The X-Factor
As you joined a new workplace have you pondered over their stricture / adherence towards a work culture, typical of their own? How did they become the best? What is that magic sauce / X-factor?
From the Vault
Has it ever happened to you that you joined your new workplace, looked around & pondered over their stricture / adherence towards a certain work culture that is typical of their own?
Is this why they are successful in the market? Is it why they are market leaders?
There has to be something that is acting as the magic sauce there.
What is it that really defines this magic sauce? What is that X-factor?
This isn’t the era of magic potions & spells. Nor is there a Harry Potter or his Nimbus 2000 here.
In reality the so-called secret sauce / X-factor has its roots in how each team in the organisation functions to the best of their ability, are tremendously motivated and driven by the objectives / goals they are chasing. There may be a strategy / multiple strategies binding all of this at the core.
Here is a list of common drivers that may more often be used to determine the overall success of the organisation.
1. Mission
This could be tricky and when organisations underestimate this, it could indeed be a great motivator if it’s written well and ought to work for a longer term.
The mission statement has to clearly depict the real intent that defines the sole purpose of the organisation’s existence whilst also fuelling the engines of everybody right from the CXOs to team members. And as a founder / cofounder if you aren’t able to clearly identify with your mission, you may only be left out with exterior examples of the world to quote / motivate your troops with, which isn’t going to work well at all.
For ex: The mission statement of an organisation that makes health & fitness products like WEARABLE DEVICES may be something like this.
To help people lead happy & better lives over a long period of time!
2. Vision
Picture this! How would you feel convening & addressing your employees over a meeting and telling them:
We’re going to build some sort of a wearable device that helps track a lot of parameters related to people’s health in general
As opposed to saying,
A portable health tracking monitor that helps you keep a check 24*7*365.
It is crucial to define the vision you have set for your product and how that supports you in achieving your organisational mission over a period of time.
3. Talent Acquisition / Team Building
Some organisations define their talent acquisition strategy like:
Talent scouting is like looking for diamonds in a mine. We believe in only picking up the best ones, the crème de la crème.
The truth is, you don’t get diamonds / solitaires in its raw natural form appearing with a princess cut looking as lustrous as shown here in the image making it attractive and standout easy.
Because, if anything, diamonds in its raw natural form obtained from the mines may look something like this.
To carry an ambition to hire / have the right team(s) in place is just one side of the coin. The other side is to have the right talent acquisition strategies that don’t limit your chances of finding such talent in any way whatsoever.
Once you have acquired the right talent, building the right team purely becomes a tactical activity.
4. Team Culture
If you have seen a few interviews of some good leaders, you’d often notice how they throw it back to and appreciate their team and how they gelled well during all phases of the PLC. The magic words may indeed be “Team Culture” that gets all resources aligned & motivated at all times.
To define a team culture, one’d have to start off by:
defining the values that is of utmost importance in serving their customers
share it across all teams involved, aligning them over a common purpose
creating a practice, inculcating it as a habit
gauging improvements / the lack of it, over a period of time
continuously learning from the feedback collected from team members & factoring it in
Taking a cue of the wearable device example covered over the previous point on Mission & Vision section, the team culture could of that organisation could perhaps be defined as:
Our culture internally revolves around great team work in offering a seamless user experience whilst looking to provide total customer satisfaction and in trying to give back to society by driving wide sects of people to become more health conscious by the day.
5. Approach
How often have we heard this?
The approach taken to solve a problem is often half the battle really.
Take the analogy of a simple game like a Tic-tac-toe.
The positioning of the knots (O) or crosses (X) will either set you up for a victory / a loss. And if your strategy is right over every trial, you could keep winning.
6. Process
Take a step back and look at the last 20 yrs. how rapidly things have changed and am not even referring to the transition of product / software development pivoting on Agile Scrum / Kanban from Waterfall. We have people who swear by Pair Programming, SAFe, XP, TDD just to name a few here.
A visual representation of Agile methodology and how it helps teams focus, get their acts together in delivering a working portion of a product & adding value to the end user incrementally.
A generic list of benefits of getting teams onboarded & adhered to a process: -
clear measure of deliverables
makes teams more dynamic
helps reporting easy
helps set milestones & success criteria
measures & indicates progress
binds teams together
aligns teams over common short-term goals
improves throughput
enhances quality
identifies friction early
reduces risk of failure
Especially with large teams in large corporates the process is often seen as a great value-add and it may make sense to have everyone on the same page as it pulls all teams aligning them over their individual & collective accountabilities.
