Jamie, DecodeXP’s Lead Analyst, is an ex-Army Officer turned Entrepreneur who served with the King’s Royal Hussars, as well as deploying overseas. Here he writes about his experiences as a Tank Troop Leader and how complex experiences can get teams working better together.
How to create High-Performing Teams (clue – it isn’t on a whiteboard)
To get really good at living on a tank together, the four of us spent 35 consecutive days discovering how best to wind each other up.
To get really good at being a Tank Troop, we spent 35 consecutive days out on the Canadian Prairie – working on our skills and learning from our experiences.
The Army is good at this, they use GPS from the vehicles and capture audio data in order to ask Commanders why they made decisions in certain key moments.
It’s why we use video feedback in our process, it’s accountable.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the right or wrong call, that may be subjective anyway, what matters is you understand your process and next time – execute better.
I learnt a heap from working with this team – and I put that down to sharing an intense experience, being honest about how we could improve, and then going out and doing it.
We managed all of this without Powerpoint, without existential leadership models and without a whiteboard in sight.
We should be sharing complex experiences in the working world too.