Teams need these four components to unlock peak performance

As the labor market has cooled, many companies have focused on getting the most from their current workforce.

“[Companies] are making sure that they’re managing their attrition and churn. They’re engaging their workforce, and that’s the strategy they’re going to be on for the rest of the year,” Rajesh Namboothiry, SVP at Manpower US, previously told HR Brew.

As people pros lead their employees into the new year, Vijay Pendakur, keynote speaker and talent effectiveness coach and author, shares how leaders can increase team productivity and maximize performance, in his forthcoming book, The Alchemy of Talent: Leading Teams to Peak Performance.

HR Brew spoke with Pendakur about what talent pros can learn from his book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What can HR pros learn from your book?

This is a book that is a radically simple approach to leading high-performing teams that’s purpose-built for this moment of disruption, volatility, and uncertainty.

What tactics do you suggest to achieve that?

It’s important for anyone who leads a high-performing team, or an HR leader who’s…[building] the teaming framework for the organization, to understand the relationship between human performance and endless disruption…I unpack the neuroscience of how humans experience big changes that we’re not in control of, which is really what we’ve lived through for the last at least five years now…When you go through enough moments of disruption and uncertainty, you get stuck in a state of languishing, where you are so overwhelmed by the tidal waves of change hitting you that it’s very difficult to do the best work of your life.

Having a clear definition of the problem allows you to then see the pathway to the solution…We need a simpler playbook for peak performance that is nativized to working in a slow motion earthquake. If we’re going to work in a slow motion earthquake, if that’s somehow business as usual, then we actually need a few things to focus on that have a multiplier effect in those conditions…What I lay out in The Alchemy of Talent…is this four-part model that teams that win consistently in a slow motion earthquake have four things. They have diversity, they have trust, they have belonging, and they have connection.

How can talent leaders bring forth those four components on a daily basis?

A talent leader, looking at designing for high-performing teams, can first look at whether the team has enough complexity to tap into the power of productive friction…Teams that win consistently actually have a level of complexity that provides for friction, and friction generates consistent innovation over time…One of the most important on-ramps for complexity is diversity. And, so that’s one thing a talent leader needs to have in mind, is a really good ROI lens on why we want to ensure that we have everything from generational diversity to academic diversity to some of the demographic diversity to viewpoint diversity all baked onto a team because that team then is primed to actually be able to tap into productive friction.

Complex teams need talent catalysts in order to actually take the complexity and make it into jet fuel for team performance. So, if you have really complex teams, but you don’t have talent catalysts, you actually see a team that underperforms against a homogeneous team…An average managed, homogeneous team will do satisfactory work. An average manager with a complex team will underperform. And so, complexity could be a superpower, if we have the catalyst in place to unlock it. And that’s where trust, belonging, and connection show up as the force multipliers for that complexity on the team.