How to get our project teams to perform similarly?

A few thoughts:
1. Transferring knowledge as part of a hand off to others is better than not doing so I suppose, but is often less effective than we hope. The problem is that tacit knowledge takes a lot of time to learn, and that's what's often required for effectiveness. I've seen a lot of projects where they've attempted this sort of thing, and it's definitely helped, but when I would visit the team that the work was handed off to a few months later they were still investing time to learn from scratch what that had supposedly picked up during the transfer. We need to look at the overall lifecycle, not just the project portion that we're involved with.
2. One-off projects are definitely good candidates for outsourcing. Until you discover that it's not a one-off, or that you need to maintain and evolve the output of the project. Then you start wishing you'd done it yourself, sometimes as you're redoing it again.
3. Hiring contractors for the specialties is definitely a good idea. A much better idea is to also include in the contract that they coach and teach their skills to your people AND you then ensure that your people step up and do so. Sadly I hear a lot of talk from organizations about this strategy but don't see as much execution of it. I've seen a lot of high-priced specialists who were supposed to be shadowed but then weren't because the FTEs couldn't be freed up.
4. Outsourcing for cost savings rarely seems to work out in practice. I hear about the cost savings of outsourcing all the time, and then when I look at the "business cases" justifying these outsourcing efforts they almost always end up being wishful works of fiction at best. To do it right you need to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as the total benefit of ownership (TBO), and both of these figures require a systems mindset to actually calculate. How much work needs to occur on the customer end to specify, manage, govern, and validate the outsourcing work? That adds up quickly, and it's important to recognize that outsourcing efforts typically require significantly more of these activities than insourced work does. What is the cost of contract management, in particular change management when you want to evolve the requirements of the work? From an operational point of view, what inefficiencies are being introduced within the customer organization to work with the outsource company. For example, a few months ago I was working with an organization that walked me through the cost savings they'd achieved through outsourcing their help desk. They honestly believed they were getting a great deal because they only looked at the costs of the help desk operation, which in fact were lower than when it was insourced. So we then worked through the overall process from the point of view of the people being served by the outsourced help desk. Wait time had skyrocketed. They effectively had expensive people wasting time waiting to be served by inexpensive people. So I suggested we take those costs into account. They were uncomfortable with that idea. Then we discovered that the problems weren't being solved as often as before, requiring new tickets to be submitted and more waiting to occur. So I suggested we take those costs into account, and they were also uncomfortable with that suggestion. Bottom line was that when we calculated the total value of ownership (TVO), TBO-TCO, we discovered that it was negative. Their great deal was actually an incredibly bad deal in practice. Worse yet, when we started working through potential scenarios to fix the help desk process we couldn't see any way to make it cost effective and still involve the outsourcing company. And I've lost track of the number of times I've run into situations like this.

Luis,

Teams and individuals, as a whole, pattern themselves from the “modeled behaviors” of those they respect and trust (in life and at work – for the negative and for the positive). If a leader desires to have his/her team tuned for success, then it’s incumbent on the leader to model the principled behaviors they wish to see in their team.

Foundationally recognizing this as truth and executing modeling with empathetic intent, will compliment or outperform the use of training and incentives to change behaviors/skills. Food for thought.

Yes, a team purpose is perceived differently by FTEs, contractors and even part timers.
Given that the gig economy reaches 40% of the workforce this has a tremendous impact on building teams.
Gig workers are concerned about their profits first, part timers about their time commitment.

Besides affecting teams, it limits organizations in building knowledge assets. Working in partnership networks mitigates this. But gig workers are no reliable partners.

Dear George
Thank you for participating in this reflection and for your feedback.

One "leader to model the principled behaviors they wish to see in their team" will be enough to achieve high performance teams?

Anton, I mostly agree. The improvements came from a combination of technology improvement, process improvement, and team training. The people on an F1 pit crew team train over and over again. If you want a video of them you'll see that they are all standing in a specific spot, in a specific pose, the car comes in and stops in a specific spot, they react and they smoothly do their individual task. They would have trained over and over again to learn that muscle memory. They would have also reflected after practice sessions to identify potential ways to do it better.

