Just got back from a visit to the Bay Area where I talked with old friends from the tech industry about performance and what makes teams great. Surprisingly, I got the same answers from a lot of different people:

• Get the right people on the team: hire, transfer, promote just get them together.
• Get rid of the wrong people: they quickly reveal themselves. Don’t hesitate – do it early or the consequences could be messy.
• Let the team recommend what they will work on. Best team I ever worked on, we got in a room one day and generated about a dozen products that we knew should be done. Management didn’t argue, just prioritized the list. Fair enough, we were off and running.
• Keep the daily upper management crap and politics away from the team. Can you sequester the team? Even better.
• Let them manage themselves. They may try things that are just out of their reach and come up with something amazing.

Sounds a little bit like Dan Pink was on to something in Drive.