7. Growth & Learning Opportunity
The human tendency is to pin on growth as that translates to success on the frontline but as for the opportunity to learn, imbibe the knowledge and do what is required there often a fixed mindset that acts as a hindrance. Switching over to the growth mindset instead will certainly help as then you begin to assess, gauge, generate & try out multiple ideas continuously learning and also making it a habit.
An analogy. Low-fidelity wireframes were built in setting expectations to a Design team that wasn’t all that experienced. So, by the end of it what the team could manage to put up was an exact replica of the wireframe they were handed.
In the retro over the week, leadership spoke to all stakeholders about the importance of brainstorming & collaborating iteratively to generate ideas that better the product offering as a whole by factoring the shared understanding of the user’s needs.
Over the coming fortnight the team had multiple design interfaces ready to be pushed to A/B Testing while some of them were just enough to get users hooked instantly.
That perhaps was a step in a right direction towards moving the team from a fixed mindset to imparting a growth mindset.
8. Visibility & Incentivisation
Afterall we are humans deep down and when we talk of dealing with teams we are essentially still talking about humans.
An analogy. The other day during my mentoring session covering an example of human behavioural patterns and adoption methods I mentioned,
“We have always been & will continue to be social animals”
One of them retorted,
“No, I don’t think that’s true anymore with the way mobile devices have been able to successfully carve a wedge between us and we aren’t as cohesive as we were anymore”.
That is true indeed. We were used to being around people some 10 years back and as of today all one needs is a mobile device. But a crucial point one still misses is,
“In getting on social networking platforms one may have successfully distanced oneself from the physical proximity of fellow humans but what is largely true of people fitting into this sample space is that, one is still yearning to connect with the world around by way of posts, messages, comments, texts, photos, videos et. al”.
What does all this prove? That rewards & recognition is at the epicentre of importance for us humans. All that sums itself up to visibility of some kind.
A culture in an organisation that is centred and revolves around high visibility and with suitable timely rewards and recognition is a very healthy one and it could be the difference between “just hiring” and “retaining the best talent” across teams for a longer period of time.
9. The X-factor
Now, to the core of our topic.
Is there a magic sauce that perhaps is the secret behind people / workforce combining to execute and achieve the extraordinary and to be able to do it consistently too?
Well. That looks the mostly likely explanation given the manner in which the term “X-factor” has been in the reckoning for all these many years.
Having said that, the X-factor has to be a derivative whose value intern depends on the strength of all the other parameters that have been defined & assigned a maximum weightage as shown below in the PIE CHART.
For ex: take a look at this illustration below.
NOTE: The table here shows an arbitrary example of an organisation whose strategy was tilted towards “just acquiring people and building teams” when the other parameters weren’t all that concentrated upon.
A few steps that ought to lead into determining the X-factor: -
1. List out the variables (x1 to xn) that could be important for your organisation’s success – the success drivers
2. Set MAX Allotted Value on the far right in identifying a defining a weightage on how you think they would all contribute to a subtotal above 90 & less than 100.
(NOTE: I have set it as 5 based on the factors that are typical to my case)
3. Reserve the last n (where n>2, <=10) points for the X-factor
4. Assess each of the variables based on how immersive a strategy the organisation has wrt channelling their efforts in aligning with their goals to cover all these drivers in comparison to an ideal scenario
(OR)
where the market leaders stand wrt these parameters, their allocations and how their strategies line up against yours. And then score / grade it over a MAX value defined in Step 2.
(NOTE: You may need an external / management consultant’s perspective here)
5. Now compute the X-factor using the formula. Firstly, compute the summation of all the variables.
Summation = Σ (Xi... Xn)
X-factor = (Summation * 5) / 95
6. ACTUAL ABILITY = (Summation) + X-factor
7. MAX. LEVERAGE = (Summation) * X-factor
So, that is how an ordinary team with really ordinary people can still push towards hitting their maximum leverage level of 475 points by focusing equally on all parameters and with individuals being deeply motivated in stretching their capabilities constantly, as opposed to being stuck on 100 points of what could be considered their capability otherwise.
A fair warning in the end:
When these parameters defined above could be thought of as broadly fitting into the strategies that would make sense for a lot of organisations there can still be a few specifics that may be typical to a some of them.
Recommend you hit the discussion room with an aim to weed all those parameters out, define them by plugging their weightage into the table described in the illustration above.
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