Could you train 7 year olds to do it just as well? Probably not given the strength requirements to operate the equipment. Could you do it with office workers? I bet you could get them to a respectable response time in a few days (could even be a one-day team building exercise, hmmm....) and given time to learn the skills and gain the experience turn them into a real pit crew if you wanted to.

The lack of a business case is exactly why there are only extremely rare instances where project teams would want to operate like those highly specialized functions. Those economies only apply to an arms race. Most nations can't afford them. You may be able to use technology to mitigate the risks, but that technology itself is extremely expensive when used very rarely.

Similarly, if you have a purely project based team (no matrixing) where certain specialists are dedicated to a team for the duration but only participate during a tiny part of it, you are carrying that cost for the length of the project. The benefit is they are available when you need them.

One bit of wisdom given to me as a race car driver myself by a long time professional in the sport is "Slow down. You'll go faster." Sometimes, rather than trying to always perform at 110% where the margin of error is zero, and the cost of errors is extremely high, you are better off focusing on sustainability and consistency. The strategies involved often consider whether you will benefit more over a longer period if your raw speed is better, or if you stop less.

Likewise any projects perform better when treated like a marathon, rather than like a sprint. There is a saying we often use when projects involve bursts of high intensity to meet deadlines, and then large gaps before we can engage again: "Hurry up and wait."

The improvement quotes in your F1 example is due to advances in technology and process. Standards are very important when you want to improve to a consistent level i.e. multiple teams with access to the same standards could function at the same level of efficiency. But even the best standards and procedures cannot overcome a lack of aptitude, training, and knowledge. Going back to your F1 example, the improvements would never be possible of you replaced the team with 7-year-olds or white-collar office workers.

When entire teams are outsourced, including the manager/leader, then you need to rely on that team to be effective. That navy seal team is no longer yours, they're simply a team of mercenaries whom you are hiring to do a job. So whatever organization is offering those mercenaries to you is responsible for helping them to become effective. The onus is on you to be sufficiently competent to hire, direct, and monitor that team. And part of their overhead, which you pay for, is the other organization will find ways to enable the team to learn and improve over time. Maybe that team has been assigned to your organization to learn a new set of skills as they get the job done for you. That expertise that you're hiring them for? Someone else paid for them to gain that expertise. The expertise that the next organization is going to pay them for having? You'll pay for that on their current gig with you. The implication is that even though you'll pay for it, you'll only benefit from that team's improvements for as long as you outsource to them. The minute you let them move on you lose that expertise, and you'll likely have paid a premium for it because of the outsourcing relationship.

Short-term strategies, such as outsourcing to another organization for their "gig team" or contracting people to work as "gig workers" is a short-term strategy that provides you with short-term benefits. This is fine as it gets the immediate job done and doesn't leave you with FTEs that you are then responsible for. BUT, any improvements or learnings that those people accrued while working for you go out the door when they do.

Implications:
1. If you want to gain the long-term benefits of investing in people's learnings then you need to keep those people around long term. The "gig mindset" pretty much prevents that if the people leave after a gig is done.
2. If you want to gain the long-term benefits of a team's learnings then you need to keep that team together long term. The "classic project mindset" where a team disbands at the end of a project pretty much prevents that.
3. If you decide to keep a gig worker or a gig team on for the next gig, then the next gig, then the next gig,... you've effectively hired very expensive people full time. This isn't this cost effective. Furthermore, in some countries, such as the US, it's not really a viable options as there are time limits on how long you can keep contractors on.

There are several ways to achieve team performance, and certainly training and continuous improvement are two of them.

You can achieve this in outsourced teams, or with contractors, using similar strategies. If you bring these gig workers into your org and take responsibility for them during the period they work for you, then you can choose to include them in any skills improvement efforts. Of course you're limited to what is allowed within the countries you operate in. Many countries have employment laws that force you to treat contractors/gig workers differently than FTEs and this often hampers your ability to support their learning efforts.

A common strategy is to put into the contract mechanisms to invest in these sorts of people. For example, if you want to provide training for a team that is composed partly of contract/outsource people and partly of FTEs, then the contracting companies may need to pay for their share of the training budget or not charge you for their people's time while on training.