Strengthening the Relationship Infrastructure to Build High-Performing Teams

By Jody Gold with Mario Moreira

Teams, not individuals, are the essential building blocks of sense-making and action-taking in organizations.  Research, theory, and experience tell us that great teams depend as much on the relationships between the people, as the people themselves.

When I was younger, I spent years practicing leadership development the way most consultants do. We focused on strengthening the skills of individuals and hoped that teams would automatically improve as a result. We probably knew that relationships are the connective tissues that hold teams together, but we didn’t provide the mindsets, maps, or tools for people on teams to take care of the entire network of relationships themselves. Improving the skills of individuals is like lifting weights without strengthening and stretching the ligaments and tendons that connect them.

Matrix Leadership provides the mindset, maps, and methodology needed to build the capacities teams need to perform as interconnected, coordinated, adaptive wholes. It’s the ‘how’ of how we think and act like we’re in it together.  This is true whether the ‘it’ is diversity and inclusion, building resilient communities, or succeeding in complex and chaotic business environments. 

The heartbeat of our approach is building the relationship infrastructure that is the most important contributor to and predictor of a high-performing team.  Economic activity and value creation can only happen when working infrastructure (roads, bridges, tunnels; power grids; telecommunication; the Internet, etc.) support them. Might relationship infrastructure be equally important?

Research from MIT[i] and Google[ii] show that the pattern and quality of interactions within teams contributes more significantly to high-performance than the personalities, experience, skills, and individual intelligence of team members combined. In the image above, a blue line between two people represents a relationship, the first-class entities that Mario Moreira writes about in his recent article. Wider lines illustrate more interactions, more capacity, and deeper relationships.  The entire network of connections within a team comprises the relationship infrastructure. 

Developing the capacity for team members to speak to each other—in the open—is an indicator of a healthy relationship infrastructure.  It replaces the common norms of talking offline, not engaging, or scapegoating.  We call this speaking “in the eyes and ears of the whole”—a capacity that creates the foundation for many other high-functioning behaviors, including delivering effective feedback.

Agile uses early and iterative feedback about products so developers can generate more valuable and higher quality products faster. Matrix Leadership uses early and iterative feedback to optimize the relationships that high-performing teams depend on.  Feedback about relationships is the most direct way to build trust, psychological safety, and resilience so teams can turn their energy into results instead of friction. 

Both Agile and Matrix Leadership bring feedback into the open where it can do the most good.  When entire teams understand their shared challenges, they are better able to collectively solve them.  In addition to improved feedback, a healthy relationship infrastructure supports other behaviors including increased ownership and accountability; collaboration and innovation; engagement and satisfaction; and leadership that is distributed, flexible, and emergent.

Relationships are first class entities, real things that can be built, maintained, and repaired.  Yet it’s the entire web of relationships, the relational infrastructure, within the best teams that enable them to out-think, out-perform, and out-happy the others. 

Thanks Mario for inviting me to expand these concepts with you. 

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We hope you enjoyed Part 2 of the Relationship series. Consider reading Part 1 & 3 
- (Part 1) Importance of treating Relationships as First Class Entities 
- (Part 3) Woven Together - A Practice to build Authentic Connection and Psychological Safety 

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[i] Pentland, Alex S. (2012, April). The New Science of Building Great Teams. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams

[ii] Duhigg, Charles. (2016, Feb. 25). What Google Learned from its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.  Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

Importance of treating Relationships as First Class Entities

I have been helping companies implement agile for over a dozen years.  I love agile because it aligns with the evolutionary and incremental manner in which change occurs in nature.  As in nature, people’s needs change continuously and it is best when an incremental and evolutionary system is used to support this continuous change. In my early years, I focused more on communications via television, photography, and film, as it was fascinating to capture the importance of character development and the relationships being built. As I moved into mindset and methods, I realized how Agile values and principles and the practices that support them focus on not just the changing needs of customers but the importance of the relationship between team members and customers and amongst team members themselves. 

During one of my engagements, I was introduced to a fascinating model called Matrix Leadership by Amina Knowlan and Jody Gold. During the education they were delivering that was focused on giving and receiving feedback, I realized that the thing between two people, a.k.a., relationship, is a first class entity.  In other words, it is a real thing that must be built and nurtured.  In a programming world, a first-class entity is a data type you can freely assign to variables such as Scalars, Arrays, and Hashes to help build out the language. 

In the human world, relationships should be thought of as first-class-entity with variables such as respect, honesty, trust, commitment, forgiveness, expectations, and empathy that can define, strengthen, and build out the relationship. There are elements that impact the way a relationship works such as experience together (aka, past) and dynamics of your relationship to those around you (e.g., influences).  These variables structurally represent various channels (or strings) that live within a relationship between two people that can either strengthen or weaken a relationship.  If one does not exercise the relationship or speak honesty, the channels of a relationship can become brittle and break when tested.   

I used to think relationships were the by-product of personalities applied to goals and are often thought of as invisible and nebulous entities.  But relationships are more like channels through which information, energy, and resources can move between people.  The strength and capacity of these relationship channels enable or inhibit the creation of value on teams as surely as the width, depth, and condition of canals enable or inhibit the movement of goods by ship.  

In an Agile world, to fulfill our goal to get our best ideas to customers faster, we have to learn faster and implement better together.  Most organizations experience meaningful gains during their first two or three years of agile implementation.   The early and iterative feedback achieved by delivering value to customers faster lets us build feature sets and user interfaces that align with current needs, instead of adhering to imperfect plans made long ago.  But after we’ve followed the agile model for a while, we run into the same people-problems that bedevil collective understanding, intelligence, and action everywhere.  Eventually, there are fewer process problems, and more relationship problems.

Understanding that relationships are first class entities has allowed my teams to take early, incremental, and iterative actions on ourselves as a system so that we can work together as effectively as possible.  Because we offer feedback not only about our tasks, but also about the impact that our behaviors have on one another, there is more trust, psychological safety, commitment to outcomes and each other, than I’ve ever known.  Next time you look at your friend, attempt to visualize the relationship entity.  What do you see in the space between you?

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We hope you enjoyed Part 1 of the Relationship series. Consider reading Part 2 and 3:  
- (Part 2) Strengthening the Relational Infrastructure to Build High-Performing Teams
- (Part 3) Woven Together - A Practice to build Authentic Connection and Psychological Safety 
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