love DPJ, clearly I want Colin to win.

Vic 15:48

Of course you do, and and there's so many great messages, isn't there, in in Colin's podcast. But there's many organizations that aren't doing this deliberately, and it's putting that deliberate program in place. The other thing, and I'm going to put at the end of this podcast just a very simple diagram that explains this in a pictorial way. But the other thing that's really important to do is that we've took so we've we've talked about the leadership level being aligned, and then the management team buddying up to support each other and observe each other's team meetings with a set of criteria and a framework to give each other feedback. So you've got those relationships starting to build. But what we also need to be able to do is at the next level down, at the individual contributor level, they need to be able to build relationships too across the different organisations. And so it's deliberately saying, right, okay, so we've got, I don't know, 10 SEs, and we've got 10 different organizations that we need to be able to link to. Who is going to go and pair up with somebody in those separate organizations? And what we've got for them is it's not just a weekly catch-up, but it's a weekly catch-up with some deliberate tasks to do that help build their relationship.

Sam 17:18

And let me just give you a lot of people they've got homework, they've got homework.

Vic 17:21

They've got homework to do, and let me just give you a super simple one, and it's it's one that we use very often. It's right in your first meeting. What I want you to do is find out 10 things that you've got in common that cannot be about work.

Sam 17:36

Okay, yeah.

Vic 17:37

And it just accelerates you getting to know each other, and so we've got a set of exercises for those people to do that start to build those relationships as well, because it's not about the entire SE team being able to connect with the entire sales organization in another region. That's not what this is about, but it's about actually I've heard about a best practice that's going on there that I can bring back because the teams are now talking to each other. So it's that simple. Can I just recap that again?

Sam 18:13

Yeah, it's probably a good idea. I think that went we we maybe weren't quite as concise as we often are.

Vic 18:20

Right. So the first step is leadership alignment through the six critical questions. The second step is taking the five behaviors of a team to the management team and to the next layer down of the team, and then empowering them to take it to their own teams in a train the trainer model. Once they become team experienced champions, then they can go and do the buddying. So they're supporting their peers in their team meetings. And then the final bit is about ensuring that you've got connections at an individual contributors layer with deliberate actions where you're building relationships with people that you don't particularly potentially know very well. Once you have that in place, then we look at how do you maintain a team of teams?

Sam 19:17

Yeah.

Vic 19:17

And that's where Beacon Force comes in.

Sam 19:19

Yeah. Which we've talked about in previous podcasts. Yeah.

Vic 19:24

Yes.

Sam 19:24

Brilliant. Yeah, that's great. I think that that that that makes it really succinct for our listeners, which is really important. Do you want to go into any detail on the six critical leadership questions? Is that worth digging into a little bit? I mean, you don't want to give the game away here and tell our listeners what they are, presumably.

Vic 19:41

No, but but actually, I think what would be a really good thing to do is at the um in the show notes, we will include them.

Sam 19:50

Okay.

Vic 19:51

So I think that's a good that's a great call out. Thanks, Sam.

Sam 19:54

Brilliant. Okay, no, that's cool. So one of your uh responsibilities when you were part of VMware was partner enablement. So you know about scaling, um, obviously within your own organisation, but effectively, there you're you're scaling a virtual team outside of your own organization. Is that where the train the trainer thing comes from?

Vic 20:14

Yeah, it's it is. Um so everything that we do, we think about how we can scale it and how we can empower the organizations that we work with. And part of the responsibilities of the the team I led at VMware was partner enablement. And there were, gosh, 30,000 partners in the VMware network, and we weren't we weren't enabling all of them clearly, but you know, we were enabling our top tier of partners and hundreds of partners, and to do that, we did do this very scalable approach, and doing a train the trainer just works so effectively. So, so the idea behind it is once we've taken the management team through the training. So, say we've got the head of marketing and they've been through the training in its entirety as a workshop. What we then do to enable them to take it back to their teams is we just give it them in bite-side chunks. So they'll just do trust and we'll give them all the tools they need to do a trust workshop, and then they'll go and do a trust workshop, and we'll support them with it, and then they'll go and do a conflict workshop, and then they'll go and do a commitment workshop. So it's it's breaking it down into bite-sized chunks that the managers can then take back to their teams.

Sam 21:33

Perfect. Who wants to be on the podcast?

Vic 21:35

There you go.

Sam 21:36

You're on your and then the last step of this is a buddy system. How do you make that work?

Vic 21:43

Yeah, so you make that work by ensuring that you've got the trust within the people that are buddying up to start with. And Lencioni has got a fantastic quote that says trust doesn't take time, it takes courage. And it's about Doing these intentional activities where you let your guard down and you are able to build that trust with your buddy, that then you can go and there is mutual support to help each other make your teams as effective as possible. So you're that additional eyes.

Sam 22:20

Okay, that makes sense. And is it worth going into a bit more detail on maintenance mode? You know, once you've been through the program, in theory, you've you're then leaving the organization to its own devices to carry on the good work that you've uh hopefully instilled within it. But how how do they how do they keep from drifting back into old habits?

Vic 22:41

Yeah, well, that's why we love Beacon Force. So Beacon Force, as I've described it, is like the Fitbit for team health and team performance. And so just very briefly, Beacon Force measures two things. It measures trust, which is why we were interested in the first place. And it takes the pulse of trust on a daily basis across the organization. When you've got a great baseline for trust, the other thing that it measures is intrinsic motivation. And that intrinsic motivation, it's it's what motivates us internally to really go the extra extra mile. And you know, I'm I'm witnessing that at the moment just within the team at the Amplified Group, because we are all so brought into what we can do for our customers, the ideas are just flowing.

Sam 23:31

Yeah, and it's just a case of capturing them and harnessing them and having the time to do something with them.

Vic 23:37

Yeah, and making them happen, but we're turning them around so quickly. And actually, even this podcast was as a response of people saying, We've heard about this now, now tell us some more about it. So Beacon Force is that constant monitor that you can say, actually, there's a team there that needs a bit of support. I'm gonna go and put some focus on that. And then the last piece of of really making sure that this works is in the hiring process, as these organizations are hiring to make sure that you are hiring team players, and that is the critical component. And actually, we've seen that with the with the organizations that we're working with. And there's a there's a great book from Lencioni on called The Team Player, and he talks about humble, hungry, and smart. And actually, there's just thinking about it, there's a there's a 14-minute video on it again that we can put in the show notes, a link to it, and that's the other critical bit to make sure that you can really build that team of teams.

Sam 24:36

That's really important. I think people overlook that a little bit. You know, what I always used to say, one bad apple spoils the cider.

Vic 24:45

Yeah.

Sam 24:46

Um, but you know, it's it's it doesn't take long before you start to fill the fill the organization up with people who haven't been through that process and don't therefore buy into those values unless they have it intrinsically in them to behave in that manner.

Vic 25:04

Yes.

Sam 25:04

So obviously that you know that's one of the most important things that you're hiring for. You know, we used to refer to it as cultural fit, it's not sort of strictly accurate, it's it's more just being being a nice person. I think the um is it Netflix refer to no no brilliant jerks?

Vic 25:20

Yes, it is, and we've I think we've talked about that before, but that's that is exactly it. But I do think it is cultural fit. I think that's the right description, yeah. And that has to be a priority in hiring because you know, if you go through this process and you put all this effort in and then you bring the wrong people into the organization, organizations are very fragile, and you know, and one of the conversations that I've had previously with Mark Templeton was scaling too quickly and bringing the wrong people into the organization, and that special family that was there was quickly lost.

Sam 25:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's the secret source, or at least as you know, as far as I'm concerned, that's the secret source. You know, you don't want to lose that.

Vic 26:04

Yeah.

Sam 26:05

Right. Well, as you are effectively in the position of being our guest today, you best uh give us your three takeaways, please, and then you know what's coming next.

Vic 26:18

So my three takeaways are you know, you can have an optimized team and you can have optimized teams working separately, but we know through experience that silos naturally form and they need to be deliberately broken down. So my first takeaway is there is actually a process that you can go through to break down silos, and the the second one is that process starts with having leadership alignment and take a look at the six critical questions, and then the last one is make sure you continue to hire team players.

Sam 27:07

Makes sense like that. Nice to succeed. Thank you very much. So perhaps you had better finish up by telling us what team experience means to you, as we ask our guests this every time.

Vic 27:21

Yeah, and I didn't know you were going to do this too, mate.

Sam 27:24

Rude of you not to answer.

Vic 27:26

Team experience means to me when you just see the happiness on people's faces when they can see that they're making a difference.

Sam 27:40

Yeah, I think that makes sense.

Vic 27:41

People like to feel that they're getting somewhere, yeah, and that they are contributing and making a difference. And 100%. I just love that feeling.

Sam 27:52

I like it. Brilliant. Any further observations for our listeners?

unknown 27:57

No.

Vic 27:58

Can I ask you what does team experience mean to you then?

Sam 28:02

Well, yeah, good question. Good question. So, I mean, my life at SoftCat for those 20 years was a team experience. It was about a culture, a group of people that put the success of the whole above their individual leanings, aspirations, what have you. It always used to amaze me how every time, just in my personal experience, every time I did something that wasn't necessarily to personal my personal benefit, that was but was to the benefit of the organization, whether it was stepping in and going to see a customer where it wasn't specifically within my remit, whether it was helping out with some training from another group of people, you know, all sorts of things like that. And most importantly, if it was trying to deflect credit that landed on my shoulders onto the people within my team who'd actually done the work, yes, the more, the more I did that sort of thing, the more successful I was. Yes. So my team experience summary would be pulling together in that whole direction, asking not what the organization can do for you, but asking what you can do for the organization.

Vic 29:23

Yeah, well, that comes to the intrinsic motivation thing that we were talking about, doesn't it? But yeah, um, in the last team that I led at VMware, one of the things that I asked them to do when we had our kickoff meeting was watch the film Bridge of Spies.

Sam 29:40

I don't know if you've seen it as opposed to Bridge of Bridge of Sighs. I haven't, I haven't.

Vic 29:45

Yeah. It's a fantastic story, but what it demonstrates is about doing the right thing, not the easy thing.

Sam 29:55

Yeah, good summary.

Vic 29:57

And I think that I think that is an outcome of great team experience.

Sam 30:01

Yeah. Yeah, I think that summarizes it. I think we should leave it there. It just remains for me to say thanks for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. As always, your comments and your subscriptions are most gratefully received.